Most lists like this are too elegant. Five abstract principles, each starting with a noun, all sounding profound and saying very little.
Here is the actual list. The things I look at first when a client asks me to review their digital experience.
1. The above-the-fold pitch
The first screen on the homepage. Specifically: would a stranger know what you sell, who it is for and what to do next, in under five seconds. Most homepages fail this. They explain the company. They should explain the offer.
2. The path to the contact form
How many clicks from the homepage to “I want to talk to you”? Two is fine. Three is on the edge. Four or more and you are losing leads who decided it was not worth the hunt. This is the single most underrated metric on most sites.
3. Mobile speed on a real phone
Not the Lighthouse score on a fast desktop browser. The actual experience on a mid-range Android phone with patchy 4G. That is what most customers are using. If your site takes seven seconds to render the hero image on mobile, you do not have a brand problem, you have a “people leave before they see the page” problem.
4. Form length
Every required field on a form costs you submissions. The maths is brutal. Eleven fields will lose you about 60% of submissions versus four fields. Most contact forms have eleven fields because someone in marketing wanted to know more than they needed to.
5. Whether the analytics work
Half the websites I audit have GA4 set up wrong. Events not firing. Conversions not tracking. Traffic that bounces in three seconds because the cookie banner blocks the page. The team has been making decisions on bad data for months and does not realise.
That is the list. None of it is glamorous. All of it moves numbers.
If you want me to do this on your site rather than describe it, get in touch.