A weak website isn't automatically a good lead. There are thousands of bad sites attached to businesses that aren't in a position to invest in fixing them — or don't care, because referrals keep them busy enough. Contacting all of them wastes time and produces disappointment.
The skill in prospecting isn't finding sites that look bad. It's finding sites where the visible problems have an obvious, explainable commercial cost — and where the business has both the means and the motivation to address them.
Before you even run an audit, two things tell you whether a site is worth the time. First: does the business actually depend on its website for revenue? A sole trader who gets all their work through word of mouth is a much harder sell than a local service business that relies on Google traffic to fill the diary.
Second: is the business operating at a scale where the cost of fixing the site is obviously smaller than the cost of the problem? A business turning over £500k with a broken mobile experience and no CTA above the fold has a clear case for investment. A hobby business with three employees probably doesn't.
Shortcut: look for businesses that are paying to advertise — Google Ads, Facebook, any paid traffic. They're already spending money to bring people to a site that's likely losing them. That's a very easy commercial case to make.
Once you've established the business context, you're looking for problems that map to a specific, describable revenue consequence. The most useful categories are:
Not every technical issue translates into a useful outreach angle. Sites with minor SEO gaps, slightly dated fonts, or acceptable-but-not-great colour choices often don't have a clear enough commercial hook to build a message around.
If you can't finish the sentence "this is costing the business..." in a way that sounds credible to someone outside tech, it's probably not the right angle. Save those observations for later, once the relationship is established.
Lixa's scoring system is designed to surface exactly this: sites with high visible friction and clear commercial consequence. A score above 65 typically means there are multiple, serious issues with obvious business impact. A score below 40 often means the site has minor problems that are harder to build an outreach angle around.
Use the score as a first pass. Focus your time on the top third of any list you generate — those are the conversations most likely to convert into actual work.
Lixa scores every site on commercial impact so you can focus on the leads that are actually ready to buy.
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