Advice
Seven signs your website is costing you work
A failing website leaves no trace: the enquiries that did not happen never show up anywhere. Twenty minutes on your phone will tell you where you stand.
A bad website does not announce itself. Nothing breaks, no one complains, and the enquiries that did not happen leave no trace. That is what makes it dangerous: the failure is invisible from the inside.
You can check yours in about twenty minutes. Do it on your phone, with wifi turned off, as if you had never seen it before.
1. It takes more than three seconds to appear
On mobile data, not office wifi. Count. People leave slow sites and they do not come back, and they never tell you.
The usual cause is images uploaded at full size: a 6MB photograph straight off a phone, displayed at postcard size. Resizing your images is often the single biggest speed improvement available, and it is free.
2. You have to pinch and zoom
If the text is too small to read at arm’s length, or you have to scroll sideways, the site was designed for a desktop and squeezed onto a phone. Most of your visitors are on a phone.
This one is fatal and very common on sites more than about five years old.
3. The phone number is not tappable
Tap it. Does it offer to ring? If it is typed as plain text rather than set up as a link, every caller has to memorise it, leave your site, and dial manually. A proportion of them will not.
Five minutes to fix, and one of the highest-return fixes on any small business website.
4. Something on it is out of date
A price that changed. A service you stopped offering. Christmas hours from two years ago. A copyright line saying 2021. A team member who left.
Each one on its own is small. Together they tell a visitor the business is not being looked after, and they will wonder what else is not.
5. A stranger could not tell what you do or where
Show your homepage to somebody who does not know your business. Give them five seconds, then take it away and ask what you do and where you are based.
If they cannot answer both, neither can a customer. The commonest cause is a homepage that opens with a welcome message instead of a plain statement of what you do.
6. It could be any business in your trade
Read your own copy and ask whether a competitor could publish it word for word without changing anything. “We pride ourselves on quality workmanship and customer satisfaction” could belong to any firm in the country, which means it does the work of none of them.
Specific beats impressive. “We only do flat roofs” is a stronger sentence than any amount of pride in workmanship.
7. It looks worse than your actual business
The one that costs the most and gets discussed the least.
If your work is meticulous and your website looks slapdash, visitors do not conclude that you are good at your job and bad at websites. They conclude that this is roughly the standard you work to. It is not fair and it is entirely consistent. People judge what they can see and assume it represents what they cannot.
This is where a poor website becomes genuinely expensive. Not because it is ugly, but because it makes a competitor look like the safer choice.
Fix these first, for nothing
Make the phone number a proper link. Resize your images. Correct anything out of date. Rewrite the first sentence of your homepage so it says what you do and where. Those four cost nothing and fix a surprising amount. Genuinely, do them before spending anything.
When it is worth rebuilding instead
If the site is fundamentally sound and just neglected, tidy it up. Genuinely, that is cheaper and often enough.
Rebuilding makes sense when it is not responsive at all, when it is built on something you cannot edit or nobody supports, when it is so slow that the cause is structural, or when it looks a decade old. At that point you are polishing something that needs replacing.
An honest supplier will tell you which of those two situations you are in, even when the answer is the smaller job.
