The $0 Website Glow-Up: Ten Fixes Before You Spend a Cent
New financial year, same old website? Here are ten fixes you can make tonight for exactly nothing, from tapping your own phone number to killing the slider, and how to tell which problems actually need a professional.
Jake Moreland
Senior Engineer, Initial Studios
The new financial year has ticked over, the BAS is in (or at least in the pile), and somewhere on your list is the line "sort the website out". Before you spend a single dollar on that line, spend an evening on this one.
This is part one of our New Financial Year Glow-Up week: three posts on getting your tech sorted for FY26-27 without wasting money. Today is the free part. Grab your phone, pull up your own website, and work through these ten.
1. Tap your own phone number
On your phone, not your laptop. Find your number on your site and tap it. If it doesn't start dialling, you've been making mobile visitors memorise your number and type it in themselves, and plenty of them simply don't. This is a one-line fix any web person can do in minutes, and you finding it costs nothing.
2. Fill in your own contact form
Submit a real enquiry to yourself. Two questions: did it arrive, and where? Forms silently break all the time, and some have been quietly sending enquiries to an inbox nobody's opened since 2023. If your test enquiry vanishes, you may have just found where a chunk of last year's "quiet patch" went.
3. Google yourself like a stranger
Search your business name. Look hard at the Google Business Profile panel on the right: are the hours right, especially public holidays? Is the address current? Are the photos yours, or three blurry shots a customer uploaded in 2021? For a lot of Australian businesses this panel gets more eyeballs than the website itself, and it's free to fix.
4. Read your last five reviews, then reply
Replying to reviews is free, takes minutes, and every future customer reads the replies as closely as the reviews. A calm, human reply to a grumpy review does more for trust than any paragraph you could write about yourself.
5. Stand in the sun with your phone
Most of your visitors are on a phone, often outside, often in a hurry. Load your site on mobile data, in daylight. Can you read it? Does anything important hide behind a menu? Does it take so long to load that you check your reception? You've just experienced your website the way your customers do.
6. Kill the slider
If your homepage has a rotating banner, nobody is reading slides two through five. Pick the one message that matters, make it the headline, and let the rest go. This is a deletion, and deletions are free.
7. Put a price somewhere
You don't have to publish a full rate card. But "from $X" or a typical range answers the question every visitor is silently asking, and the businesses that answer it get the enquiry from people who can actually afford them. If a price feels impossible to state, that's worth noticing too; we wrote about anchoring ours in our pricing.
8. Swap one stock photo for a real one
The handshake photo, the glass office, the model in the hard hat that's never seen a site: your customers can smell them. Take one honest photo of your actual counter, ute, kitchen or workshop and put it where the stock photo was. Real beats polished, every time, and your phone camera is plenty.
9. Hunt the stale bits
The copyright year saying 2023. The "Christmas trading hours" post from two Christmases ago. The Instagram icon that goes to a dead account. Each one quietly tells visitors "nobody's home". Ten minutes with a cup of tea fixes the lot.
10. Check who owns your domain
Log in to wherever your .com.au is registered, or find out who can. If the honest answer is "some guy who built the site in 2019", fix that this week, not during a crisis. Your domain, your hosting and your Google profile should all be in accounts you control. We're blunt about this in our FAQ because we've seen the other ending.
The line between free and worth paying for
Everything above is free because it's finding and fixing what already exists. What it can't do is change what your site fundamentally is: a slow site is still slow, a template still looks like a template, and a site with no way to book still can't take a booking at 9pm.
That's the paid list, and it's what the rest of this week covers: Thursday's post on what to actually budget for tech this financial year, and Saturday's on which projects pay for themselves by Christmas.