3 of 6 agency websites I checked didn’t load

Agencies sell websites and marketing, so you would expect their own sites to be fast and reliable. When I checked six agency websites, three of them did not load.

I am not sharing this to embarrass anyone. Agencies are busy building sites for clients, and their own site is the one nobody has time for. But a site that does not load costs leads, and it costs rankings.

Why it matters more than it seems

• Prospects leave. A potential client who clicks your link and sees an error will not wait. They will open the next agency in their list.
• Google notices. If Googlebot hits errors or timeouts when it crawls, it slows down crawling and may drop pages from the index.
• It undermines trust. If an agency’s own site is broken, a prospect will wonder what their site will look like.

What usually goes wrong

Expired SSL certificate or domain

The browser shows a big security warning, and most people turn back. This happens when auto-renewal fails or a card expires. It is easy to miss if you never visit your own site.

Hosting that cannot cope

Cheap shared hosting can slow to a crawl or return server errors (5xx) when the server is busy. Your site may work for you at 10 am and fail for a prospect in London at 9 pm your time.

Plugin or update conflicts

On WordPress, an automatic update to a plugin or theme can break the site with a fatal error. If nobody checks after updates, the site can stay broken for days.

Heavy pages

Large uncompressed images, autoplay videos and stacks of scripts can push load time past the point where people give up, especially on mobile data.

Security plugins or firewalls blocking visitors

Overly strict firewall rules sometimes block whole countries, or block search engine bots. That is a serious problem if you sell to clients abroad.

What “loads” really means

A site does not just work or fail. There is a big grey area in between. A page can technically load but take eight seconds to show anything useful, or jump around while it loads so people tap the wrong button.

Google measures this with Core Web Vitals. The three to know are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long the main content takes to appear. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.

You do not need perfect scores. You do need a site that shows its main message quickly on a mid-range phone with an average connection, because that is how many of your prospects will see it.

How to check this on your site

1. Open your site in a private browser window on your phone, using mobile data rather than Wi-Fi.
2. Ask someone in another country (or use a VPN) to load your homepage and a service page.
3. Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score and Largest Contentful Paint.
4. In Google Search Console, open Settings → Crawl stats and look at the share of requests with server errors or timeouts.
5. Check when your SSL certificate and domain expire, and turn on auto-renewal with a card that is still valid.
6. Set up a free uptime monitor that emails you when the site goes down.

A simple routine

Once a month, spend ten minutes on your own site: load it on mobile, test the contact form, check Search Console for errors, and confirm renewals. It is the least glamorous part of running an agency, and one of the most valuable.

If you are an agency and want a second opinion on your own site, or support on client sites, take a look at my white-label SEO service. The first audit on one client is free.