Why five checks, and why these five
When we score an HVAC company's existing website, we do not start with taste. Taste is arguable and slow. We start with five mechanical facts that are either true or false, because they are the ones that decide whether a hot, annoyed homeowner can call you from the search results in under thirty seconds.
They are weighted, in our own scoring, roughly like this: a site with no working secure connection carries the heaviest penalty, then a missing viewport tag, then old page-builder markers in the code, then a stale or missing copyright year, then a slow or enormous page, then a missing page title. The weights are ours and you are welcome to disagree with them. The checks themselves are not opinions.
Here they are, in the order that costs you the most money.
Check one: the viewport tag — does the page know a phone exists?
What it is. One line of code in the head of every page, which tells the phone browser to lay the page out at the phone's own width instead of pretending to be a desktop monitor and shrinking everything to 30% size.
The ten-second test. Open your homepage on your phone. Do not pinch. Do not rotate. Can you read the body text — not the big headline, the ordinary paragraph text — without zooming? If the answer is no, or if the page starts zoomed out with tiny text and a horizontal scrollbar, the tag is missing or wrong.
The exact test, if you want it. On a computer, open your homepage, press Ctrl-U (Cmd-Option-U on a Mac) to view the source, then Ctrl-F for the word viewport. You are looking for something like <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. No match means the tag is not there. MDN's documentation explains what browsers do in its absence: they assume a desktop-width canvas and scale the whole page down.
Why it costs you. This is the single most common finding on older contractor sites, and it is the one a homeowner feels immediately. A site that arrives zoomed out reads as abandoned before a word of it is read.
Check two: tap-to-call — is the phone number a link?
What it is. A phone number written into the page as a link using the tel: scheme defined in RFC 3966, so that tapping it opens the dialler with your number already in it. A phone number that is just text — or worse, a phone number inside an image — makes the homeowner memorise ten digits, leave your site, open the phone app and type.
The ten-second test. On your phone, tap your own phone number on your own homepage. Does the dialler open? If nothing happens, it is not a link.
The second half of this check. Where is it? Look at your homepage on a phone without scrolling at all. Is the number visible in that first screen? If you have to scroll to find it, an emergency caller in July will not.
The third half, which almost nobody does. Is it big enough to hit? WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum target size of 24 by 24 CSS pixels at level AA, and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines recommend a tappable area of at least 44 by 44 points. A phone number set in small text in a header, with no padding around it, fails both. We check for this specifically, because we shipped a build once with three call links under the threshold and had to be told.
Check three: the connection warning — and why "look for the padlock" is out of date
What it is. Whether your site is served over HTTPS with a certificate that is currently valid. Certificates expire. A great many small-business sites are secure right up until the day nobody renews.
Why the old advice fails. Everyone has been told to look for a padlock in the address bar. Chrome removed it. In 2023 Google replaced the lock icon with a neutral controls icon, on the reasoning that most people misread the padlock as "this site is trustworthy" rather than "this connection is encrypted." So on a modern Chrome, the absence of a padlock tells you nothing.
The ten-second test that still works. Two parts. First, look at the address itself — it must begin https://. Second, tap the icon immediately to the left of the address. It should say the connection is secure. If the browser is showing "Not secure" next to your address, or an interstitial warning page before your homepage loads, stop reading and fix it today: Chrome has flagged plain-HTTP pages as Not secure since 2018.
The bit people miss. Check and your homepage and one interior page, and check both with and without the www. Half-configured certificates are common: https://example.com works, https://www.example.com throws a full-screen security warning, and the version Google sends people to is the broken one.
Check four: the copyright year in the footer
What it is. The year next to the © at the bottom of the page. This one is not a technical fault at all — it is a signal, and it is the fastest legitimacy check a stranger can run on you.
The ten-second test. Scroll to the bottom of your homepage. What year does it say?
In our own scoring we treat a footer year of 2022 or earlier — or no year at all — as a finding. That threshold is a judgement call, not a standard. The logic is simple: a footer stuck three or four years back is usually a site nobody has logged into since, and a homeowner reads it exactly that way. If the business closed, who is answering the emergency line?
The fix is ten minutes. Either update it once a year, or have it print the current year automatically. If your web company cannot do that, that is its own finding.
Check five: the page title
What it is. The text in the browser tab, and the blue clickable line in Google's results. Google's own documentation is clear that it generates the title link from the page, and the title element is the main input.
The ten-second test. Look at the browser tab on your homepage. If it says Home, Untitled, index, your domain name, or nothing at all, that is what a searching homeowner is being offered as a reason to click.
What good looks like. What you do, and where. "Emergency AC repair in Morris County" beats "Home" and it beats your company name on its own, because a person scanning six blue links is not looking for your name — they do not know your name yet. They are looking for the town and the service.
What to do with a failing score
Take the five results in order. If the connection is broken, that is today. If the viewport tag is missing, the site needs rebuilding rather than patching — a page laid out for a 1024-pixel monitor cannot be made to fit a phone by adding one line. Tap-to-call, the footer year and the title are usually an afternoon.
And if all five pass, good — the plumbing is sound and the next questions are the ones worth arguing about: whether urgent calls and planned replacements have separate paths, whether the service area is named, and whether the site says anything that would make a stranger let you into the house. Those are on the page for HVAC companies.
If you would rather see the answer than run the test, we build a real homepage for your business and send you a private link before any payment, contract, sales call or credit card. That is the free homepage preview, and the audit above is the first thing we run before we start drawing.
Sources
- MDN Web Docs — the viewport meta element and what happens without it — https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Guides/Viewport_meta_element
- RFC 3966 — the tel URI scheme, the standard behind a tap-to-call link — https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3966
- Chromium Blog, May 2023 — Chrome replaced the lock icon in the address bar; the padlock is no longer the signal to look for — https://blog.chromium.org/2023/05/an-update-on-lock-icon.html
- Chromium Blog, February 2018 — Chrome marks pages served over HTTP as "Not secure" — https://blog.chromium.org/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html
- Google Search Central — title links, and where Google gets the title it shows — https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link
- WCAG 2.2, Success Criterion 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) — 24 by 24 CSS pixels at level AA — https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/target-size-minimum.html
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Layout — a minimum tappable area of 44 by 44 points — https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/layout
Every vendor page cited here was read on 2 September 2026 and may have changed since. Where a figure comes from someone other than the vendor, the sentence says so.