Septic Website Checklist: 12 Things to Check in 20 Minutes

You can audit your own septic company website in about 20 minutes, tonight, on your phone, without hiring anyone. Twelve checks, run in order, each one something you can see or click for yourself right now.

This is not a design critique. If you want the persuasion side of this, the copy and layout choices that turn a visitor into a call, I wrote a separate post on septic website design that converts. This one is a diagnostic. It tells you whether your site does the twelve things a septic company site has to do, or whether it's quietly missing one and bleeding calls you never see.

Run the checklist below first. Then come back for the sections that explain the ones that failed.

The 20-Minute Checklist

Grab your phone. Open your website the way a homeowner would at 9pm after their yard starts smelling wrong, tired, half-annoyed, looking for a reason to trust the first result they click. Work through these twelve in order and check off what passes.

If everything checked out, you're ahead of most septic company sites. If two or three didn't, keep reading. Each section below explains why it matters and exactly how to fix it.

Phone Number and Service Area

If check one failed, fix it before anything else on this list. A homeowner with a backed-up line isn't going to copy ten digits by hand into their dialer. On most site builders the fix is a setting, not code: open your theme or header editor, find the phone number field, and confirm it's set to link as tel: rather than plain text. On WordPress themes this usually lives under Customize, then Header. On Squarespace and Wix it's a toggle in the header block's settings panel.

Service area works the same way but fails differently. "Proudly serving our community for 30 years" tells a search engine and a visitor nothing. Name the counties or towns on the homepage, plainly, the way you'd say it on the phone: "Serving Cobb, Cherokee, and Paulding Counties." For the ranking side of getting found in each of those towns, see our local SEO guide for septic companies.

One Page Per Core Service

Pumping, installation, repair, and inspections are four different searches with four different intents, and they deserve four different pages. A visitor who typed "septic tank pumping near me" doesn't want to land on a page that also talks about installation permits. Give each service its own URL, its own headline, and its own call to action.

This isn't just tidiness. Search engines match a specific query to a specific page more often than they match it to a paragraph buried on a general services page. If you serve more than one city, that same logic extends to location pages, one per major service area, each with content that's actually different rather than the same page with the town name swapped out.

If your site needs that kind of restructuring rather than a patch here and there, that's a rebuild, not an afternoon fix. Our web design service handles page architecture like this from the start instead of bolting it on later.

Pricing and Reviews

You don't have to publish an exact number. A range, a minimum call-out fee, or "pumping starts at" gives a homeowner enough to decide whether to keep reading or keep shopping. Silence doesn't protect your margin. It just pushes the comparison shopping to a competitor's site that did publish a number.

Reviews carry even more weight than pricing. In BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 97% of consumers said they read reviews for local businesses, and 31% said they'll only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher. Embed your actual Google rating and a handful of real reviews on the homepage, not a static "what our customers say" section you wrote yourself. For the system to keep that rating current, see our guide on generating and managing online reviews.

Photos of Your Actual Trucks and Crew

Stock photography reads as generic within about a second, and a homeowner deciding whether to let you onto their property notices. Use photos of your actual trucks, your actual crew, your actual last job. A slightly less polished photo of your real tank pumped yesterday beats a perfectly lit stock image of a truck you don't own every time. This costs a Saturday with a phone camera, not a photographer's day rate.

What PageSpeed Insights Is Actually Telling You

Speed isn't a vague "feels slow" complaint. Google measures it with three specific numbers, called Core Web Vitals, and publishes the passing thresholds on its own web.dev vitals page. Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights, read the mobile tab, and compare your score against these three targets.

Largest Contentful Paint measures how long the biggest visible thing on the page, usually your hero image or headline, takes to load. Interaction to Next Paint measures how long the page takes to respond after someone taps a button. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps around while it's loading, the thing that makes you tap the wrong link because a photo just loaded above it. Google assesses all three at the 75th percentile of real visits, meaning a passing score means three out of four actual visitors get that experience, not just the one PageSpeed Insights simulated.

PageSpeed Insights will name your worst offender directly, and it's almost always one of three things: uncompressed photos straight off a phone, too many third-party scripts, or cheap shared hosting. web.dev's guide to image compression walks through fixing the first one without a developer.

Mobile Check and SSL

Load your site on your own phone, on cell data, and try to use it one-handed while walking, because that's roughly the condition a real prospect is in. Can you find the phone number without scrolling? Does the contact form fit the screen? Does anything require you to pinch and zoom to read it?

SSL is the faster check. Look at your address bar right now. You want a padlock and https://, not a "Not Secure" warning next to your domain. Almost every host and site builder issues this free and automatically today, so if yours is missing, that's usually a five-minute fix in your hosting dashboard, not a rebuild.

Schema Markup and a Contact Form That Emails Fast

LocalBusiness schema is structured data in your page's code, invisible to a visitor, that tells Google your business name, address, phone number, and service area in a format search engines parse directly. Right-click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and search for "LocalBusiness." If it's not there, ask whoever maintains your site to add it. It won't move your rankings on its own, but it removes doubt for the search engine about who you are and where you work.

Your contact form is the other half. Submit it yourself right now and time how long the email notification takes to land in your inbox. It should be under a minute. Every hour it takes longer is an hour a prospect thinks they contacted you and is quietly calling the next name on their search results instead.

Tracking: GA4 and Call Tracking

Open Google Analytics and check whether today's date shows real visitor activity or a blank dashboard. A dead or missing GA4 install means every other decision about your site, and your ad spend, is a guess. Pair it with call tracking so phone leads, not just form fills, show up in the same picture. For how to connect both back to which channel actually produced the lead, see our guide on tracking where your septic leads come from.

The Five Second Test

Here's the shortcut version. Before a homeowner reads a single word of your copy, they've already decided whether you look legitimate. This is what separates a site that passes from one that doesn't.

Print this table, put it next to your monitor, and check your own homepage against it once a quarter. Sites drift. A theme update breaks click-to-call, a new photo gets added without compression, a review widget quietly stops loading. The five-second test catches drift before a caller notices it and hangs up.