I Roasted Twelve Beauty Websites. The Same Three Things Went Wrong

Open your own website. Start a timer.

Five seconds is what you get before a stranger decides whether you're worth her Saturday morning and her money. I ran that timer on the last 12 websites I roasted, across beauty, hair and skin, and I can tell you what happens when it runs out.

Mostly nothing happens. The clock hits five, and she still has no idea what you do.

Almost every site I've roasted has been genuinely beautiful. Proper photography, branding someone paid good money for, a colour palette I'd happily live inside. The design turned up and did its job. The words turned up and refused to take their coat off.

Three things went wrong, over and over.

She can't tell what you do, or why it should be you

This was the big one. Six of the twelve.

I landed on one homepage that was so pretty I forgot to be critical for a second, then caught myself thinking, wait, what do you sell? Nothing on the screen told me. I had to click into a menu, open a treatment page and read two paragraphs before I understood I was looking at a skin clinic.

That's not a browsing experience, that's a scavenger hunt, and nobody's doing a scavenger hunt at 9pm with a glass of wine and eleven other tabs open, trying to find a fix for their perimenopausal skin.

The ones that come unstuck usually reach for the same sentence.

I have read more versions of "Welcome to our salon, where we're passionate about skin" more times than I've had almond lattes this year, and I've had a concerning number of almond lattes this year.

It could belong to any business in the country. If your competitor could paste your homepage onto her site and nothing would look out of place, that's your problem, right there, in one line.

Your beauty website is selling the glycolic, not the glow

Five of the twelve did this.

Your menu says glycolic peel. She doesn't want a glycolic peel. She wants to stop tilting her phone camera at a specific angle to hide her jawline acne. Glycolic is not a benefit, glycolic is homework.

Same goes for the experience. One salon I roasted had a genuinely lovely thing going on, warm, unhurried, the kind of place where someone remembers your dog's name. None of that was on the website. The website had a price list.

Tell her what happens when she walks through your door and what you'll do for her skin that the place down the road won't.

Want your website on the Sunday Roast menu? Send me a DM with your business name and I'll add you to the list. It's free, and you'll walk away with a to-do list.

Adding more words made it worse

This one surprises people, so stay with me.

Four of the twelve had the opposite problem to the one they thought they had. They'd written a good line, read it back, panicked, then added a sentence explaining the good line. Now your best sentence has a stage five clinger following it around the room.

Your best line doesn't need an emotional support sentence. Cut the explainer and let it work.

The same instinct shows up on treatment menus with 48 services listed in one unbroken wall of text. Every one of those services is real and worth booking. Presented like that, she can't find the one she came for and leaves confused as f*ck, never to return again.

One of the best homepages I've reviewed all year had barely any copy on it. Every word earned its spot. Short isn't lazy when it's deliberate. If your visitor can't work out what you do in five seconds, the answer usually isn't more words, it's better ones.

Twelve roasts, zero rebuilds

Not one of the twelve businesses I've roasted needed to burn it all down and start over.

Every single one had the bones of a website that converts, and every single one walked away with a to-do list they could get through in an afternoon with a cup of tea and a bit of ruthlessness.

That's the bit worth hearing if your enquiries have gone quiet and you've started pricing up a rebuild.

The design is probably fine. Go and run the five-second timer on your own homepage first, and be honest about what you see when it stops.

Then fix the words.