Website Strategic Hygiene Scan
A twelve-question hygiene scan on the strategic integrity of your top pages — discordant claims, missing proof, weak CTAs, and navigation tells. Output: a hygiene grade plus the top three fixes.
Who it’s for: Growth and content leads who own the homepage and the top five pages, and PMMs running a pre-launch audit on the site copy.
- 01
Your hero headline states the buyer, the category, and the outcome — not all three necessarily, but at least two.
Heroes that say 'The platform for teams' are all outcome, no buyer, no category.
- 02
Your primary CTA verbs match the buyer's current intent, not your funnel stage name.
'Request a demo' is a sales verb. 'See it on your site' is a buyer verb.
- 03
Your proof stripe (logos, numbers, quotes) is tied to the specific claim in the hero, not generic credibility.
A logo wall underneath 'the fastest' proves 'trusted', not 'fastest'.
- 04
Nothing on your homepage contradicts anything on your pricing page.
Different teams, different contracts, different words. Buyers compare.
- 05
Your above-the-fold visual reinforces the headline — or at least doesn't fight it.
Abstract hero art is the default and usually a wash. Outright contradiction is the risk.
- 06
Your navigation matches how buyers search — not how your product team organizes features.
Nav labels like 'Platform' and 'Solutions' require a buyer to translate.
- 07
Your homepage does not claim category leadership you cannot substantiate.
'Leading', 'number one', 'the platform of choice' — all become liabilities unless you own the proof.
- 08
Your secondary CTAs do not compete with the primary CTA for the same user action.
Three buttons above the fold that all go to sales routes means none of them gets the attention.
- 09
Your social-proof logos are recognizable to your ICP — not just familiar names.
Fortune 500 logos impress investors. Peer-company logos move deals.
- 10
The page loads in under three seconds on a mid-tier phone on 4G.
Performance is a strategic hygiene issue. Hero images that are 4MB aren't about clarity — but they starve it.
- 11
Nothing above the fold requires scrolling to a separate section to make sense of it.
If the hero headline only works once you read the feature list, the headline is doing half its job.
- 12
A skeptical buyer who bounced could tell a colleague, in one sentence, what you do.
The bounce-report sentence is the real value prop. Often it's uglier than the written one.
Read it honestly, not charitably.
Hygiene, not strategy. A page can score 90 on this scan and still be selling the wrong category to the wrong buyer — that’s a positioning problem, not a hygiene one. This checklist assumes the positioning is roughly right and asks whether the page is executing on it cleanly.
Items cluster in three tiers: above-the-fold essentials (1–5), navigation and CTA wiring (6–8), and proof plus performance (9–12). If you’re triaging, fix above-the-fold first — that’s where eighty percent of drop-off happens — then CTAs, then proof. Performance issues read as hygiene because they compound every other fix.
One honest misread: counting a page as clean because it’s designed well. Good design masks weak hygiene. The test is whether the page communicates the right thing in the right order — not whether it looks like the reference.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Move 01
Work through the Above the Fold teardown — it maps directly onto items 1–5 and shows the six things a buyer actually reads.
- Move 02
If surface consistency (items 4 and 11) is weak, the Message Consistency cluster covers drift detection, reconciliation patterns, and the team rituals that stop it recurring.
- Move 03
Run a full Positioning Audit on your actual homepage. It runs this hygiene logic plus seven more dimensions against your real copy, not a self-report — and returns specific line-level edits.
Why these questions, in this order.
Hygiene is one of those words that sounds boring and turns out to be the decisive factor. Most B2B homepages don’t fail on big strategic questions — they fail on twelve small ones that compound. A weak hero absorbs the cost of a weak CTA; both of them absorb the cost of a proof stripe that proves the wrong thing; by the time a buyer reaches the feature list they’ve already decided.
The sequence here is ordered by visibility. Items 1–5 are everything a bounced buyer will have seen. Items 6–8 are the second-layer decisions that shape whether they convert or keep exploring. Items 9–12 are the trust tax — performance, peer-logos, and the sentence test — which is how buyers decide whether to take the page seriously at all.
What this scan cannot fix: the underlying positioning. If the hero says the wrong thing well, hygiene improvements move the score without moving the business. Combine this with the Positioning Clarity Checklist for the strategic read.
Run the full Positioning Audit.
Eight-lens diagnostic of your site against your own strategic intent.
- Positioning Clarity ChecklistTen yes/no questions on whether your value prop is clear, distinct, and buyer-friendly.
- Competitive Defense ReadinessCan your team handle objections about your top three competitors on a live call?
- Sales Enablement Health CheckDoes your sales team have the battle cards, objection handlers, and intel they need?