How to Check If Your Website Design Is Working: A Non-Designer’s Guide
You don’t need to be a designer to evaluate your website. This guide shows simple tests to understand what’s working and what needs fixing.
You're not a designer. You're a founder, marketer, or product manager who built a website — or had one built — and now you're wondering: is this actually working?
You can tell when something feels off, but you can't always say why. The good news: evaluating whether a website design is working doesn't require design training. It requires asking the right questions and knowing what the answers should look like.
This guide gives you seven practical checks — no jargon, no theory — that you can run in under 30 minutes.
What "Working" Actually Means
Before you start checking, you need a definition. A website design is working when three things are true:
- Visitors understand what you offer within the first five seconds
- Visitors can immediately identify what to do next
- Visitors trust you enough to take that step
That's it. Every design decision — the color of your buttons, the size of your headline, the placement of your testimonials — exists to serve one of those three outcomes. If your design is achieving all three, it's working. If any one of them is failing, that's where your problem lives.
Check 1: The "What Is This?" Test
Open your website and look at only what's visible before scrolling. Now answer, in one sentence, what this company does and who it's for. If you struggle — you know the answer because you built it — show it to someone who's never seen it before. Ask them: "What does this company sell, and who is it for?"
If their answer is vague, wrong, or takes more than a few seconds, your headline or value proposition isn't doing its job. The fix isn't writing better copy (though that often helps) — it's also making the headline the most visually dominant element on the page. A great headline buried under a large decorative image is invisible.
This is what the blur test catches quickly. Run your page through BlurTest — blur the page until text is unreadable, and check whether the headline is still the most prominent text block. If it disappears into the visual noise, it needs more size or contrast.
Check 2: The "Where Do I Click?" Test
Look at your page — just the first visible screen on desktop and on mobile separately — and find the main action you want visitors to take. Now ask: could someone who has never seen this page before find that button within three seconds, without reading anything?
The test is about visual prominence, not content. The CTA should stand out from every other element on the page through color contrast. If your button color appears anywhere else on the page (in the header, in decorative elements, in the background), it loses its signal value.
Common failures:
- The CTA uses the same blue as every link on the page — nothing signals "this is the most important thing to click"
- There are two or three CTAs competing for attention at the same visual weight
- On mobile, the CTA is below the fold and there's no sticky element keeping it visible while scrolling
Check 3: The "Do I Trust This?" Test
Pretend you've never heard of your company. You arrived from an ad or a Google search. You have no prior relationship with this brand. Look at your page and ask: what evidence does this page give me to trust this company before I hand over my email or credit card?
What trust signals look like when they're working:
- Testimonials with a real name, company, and a specific outcome (not "Great product! — John S.")
- Social proof with numbers that are verifiable or at least plausible
- Security indicators near forms — SSL indicators, recognized payment logos
- A clear, simple return or refund policy near the CTA
What trust signals look like when they're not working: they exist but they're at the bottom of the page, so no one sees them before deciding to leave. Placement matters as much as presence. See our full guide on trust signals in design.
Check 4: The Phone Test
Open your website on your actual phone — not a browser resize, an actual phone. Hold it one-handed, the way you normally would. Ask the same three questions from above:
- Is it immediately clear what this company does?
- Is the main CTA visible without scrolling?
- Can you tap the main button easily with your thumb?
Mobile failures that are common and fixable: the hero image is sized for a wide desktop screen and takes up the entire phone screen in portrait mode, pushing all content below the fold. The font size was set for desktop and is too small to read without zooming. The CTA button is 36px tall, which is too small for reliable thumb tapping (aim for 44px minimum).
Check 5: The Squint Test
Lean back from your screen and squint until you can't read any text. Look at the shapes, colors, and sizes of the elements that remain visible. Ask yourself: what is the most prominent element on this page? What draws the eye first?
It should be: your headline area, then your CTA. If a decorative image, a navigation bar, or a background pattern draws more attention than your headline and CTA, your visual hierarchy is inverted.
The squint test and the blur test reveal the same thing — visual weight distribution — but from slightly different angles. The squint test you can do in your chair. For a scored version, run a BlurTest analysis on your live page. The platform measures which elements are pulling attention and gives you a CTA visibility score you can benchmark against.
Check 6: The "Read It Out Loud" Test
Read your page content out loud — not just the headlines, everything. This catches problems that your eyes skip over when reading silently because your brain autocorrects familiar text.
What to listen for:
- Sentences that are hard to say — if you stumble, a visitor will stumble reading
- Jargon that you're using automatically but a first-time visitor wouldn't know
- Claims that sound vague when spoken ("We deliver best-in-class solutions" — what does that mean?)
- Subheadings that don't tell you anything when read in sequence — if you can read only the headings and still understand the page's story, the structure is working
Check 7: The Comparison Test
Open your website and a direct competitor's website in side-by-side tabs. Switch between them every 10 seconds for a minute. You're not looking for features — you're looking for which page communicates more clearly and more quickly.
After a minute, ask yourself: if I arrived at both of these from the same Google search, which one would I trust more? Which one would I read further? Which CTA would I be more likely to click?
This is often the most revealing check because it gives your brain a reference point it doesn't have when looking at your page in isolation. For a more structured approach to this, see our guide on how to analyze a competitor's landing page.
What to Do After the Checks
After running all seven checks, you'll have a list of things that aren't working. Prioritize them in this order:
- CTA not visible (Check 2) — fix this first. If visitors can't find the action, nothing else on the page can convert them.
- Offer not clear (Check 1) — fix headline prominence and specificity second.
- Mobile broken (Check 4) — mobile issues are costing you a majority of traffic.
- No trust signals near CTA (Check 3) — then add credibility where the decision is made.
- Squint test fails (Check 5) — then address visual hierarchy and color contrast.
For a more comprehensive pre-launch audit, use our usability testing checklist. To understand what's drawing visual attention on your specific page, run a BlurTest analysis. And to benchmark against what competitors are doing better, see our competitor analysis guide.