Before you start
Do this on a phone, on mobile data rather than the hangar wifi, and pretend you have never seen the site before. Every check below is something a visitor experiences, not something a tool reports. Tools come later.
Part one: the first fifteen seconds
More enquiries are lost here than anywhere else on the site, and every fix in this section is cheap.
- Does the first screen name what you do? Not your company name and a photograph. The words “aircraft maintenance”, and the aircraft you take.
- Is the approval reference visible without scrolling? As text, in the regulator's wording. In our sample the approvals were present on every site that held them, but routinely further down the page than a phone visitor ever reaches.
- Is the airfield named in the first screen? The field, not just the county.
- Does the page fit the phone? Three of the nine sites still hand a phone a desktop-width layout. One is laid out 981 pixels wide, so a 375-pixel phone shrinks everything to about 38% of its intended size. Two more tell the phone to treat the screen as 320 pixels wide. All three are one line of code.
- Does the main content appear within four seconds? Of the seven sites we could measure, five took four seconds or more on a mid-range phone on a simulated slow connection. Two took 8.8 seconds. Google treats anything over four seconds as poor, and so does a person with a job to do.
Part two: the contact path
This is the section with the single highest return, and the one most often broken.
- Does tapping the phone number dial it? Seven of the nine sites had no tap-to-call link anywhere. The number was correct and visible on every one of them. Tapping it simply did nothing. This is the most common serious fault we find in aviation, and it is a five-minute fix.
- Is there one phone number, or several? One site in the sample shows a different main number on one page from the number on the other twenty-two. Somebody, at some point, will ring the wrong one.
- Are email addresses text? One site publishes two department addresses as images. They cannot be copied, tapped, or found by search. As far as the site's code is concerned they do not exist.
- Is there an enquiry or quote form at all? Three of the nine had none, including on their contact page. A form is how you capture the person who is researching at nine in the evening.
- Does the form ask for the registration and the type? Those two fields turn a vague enquiry into a quotable one, and they cost the sender five seconds.
- Is the email address on your own domain? One site asks customers to write to a free webmail address. For a business that handles other people's aircraft, a company address is worth the ten minutes it takes to set up.
- Is there a route for urgent or AOG work? If you take it, give it its own path. If you do not, say so plainly.
- Does the form tell people what happens next? “We will be in touch” is not a commitment. “You will hear back the same working day” is.
Part three: whether they believe you
- Is the capability list scannable? Can a reader find their specific job in five seconds without reading a sentence? If it is written as paragraphs, the answer is no.
- Are aircraft types named? Types, classes or a weight limit. Something an owner can measure themselves against.
- Is the approval wording current? UK organisations have held UK approvals since 1 January 2021. One site still advertises an EASA approval on fourteen pages. Search your own site for the old terms and read every result.
- Is there any proof beyond the claims? Years at the field, number of engineers, manufacturer agencies, registers supported, photographs of your own hangar taken this decade.
- What do the dates say? One site's footer says 2017. Another says 2022, with its most recent news item dated September 2022 and a notice from the Covid period still on the page. A date is the cheapest signal that somebody is home, and the cheapest signal that nobody is.
Part four: the technical floor
Less visible, still expensive. These are the ones a visitor feels without being able to name.
- Does the address without “https” redirect to the secure version? On one site it does not: type the address without the prefix and you get the insecure version and stay there.
- How heavy is the homepage? One in the sample downloads 7.8 MB across 75 files, with a single photograph weighing 951 KB. On a phone, away from wifi, that is most of the reason the page takes nine seconds.
- Is anything running on old components? Old plugins and libraries are how small sites get defaced. In the sample we found jQuery 1.10.2 on one site, and on another a page builder and a slider several major versions behind, plus an embedded service that was shut down years ago.
Scoring it honestly
Count the checks you pass. Under ten and the website is actively working against the business: the fixes are worth doing before you spend anything on advertising, because advertising only sends more people to the same leak. Between ten and sixteen and you have a site that works for patient visitors, which is not the same as one that converts impatient ones. Seventeen or more and your problem is probably discoverability rather than conversion, and the money goes into being found instead.
For what it is worth, none of the nine sites we scored reached sixty out of a hundred on our own scale. The average was in the low thirties. These are real businesses with real approvals and real engineers, and the websites are simply not carrying them.
The three to do first, in this order, on almost any aviation site: make every phone number a tap-to-call link; move the approval reference and the aircraft limit into the first screen; add an enquiry form that asks for the registration and the type. None of the three requires a redesign, and between them they fix the most expensive faults on the list.
What a tool will not tell you
Automated scanners are good at part four and blind to parts one to three. They will tell you an image lacks alt text. They will not tell you that your approval is three scrolls down, that your capability list reads as prose, or that the only way to reach you is a phone call during office hours.
That is why the audit we do is done by hand, with the site open on an actual phone, and why it takes a couple of days rather than a couple of seconds.
Want us to run all twenty-one against yours? Send the address. You get a written report with what we found, how we measured it, and the three things we would change first. No call required to receive it.
Related: what an aircraft maintenance website should contain and how to present CAA, EASA and FAA approvals.