The free 15-point website health check for small businesses.
Five leaks cost small business websites more enquiries than anything else. Work through the checks, score your site out of fifteen, and get a fix list in priority order. No sign-up to read it.
Websites rarely fail loudly. They leak. Nobody emails to say your site put them off, so a leaking site looks exactly like a quiet market, and businesses blame the economy for something that is fixable in a fortnight. These are the five we find on almost every site we audit, in the order they cost you money.
It is too slow, and nobody will ever tell you
Every second of load time is a share of your visitors deciding to go back to the search results.
Speed is the only leak on this list that people feel before they see anything at all. A visitor taps your link from Google, gets a white screen, waits, and goes back to try the next business instead. They do not email to complain. They do not remember your name. As far as your inbox is concerned, that enquiry never existed.
Most slow small business sites are slow for boring reasons: photographs uploaded straight off a phone at full resolution, a page carrying five plugins to do the work of one, and a homepage video nobody asked for. None of it is hard to fix, which is what makes it worth fixing first. It is also the one leak that costs you twice, because Google treats a slow site as a worse result and ranks it lower.
Test it honestly. Not on your office broadband on the laptop where the site is already cached, but on your own phone, on mobile data, standing outside. That is the experience your customers actually have.
It was designed on a desktop, for a desktop
Most of your visitors arrive on a phone. If the site fights them there, the desktop version is decoration.
Almost every website is designed by someone sitting at a large screen, and almost every website is read by someone holding a phone in one hand. When those two facts are not reconciled deliberately, the phone version becomes an afterthought: buttons too small to hit first time, text that needs pinching, a menu that jumps, forms that zoom the whole page the moment you tap a field.
None of that reads to a customer as a technical fault. It reads as carelessness, and carelessness is the one thing nobody wants from a business they are about to hand money to. A builder in Portsmouth or a salon in Chichester loses the enquiry for exactly the same reason: the site felt awkward, so the customer used the one that did not.
Responsive is not a switch you flip at the end of a build. It is a decision made before the first page is designed, which is why retrofitting it always costs more than doing it properly the first time.
There is no obvious next step
Interest with nowhere to go is the most expensive kind of traffic there is. You paid for the visit and got nothing back.
This is the leak that hides best, because the site looks finished. The design is tidy, the copy is fine, the photographs are good, and visitors arrive, read, and leave without doing anything, because nothing ever asked them to. A page with three equally weighted links has no call to action. It has a menu.
Every page needs one obvious thing to do next, and it should be the same thing: call, book, or get a quote. Make the phone number tappable, keep the form to the fields you genuinely need, and put the action where someone will hit it without hunting. If a visitor lands halfway down a page from a Google result, which happens constantly, they should still be able to see what you want them to do.
The cheapest version of this fix takes an afternoon and no new design work at all. It is usually the single highest-return change we make to an existing site.
It says what you do, but never why you
You are being compared with two other tabs. Sounding like both of them is how you lose to whoever is cheapest.
Nobody chooses a tradesperson, a practice or a studio because of the phrase quality service at competitive prices. That sentence describes every business in every industry, which means it describes none of them. It is the written equivalent of a blank wall, and it is on an enormous number of small business homepages.
What actually separates you is specific and slightly awkward to write: real reviews with real names attached, photographs of work you actually did, the accreditations your trade takes seriously, how long you have been doing this, and what you will not take on. Specifics are believable in a way that adjectives never are. A named review from a customer in your town is worth more than any amount of praise nobody can trace.
The test is simple. Cover your logo and read your homepage. If it could belong to any competitor within twenty miles, the copy is not doing its job.
Google cannot read it properly
You can have the best site in your area and still be invisible to the one system that decides who finds you.
A site can look completely finished to you and still be close to unreadable to a search engine. Missing page titles, every page sharing one description, headings used as decoration instead of structure, images with no alt text, no sitemap, and nothing anywhere on the page that tells Google which town you actually serve.
This is the leak that quietly caps everything else. You can fix your speed, your phone layout, your calls to action and your copy, and still get almost no traffic to apply them to, because nobody is arriving in the first place. Local search in particular is unforgiving: if your service area is not written into the copy, and your Google Business Profile does not point cleanly at the site, you are competing for the customers who already know your name.
None of this is the mysterious part of SEO. It is a checklist, it is mostly one-off work, and it should have been in your build from the start.
Score your own site, honestly.
Fifteen checks, three for each leak. Tick only the ones you are genuinely sure about, because a generous score is no use to you. Everything you leave unticked becomes your fix list, in priority order, at the bottom.
Tick the checks you are sure about and your score will appear here.
Your fix list
Work through the checks above and anything you leave unticked will appear here, in the order we would tackle it, with what to do about it.
Fifteen minutes, no charge, no pitch. We go through your site while you watch and tell you which of these fifteen you are failing and what it would take to fix. You are welcome to take that list to anyone.
Wondering what fixing this costs? Every figure we charge is on the pricing page, agreed in writing before anything starts. If you would rather read than tick boxes, the short version of this guide is on the blog as five signs your website is quietly losing you customers, and there is a local view in web design in Chichester.