Website audit · concept redesign

49 / 100 weighted score

Genuinely likeable brand, undermined by a site that gives buyers no reason to act now.

Hey August Co has real, warm family photography and a real founder story — a mom who started the brand after having her son August. But the site itself scores near-zero on the things that actually convert: one CTA label site-wide, a single review on the sampled product page despite a review app being installed, zero material/safety claims for a sun-hat product line, and a mobile homepage that can take nearly 11 seconds to fully load.

↗ heyaugustco.com (live site)
Conversion path 25%
55
Trust & proof 20%
35
Content coverage 20%
40
Tech performance 10%
52
SEO foundations 10%
55
Design & hierarchy 10%
62
Local / multi-loc 5%
70

Give credit where it's real

What's genuinely working.

Lighthouse SEO audit
100/100

Technically well-configured — correct canonical, correct viewport, a well-formed robots.txt that's even ahead of the curve with agentic-commerce (AI shopping assistant) directives.

Visual review, homepage + PDP
Real photos

An actual family, actual kids, genuine outdoor settings — not stock photography. Most small DTC shops don't have this. It's the site's biggest real asset.

DOM scan
Wholesale + Shop Pay

A wholesale page and Shop Pay installments both signal a real, ambitious small business, not a dropship storefront.

The three findings that matter most

Where the real money is being left on the table.

Lighthouse, mobile, simulated throttling
10.9s

Mobile LCP — over 4x Google's 2.5s "good" threshold. 60 of 246 requests are third-party (18%), suggesting accumulated app/tracker bloat is the likely culprit.

Direct DOM scan, sampled product page
1 review

Judge.me is installed and functional, but the sampled best-selling product shows a single review. Seeing explicit proof that almost nobody else bought this item undermines trust more than having no review widget at all.

Full-site regex scan for conversion vocabulary
1 CTA

"Add to Cart" is the only call-to-action label found anywhere on the site. Zero mentions of "quote," "gift," or any secondary action a hesitant buyer could take instead.

Before / after

Homepage.

Before — live site
Current heyaugustco.com homepage, full page
Real problem: H1 is the logo only — no actual headline reinforcing the brand promise. Below the fold, photo quality is inconsistent tile-to-tile (some professionally color-graded, some look like ungraded phone snapshots).
After — redesign concept
Redesign concept homepage, full page
Fix: a real headline ("Caps built for the whole crew"), a Compare-surface product grid with review counts and pricing visible at a glance, and a dedicated section for the material/safety claim once verified. Uses the site's own real photography throughout — nothing stock.

Mobile.

Before — live site
Current homepage on mobile viewport
Lighthouse flags target-size (tap targets too small/close) and heading-order failures on this exact viewport.
After — redesign concept
Redesign concept on mobile viewport
Full-width tappable CTAs, real heading hierarchy, disclosure labels kept legible without breaking layout.

Product page.

Before — live site (splash-proof-5-panel-hat-in-sunshine)
Current product page, full page
Real problem: pricing is clear, but there's no material/UPF claim despite this being a sun-hat category — the single most relevant purchase-decision fact for a parent buyer is simply absent.

Structural comparison

The full before/after flow.

Every node in this diagram traces to a real measurement in AUDIT-DATA.md — nothing here is a stylistic opinion.

Verified reference sites

Real, live peers — not global giants.

Each site below was fetched live and independently re-verified (not taken on description alone) before being cited here.

Brave Little Ones

bravelittleones.com ↗
  • "5,100+ five star reviews" headline claim — verified live in the real DOM
  • Grid-level urgency badges (Restocked!, Almost Gone!) — real inventory signals
  • Founder story used as a conversion lever, not a formality

SUNDAY & CO.

shopsunday.com ↗
  • Clean 7-item nav for a caps/beanies/accessories catalog — no dropdown sprawl
  • Free shipping threshold ($19+) tuned to the actual price range
  • Minimal PDP: one size dropdown, 3-bullet feature list, no essay copy

Tenth & Pine

tenthandpine.com ↗
  • 4-icon "Difference" row answering materials/ethics without a long page
  • Seasonal capsule homepage anchor — repeatable content cadence
  • Rewards messaging placed in the top ribbon, visible before any scroll

Free Fly Apparel

freeflyapparel.com ↗
  • Kids' line organized by activity, not flat product type
  • Inline star ratings on collection-grid cards — verified live
  • Owns the UPF/sun-safety angle as an explicit category differentiator
Also checked, not used: Beau & Belle Littles (store closing/clearance), Shop Cadets (pivoted away from kids' apparel), Shade Critters (dated template), Little Palmerhaus (wrong market/scale), Snug Bug (couldn't verify), Tracksmith (no citable detail extractable), Rylee + Cru (out-of-scale multi-brand portfolio). Kept here so none of these get re-researched later.

Cheapest fixes, no redesign required

Do these five things this week.

1Write a real homepage H1 and a real meta description — both are currently placeholder-thin.
2Add alt text to product/lifestyle images (87.5% currently missing it) — a real photography asset is invisible to Google Images right now.
3Audit installed Shopify apps for render-blocking bloat — 60 of 246 requests are third-party, and that's the likely cause of the 10.9s mobile load.
4Confirm whether a real UPF/SPF rating exists — if so, it's the highest-leverage trust claim missing from the entire site.
5Check the $999.99 / $150.00 price anomaly found in a related-products scan — likely a Shop Pay display artifact, but worth confirming it isn't a real pricing bug.