BIRMINGHAM · CITY AUDIT

A brutally honest website audit for Birmingham businesses

Birmingham is the UK's second-largest city economy and home to roughly 90,000 small businesses. The Commonwealth Games legacy investment is still feeding visitor traffic into the city. HS2 — eventually — will feed in more. None of which matters if a visitor's first interaction with your business is a website that doesn't load on their phone.

ShiteScore tells you what's wrong with your site in plain English. £9.99 one-off. No subscription, no sales call.

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Why Birmingham businesses specifically need this

Birmingham has the most diverse small-business mix of any UK city. Jewellery Quarter craft makers, Digbeth food traders, Bullring retailers, Edgbaston professional services, Solihull tradespeople — all competing for a different slice of the same Google search results, and most with websites built before "Core Web Vitals" was a phrase anyone said out loud.

The diversity matters because the audit findings vary wildly by sector. A Jewellery Quarter goldsmith's site usually fails on image weight (high-res product photography is the entire selling point and nobody's compressed it). A Digbeth street-food trader's site usually fails on schema (no structured data means Google's "find food near me" results never include them). A Solihull electrician's site usually fails on mobile usability (the Wix template was beautiful in the demo and unworkable on a Samsung A14).

The other Birmingham angle worth flagging: accessibility is a bigger deal here than people realise. The Commonwealth Games drove sustained scrutiny on tourist-facing accessibility, and the standards leaked into mainstream small-business expectations. A typical Birmingham consumer-facing site has 20+ WCAG violations on the homepage. Most are 5-minute fixes. None of them get fixed because nobody knows they're there.

What we typically find on Birmingham business websites

In rough order of impact:

Hero images that haven't been compressed. A 4MB JPEG that should be a 200KB WebP is the single most common Birmingham finding. Quickest possible win.

No LocalBusiness schema. Around 60% of the Birmingham sites we audit have zero structured data. Without it, Google's local results and AI search engines treat you as if you don't exist.

Render-blocking JavaScript. Tracking pixels, chat widgets, third-party fonts. Stack three and you've added a second of perceived load time.

Missing alt text. Every product image, every team photo, every "About us" headshot. Both an SEO problem and an accessibility problem in one.

Old WordPress plugins. ShiteScore fingerprints installed plugins and checks the WordPress.org version data. Roughly half the WordPress sites we audit have at least one plugin two major versions behind.

15 pages, six categories, prioritised fix list with platform-specific instructions. £9.99 one-off. 7-day refund — we'll ask what went wrong, but we won't argue.

so. how shite is your site?

Score me →

FAQ

Reasonable questions.

Is this actually called ShiteScore?

Yes. It's called ShiteScore because that's the word people use when they look at their own website. The brand is the joke that's already in your head.

Will you ring me afterwards?

No. The whole product exists because we're sick of being rung up by agencies. We don't even have a phone number.

What if my score is really shite?

Then the report is more useful, not less. The lower the score, the more low-hanging fruit. We don't sugar-coat, but we also don't shame.

Refund policy?

7 days. If the report genuinely isn't useful to you — not just "I didn't like my score" — reply to your report email with the word "refund" and it's done within an hour. We'll ask what went wrong so we can improve it, but we won't argue.

Is this AI-generated slop?

The crawl and scoring are real data — PageSpeed Insights, a live site crawl, security header checks, DNS lookups. The fix steps are a mix: common, well-understood issues are served from a curated library of pre-reviewed, platform-specific instructions written and checked by a human. Novel or site-specific issues are generated by Claude AI from your actual audit data. Nothing is generic filler.

Which platforms do you support?

We detect your CMS automatically. WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow all get platform-specific fix steps — naming the exact menu, plugin, or setting you need. WordPress sites also get a plugin version check: if your plugins are significantly out of date, we flag it with guidance on updating safely. For custom-built sites, we give you the general technical approach.