What we check

We look at the things that decide whether a visit to your website turns into a sale:

  • Speed: how quickly your home page appears and settles on a phone and on a computer, using Google's PageSpeed Insights.
  • Selling online: whether people can find your shop, see each wine with a price and buy it with a basket.
  • Wine club: whether you offer one, and whether people can find it.
  • Trust and compliance: a secure connection, a privacy page, and a cookie banner if your site uses analytics or advertising cookies.
  • Search engines: your page title and description, product details, sitemap and robots file.
  • Email signup: whether visitors who aren't ready to buy can join your list.
  • AI search: whether tools like ChatGPT can read your prices and product details. This is for information and doesn't affect your grade.

Why speed matters

Most people will first see your winery on their phone, perhaps after a tasting, a recommendation or a good bottle at a friend's table. If your site is slow to appear, many give up before they've seen a single wine, and every bit of speed counts: a Deloitte study of 37 brands found that making a mobile site just 0.1 seconds faster led to 8.4% more retail customers buying.

Every sale made on your own website is one you keep the full margin on, so it's worth making that first visit easy. Speed is a big part of that, but it isn't everything. A fast site still loses the sale if people can't find the shop or buy there and then, which is why the check covers more than speed.

Source: Deloitte, Milliseconds Make Millions (2020)

How to read your results

Your grade runs from A to E and covers everything above, with speed counting most. A site with a mobile speed score under 50 can't get higher than a B, however good the rest is.

Your mobile speed score comes straight from Google, out of 100. 90 or more is good, 50 to 89 could be better, and under 50 needs work. The test uses a slow mobile connection on purpose, so don't be surprised if your site feels much quicker on your own laptop. Scores can also move a few points between checks, even if nothing has changed.

Where to start

We list the top three things to fix, starting with what's costing you most. Your full report explains every check, why it matters and how to fix it, and you can pass the link to whoever looks after your website. Once you've made some changes, come back to your report and check again.

What we can miss

We read your home page and a few others automatically, so we can miss things, especially anything loaded after the page opens. Some websites also block automated checks. If yours does, we can only test its speed and won't give it a grade.