We've run 32 website audits and rebuilds. Not for enterprise companies with dedicated dev teams — for small and medium businesses: a law firm in Strassen, a real estate agency in Belval, an engineering firm in the Cloche d'Or, a restaurant group in Kirchberg.
Here's what 32 projects taught us — honest, data-first, without the sales spin.
Lesson 1: The biggest problem is almost never design.
When clients come to us, they say "we need a new design." And sometimes they're right — the site looks dated and that matters. But in 26 of 32 audits, the most impactful problems were technical, not visual:
- PageSpeed score under 40 on mobile (23 of 32 sites)
- No SSL certificate, or mixed content warnings (11 of 32)
- Missing or wrong meta tags — title tags duplicated, descriptions missing (28 of 32)
- Images served without width/height attributes causing layout shift (31 of 32)
- No Google Search Console set up — the owner had no idea how the site was performing (19 of 32)
A beautiful new homepage on a site with a 32 PageSpeed score will be outranked by an ugly site with an 85. Design matters — but performance comes first.
Lesson 2: Mobile is everything.
Across the 32 sites we audited, an average of 64% of traffic came from mobile devices. Not "a lot of mobile traffic." Most traffic. The majority.
On 14 of those 32 sites, the mobile experience was a scaled-down version of the desktop — same layout, same font sizes, same navigation, just squeezed smaller. On two sites, mobile was completely broken: overlapping elements, horizontal scrolling, a contact form that didn't fit the screen.
We now build mobile-first on every project, without exception. Desktop is a progressive enhancement on top of a solid mobile base — not the other way around.
Quick test: open your site on your phone, not your laptop. Navigate to your contact page. Try to fill in the form. If anything feels awkward, that's exactly what your customers experience — and many of them leave without contacting you.
Lesson 3: Clients care about three things, in order.
After 32 projects, we know what clients actually prioritise once the work starts. In order:
1. "Will it come up on Google?"
This is always the first real question, once the initial conversation about aesthetics is over. The answer: yes, but not overnight. The technical SEO work we do — proper title tags, schema markup, Search Console setup, Core Web Vitals fixes — creates the foundation. Organic results take 60–90 days to reflect the changes. We tell every client this upfront.
2. "Will it work on phones?"
Second question, always. Mobile-first is now so expected that clients are surprised when we mention it explicitly — "isn't that just... standard?" It should be. It still isn't on many agency builds from 2019–2022.
3. "Can I update it myself?"
This is where our approach diverges from most agencies. The honest answer is: with our static HTML builds, no — you can't update it yourself without some technical knowledge. We are upfront about this. For clients who need self-editing, we recommend adding a CMS like Sanity or Payload (we offer this as part of the Full Rebuild package). For clients who just want the site to work and will call us for updates, static is faster, cheaper to host, and more secure.
Lesson 4: 7 days works because of what doesn't happen.
The most common question we get: "How do you build a site in 7 days?" The answer isn't a special process. It's everything we've removed from the typical agency process.
No: back-and-forth proposals that take three weeks to approve. No: "discovery sprints" that produce decks instead of code. No: design in Figma until perfect, then hand off to a separate dev team. No: revisions via email chains. No: project managers between the client and the person doing the work.
What remains: one person owns the project from brief to launch. We start with a content skeleton — every section of the site, copy and structure, agreed in 48 hours. Then we build. One round of revisions is included. On day 7, the site goes live.
The 7-day clock also focuses the client. When someone knows the build window is fixed, they gather their content, write their copy, and respond to questions within hours instead of days. Deadlines create clarity. An open-ended timeline creates drift.
Lesson 5: The audit is the product.
We started offering free audits as a lead generation tool. We kept offering them because clients told us the audit itself was more valuable than any proposal they'd received from other agencies.
A good audit shows the client exactly what's wrong, why it matters in business terms (not technical terms), and what the fix would cost. No vague "we'll improve your SEO" — specific: "Your LCP is 7.2 seconds because your hero image is 4.3MB. Here's what it should be, and here's the before/after PageSpeed score after we fix it."
When the audit is honest and specific, the client either fixes it themselves (which is fine — we've made a friend) or hires us to do it because they trust us before we've charged them anything.
What comes next
Thirty-two projects is a dataset, not a sample size. We expect our findings to hold. The Luxembourg SME market is large enough that the same issues will keep appearing, and specific enough that local context matters: multilingual requirements (Luxembourgish, French, German, English), EU data privacy expectations, the specific industries concentrated in the Grand Duchy.
We're building tools and templates around this knowledge. The audit template you can see on this site is one output. The blog you're reading is another. If you want to see what your site's audit would look like, the request takes 30 seconds.