Most firms I speak to believe their digital experience is somewhere between "fine" and "pretty good, actually." Then we sit down together and walk through it properly, and the room goes quiet.
Not because the findings are catastrophic. Usually they're not. It's the specificity that catches people off guard. There's a world of difference between a vague sense that "the website could probably do with a refresh" and discovering that your enquiry process scores a 1 out of 5 because all you're offering is a generic contact form with no response time commitment and no acknowledgement. The first one gets deferred indefinitely. The second one gets budget.
That's what this assessment is designed to do. Not tell you something you don't already suspect - but give you evidence where you currently have intuition. Because intuition doesn't get past a board. Evidence does.
Set aside 20 to 30 minutes. You can do this alone, but honestly, you'll learn more if you don't. The most valuable version of this exercise is when two or three people complete it independently - say, the managing partner, the marketing lead, and whoever owns IT or digital - and then compare scores.
The gaps between assessors are often more revealing than the scores themselves. I've seen a managing partner score their website clarity at a 4 while the marketing director gave it a 2. Same website. Same firm. The partner was thinking about the homepage. The marketing director was thinking about the service pages three clicks deep that hadn't been updated since 2021. That conversation - the one where you realise you're not even looking at the same thing - is worth more than any number on a page.
Each of the eight dimensions below is scored 1 to 5 against observable criteria. Not feelings. Not "how do you rate your website on a scale of 1 to 10" nonsense. Specific, describable things you can actually go and check. A 1 means something concrete. A 5 means something concrete. You shouldn't need specialist knowledge to score yourself - just willingness to look honestly.
We already know roughly where we are. We don't need a formal assessment to tell us the obvious.
Maybe. But "roughly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. And "the obvious" tends to mean the one or two things you've already noticed, while four or five other dimensions sit there quietly, unexamined. So humour me.
1. Website clarity and usability
This is the front door. Can a visitor who's never heard of your firm work out what you actually do - and whether you're relevant to them - within about 30 seconds?
Score yourself a 1 if most visitors can't identify your primary expertise within half a minute. That usually means a homepage full of generic language ("we deliver solutions that drive value") with no clear navigation to specific services or sectors. A 5 means a clear, specific value proposition immediately visible - not a tagline, a genuine statement of what you do and for whom - with intuitive navigation to relevant content. If you want a reality check, I've written separately about why most B2B service websites fail their users. It covers the common patterns in more depth.
2. Content quality and relevance
Not "do you have a blog." Whether your content demonstrates genuine expertise in the situations your target clients actually face.
A 1 here means generic service descriptions. "We provide corporate tax advisory services to businesses of all sizes." No sector-specific insight, no evidence of having thought about the client's actual problem. A 5 means specific, evidenced content that speaks to particular situations - a piece on TUPE implications during PE-backed acquisitions, say, rather than "our employment law team can help with all aspects of employment law." The gap between these two is enormous. Most firms sit closer to the 1 than they'd like to admit, and I say that having reviewed a lot of professional services websites over the years. A lot.
3. Mobile experience
Pull your website up on your phone right now. Not later. Right now.
A 1 is a desktop design that's been squeezed onto a small screen - pinch-to-zoom text, buttons too close together, forms that are practically unusable. A 5 is a genuinely mobile-first design that loads quickly and provides a fully functional experience on any device.
Before you think "our clients don't use their phones to look at our website" - check your analytics. You'll probably find 40 to 60% of your traffic is mobile. Even in B2B. Even in professional services. I know, I know. But there it is.
4. Enquiry process
This is where a lot of firms haemorrhage opportunities without realising it. What actually happens when someone wants to get in touch?
A 1 is a generic "contact us" form - or worse, just an email address - with no indication of what happens next. No response time. No acknowledgement. No sense of whether anyone's actually going to read it. A 5 means multiple frictionless contact paths, published response time commitments, and an immediate acknowledgement that tells the person their enquiry has been received and what to expect.
I worked with a law firm last year that went from a single contact form to structured enquiry paths by practice area, with a 4-hour response commitment. Their qualified enquiries increased 67% in six months. Not because more people were visiting the site - because fewer people were giving up halfway through trying to reach them. That's a painful thing to sit with, if you think about how long their old form had been live.
5. Portal or self-service capability
Can your clients do anything without picking up the phone or sending an email?
A 1 means no self-service capability at all. Every interaction requires a human on your side. Checking the status of a project? Phone call. Getting a copy of an invoice? Email request. A 5 means clients can initiate, track, and complete routine interactions independently - not everything, but the stuff that shouldn't require a conversation.
If you don't have a portal, that's a 1. If you have a portal that nobody uses because it's painful, that's... also basically a 1, if I'm being honest. I've seen firms proudly point to their client portal and then quietly admit that fewer than 15% of clients have ever logged in. That's not a portal. That's a checkbox.
6. Responsiveness
Not just speed - consistency. Do you have formal response time standards, and do you actually meet them?
