MANCHESTER · CITY AUDIT

A brutally honest website audit for Manchester businesses

Manchester is one of the fastest-growing small-business cities in the UK. Northern Quarter independents, MediaCity start-ups, Trafford retailers, Salford Quays creative agencies — all competing for the same local search traffic, and most with websites that are quietly costing them money.

ShiteScore tells you exactly what's wrong with your site and how to fix it. £9.99, one-off. Free score in 30 seconds. Full report in your inbox in five minutes.

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Why Manchester businesses specifically need this

The Manchester high street isn't dying — it's just consolidating around the businesses who can be found online. A coffee shop on Oldham Street with a 35/100 ShiteScore loses customers to one on Tib Street with a 78/100 every single day. The difference isn't usually the coffee. It's usually that one of them has a faster site, real Google Business Profile schema, and an FAQ page that answers "do you do oat milk".

Mobile traffic in Greater Manchester runs slightly higher than the UK average — around 68% — partly because of student-heavy demographics around the universities. That makes mobile performance disproportionately important. A 1-second delay in mobile load time correlates with roughly a 7% drop in conversions across most small-business sites we've seen. At Manchester's competitive density, 7% is the difference between a quiet Tuesday and a profitable one.

The other Manchester-specific issue: your competitors here are sharper than you think. Manchester punches above its weight on web tooling — there are more developers per capita than in most UK cities outside London. The agency-built site your rival paid £8K for last year was probably built well. ShiteScore tells you whether yours stacks up.

What we typically find on Manchester business websites

The pattern by sector:

Independent retail (Northern Quarter, Stockport, Altrincham): Shopify themes that haven't been updated in 18 months, image-heavy product galleries with no compression, missing structured data on individual products.

Hospitality (city centre bars, Ancoats restaurants): WordPress sites with three booking-widget plugins fighting each other, and an Instagram embed loading 80 photos before the page becomes interactive.

Professional services (Spinningfields, MediaCity): bespoke React sites that look beautiful and score 28/100 on mobile because the JavaScript bundle is 2.4MB before any content arrives.

Tradespeople (across Greater Manchester): Wix or Squarespace template sites with no LocalBusiness schema, which means Google's local pack doesn't know you exist.

Every one of these is fixable. None of them needs a redesign. 15 pages, six categories, prioritised fix list. £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.