Most small business websites are not bad because of how they look. They are bad because they make the visitor work. Someone lands on the page with a simple question – are you open, what do you charge, how do I book – and the site makes them hunt for it.
Fix these five things and you will be ahead of most of your competitors.
1. Built for a phone first
Around three quarters of visits to a local business website come from a mobile. Not a tablet on the couch – a phone, one-handed, often standing in the street or sitting in a car.
That changes what "designed well" means. Text has to be readable without pinching. Buttons need to be big enough for a thumb. Phone numbers must be tap-to-call. Menus should not require precision. And whatever matters most has to be near the top, because scrolling on a phone is slow.
The test is simple: open your own site on your phone, and try to find your opening hours in under five seconds. If you can't, neither can your customers.
2. It has to load fast
People leave slow sites. Not after thirty seconds – after three. And when they leave without doing anything, search engines take note, which drags your ranking down as well.
The usual culprits are easy to identify:
- Photos uploaded straight off a camera or phone at full size. A 6 MB hero image should be a 200 KB one.
- A pile of plugins each loading their own code.
- Slideshows and video backgrounds that load before the content.
- Cheap shared hosting.
Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights. It is free, and it tells you exactly which of the above is hurting you.
3. Contact details you cannot miss
This sounds obvious and it is broken constantly. Your phone number should be visible in the header on every single page, tappable on mobile. Your email, address (if customers visit), and opening hours should be in the footer of every page and on a contact page of their own.
A contact form is fine as an extra, but never as the only option. Plenty of people simply will not fill in a form – they want to ring. And if you do have a form, test it every few months. Broken forms that silently swallow enquiries are far more common than anyone likes to admit.
Include a map if you have a shopfront. Include your service areas if you travel to customers.
4. Proof that other people trust you
A visitor who has never heard of you is trying to decide whether you are any good. Nothing you say about yourself settles that – but other customers can.
- Google reviews on the page. Real names, real wording, star rating shown, ideally pulled through automatically so they stay current.
- Photos of your actual work. Not stock images. Your shop, your team, your jobs.
- Faces and names. People buy from people, particularly for services.
- Logos of clients you work with, if you are business-to-business.
- Video testimonials. A thirty-second clip of a happy customer beats a page of copy.
Put this high on the page – right after the top section, before you launch into your list of services.
5. One obvious thing to do next
Every page should have a clear next step. Call us. Book a time. Get a quote. Order online. One primary action, repeated as the visitor scrolls, in a button that looks like a button.
Where sites go wrong is offering five equal options – call, email, form, chat, newsletter, social – and leaving the visitor to choose. Pick the action you most want and make it the loudest thing on the page.
The short version
Fast on a phone, easy to contact, obviously trustworthy, one clear next step. Nothing here is exotic, and none of it needs a big budget – it needs someone to care about the detail.
Bold Media Group builds websites for small businesses across Australia, with unlimited updates so the site never goes stale. If you would like an honest opinion on how yours measures up against these five, send us the link and we will take a look.