A 1 means no formal standards and inconsistent follow-up. Some partners reply within an hour. Some take three days. The client has no idea what to expect. A 5 means published response time commitments that are consistently met across every contact channel - phone, email, web, portal.
This one sounds simple. It's remarkable how few firms can genuinely claim it. And the ones who can't usually know it - they just haven't done anything about it yet.
7. Accessibility
Can everyone use your digital experience? Not just people with perfect vision, fine motor control, and familiarity with your particular brand of navigation.
A 1 means no accessibility provision - content that's inaccessible to users with visual, motor, or cognitive needs. Missing alt text, poor colour contrast, no keyboard navigation, PDFs that screen readers can't parse. A 5 means WCAG 2.1 AA compliance with genuinely accessible content and interaction design.
This isn't just a moral imperative - although it is that. It's also a legal and commercial one. And it's the dimension where the gap between "we think we're fine" and "we've actually checked" tends to be widest. Most firms haven't checked. Eek.
8. Technical performance
Does the thing actually work? Properly?
A 1 is slow-loading pages, frequent errors, broken links, and functionality that fails unpredictably. A 5 is consistent fast performance, no broken elements, and regular monitoring with proactive maintenance.
Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights right now. If the score makes you wince, you know where you are. If you've never done this before, brace yourself.
Add up your scores across all eight dimensions. You'll land somewhere between 8 and 40.
Competitive (33–40): Your digital experience is at or above sector average across most dimensions. Genuinely good - and rarer than you'd think. Your investment priority is maintenance and incremental improvement. Don't get complacent, but don't panic either.
Adequate (21–32): You meet minimum acceptable standards on most dimensions but have specific gaps that are creating avoidable commercial cost. This is where the majority of mid-market B2B service firms land, in my experience. The temptation is to treat it as "good enough" and move on. Don't. Pick the two or three below-average dimensions with the highest commercial impact and fix those. Not everything. Just the ones that matter most.
At risk (8–20): Your digital experience is below sector average on multiple dimensions and is likely costing you measurable revenue through lost enquiries, poor referral conversion, and client friction. This isn't a "when we get round to it" situation. Start with the dimensions that affect new business conversion most directly, and start soon.
Here's where context matters. The relative commercial importance of these eight dimensions shifts depending on what kind of firm you are and where your growth pressure sits.
If your primary challenge is winning new business, then website clarity, content quality, and enquiry process are where your score matters most. A firm scoring 4s on portal capability but 2s on enquiry process is losing opportunities it doesn't even know about. That's the frustrating kind of loss - invisible until you go looking.
If your primary challenge is retaining clients and reducing churn, then portal capability, responsiveness, and accessibility carry the most weight. Your existing clients are the ones interacting with these dimensions daily, and their tolerance for friction drops every time they use a well-designed app in their personal life. They're not comparing you to your competitors. They're comparing you to Monzo and Deliveroo.
If you're investing significantly in digital marketing - SEO, paid campaigns, content distribution - then mobile experience and technical performance have proportionately higher impact. There's no point driving traffic to a site that loads in seven seconds on a phone. You're essentially paying to disappoint people.
So don't just look at the aggregate. Look at which of your lowest-scoring dimensions sit in the category that matters most for your firm right now. That's your priority list.
If you scored 33–40: You're in good shape. Keep measuring, and focus on incremental gains. There's a companion piece on building a measurement framework worth reading - it'll help you make sure you're tracking the right things over time rather than just assuming things are holding steady.
If you scored 21–32: You've got specific gaps, and now you can see them. Pick the two or three dimensions that scored lowest and sit in the category most relevant to your firm's current priority. There's more detailed content across this site covering each dimension - website clarity, content strategy, enquiry optimisation, accessibility - that can help you understand what "good" actually looks like in practice.
If you scored 8–20: Right, look - I'd strongly recommend getting a facilitated assessment. Not because you can't see the problems (you clearly can now), but because the path from "we know it's bad" to "here's exactly what we're doing about it, in what order, by when" is harder than it looks. A structured digital experience review covers these same eight dimensions in more depth and produces a specific improvement roadmap. It's the difference between knowing you need to fix things and having a plan that actually gets funded.
A low score also gives you something concrete to take to your board. I've written separately about building an investment case for digital improvement - the specificity this assessment produces is exactly what makes that conversation possible. Scored gaps with commercial consequences get budget. Vague concerns get another deferral.
If you want to run this as a proper team exercise - scored independently, then compared - [download the printable self-assessment here]. It's formatted with the full scoring criteria for each dimension, space for multiple assessors, and the priority matrix. Takes 20 minutes per person. The conversation afterwards is where the real value is, and it tends to go in directions nobody expected.
If you'd prefer a facilitated version - same eight dimensions, assessed in more depth, with external benchmarking against firms like yours - [book a facilitated assessment session]. We'll confirm your self-assessment findings, extend them with benchmarking data, and produce a prioritised improvement roadmap you can actually act on.
Knowing your score is useful. Knowing what to do about it is the bit that matters.