Websites rarely fail loudly. Nobody emails to say "I was going to call, but your site took nine seconds to load so I called someone else." They just leave, and you never find out.
That's what makes this worth twenty minutes. Below are the ten things we find most often when we audit a small business's web presence, in rough order of how much money they quietly cost. Each one comes with a test you can run yourself.
Fair warning: most businesses fail at least three of these. That's normal, and none of it means your business is bad. It usually means nobody was ever accountable for the website after the day it launched.
1. It takes more than three seconds to load on a phone
Most people abandon a site somewhere between three and five seconds. On a phone, on cellular data, in a car park — which is where a lot of local searching actually happens — a heavy site can take eight or more. Every second you shave puts money back.
The test: put your phone on cellular, turn WiFi off, and load your homepage. Count out loud. If you get past "three" before you can read anything, you have a problem. For a number rather than a feeling, run your URL through Google PageSpeed Insights — it's free and takes a minute. Look at the mobile score, not desktop. Under 50 is a fire.
Usually caused by: enormous uncompressed photos straight off a phone, a page builder loading a dozen scripts you don't use, and cheap hosting. All fixable.
2. Your phone number isn't tap-to-call
If your number is typed as plain text — or worse, sitting inside an image — a customer on a phone has to memorise it, leave your site, and dial manually. A large share of them simply won't. This is the cheapest fix on this list and one of the most commonly broken things we find.
The test: open your site on your phone and tap your own number. If the dialler doesn't open, you're losing calls. While you're there, tap your address and see if it opens maps.
3. You don't appear in the map results
Search for what you do plus your city. Google shows three businesses on a map before a single website link. Getting into that block is decided mostly by your Google Business Profile and your reviews — not your website. It's free, and most small businesses have never finished setting one up.
The test: search "[your service] [your city]" on your phone, logged out or in incognito so it isn't personalised to you. Are you in the three? Now search your business name — is the panel on the right complete, with real photos, services, hours, and recent posts? Or is it a name, a phone number, and a grey blank?
4. Your newest review is from two years ago
Recency counts more than people expect. A business with eighty reviews arriving steadily tends to outrank one with two hundred that stopped in 2023. Customers notice the dates too — a wall of five stars that all end abruptly reads as a business that used to be good.
The test: look at your review dates, not your star average. When did the last one land? If you can't remember the last time you asked for one, that's your answer.
Also check: have you replied to them? All of them, including the bad one? An unanswered one-star is a customer's last impression of how you handle problems.
5. A stranger can't tell what you do in five seconds
Someone lands on your homepage cold. In five seconds they need three things: what you do, where you do it, and what to do next. If your hero says something like "Excellence. Delivered." over a stock photo of a handshake, you've spent your five seconds saying nothing.
The test: show your homepage to someone who doesn't know your business — a neighbour, your teenager. Five seconds, then take it away. Ask them what you do and where. If they hesitate, your competitor with the boring headline that just says "Roof repair in Charlotte, same-week appointments" is beating you.
6. Your contact form doesn't work and you don't know it
Forms break silently. A plugin updates, a mail setting changes, an address goes stale — and submissions vanish into nothing. The customer sees "thank you" and waits for a call that never comes. They don't email again. They call someone else, and they tell people you never got back to them.
The test: fill in your own form right now with a real message. Did the email arrive? Check your spam folder too — that counts as broken, because it's where your leads have been living.
Then do it again next month. We've walked into businesses that lost six months of enquiries this way, and the owner's honest read was that the market had gone quiet.
7. There's no price anywhere, not even a range
"Contact us for a quote" is a request for the customer to do work before they know if you're in their universe. Some will. Most compare you to whoever published a number and feels less like a negotiation. Publishing a range also filters out the enquiries you were never going to win — that's a feature.
The test: could a stranger tell, in under a minute, roughly what you cost? Not exactly — roughly. "Most kitchens run $8,000–$15,000" or "call-out is $89, credited against the work" is enough.
The usual objection: "every job is different." True, and it doesn't matter. A range plus a sentence about what moves it beats silence every time. It's why our own prices are on our website.
8. The site looks abandoned
Customers read staleness as risk. A copyright line ending in 2019, holiday hours from two Christmases ago, a "coming soon" page that never came, a blog with one post from the year you launched. None of it says "small business." It says "are these people still trading?"
The test: scroll to your footer. What year does it say? Now check your hours, your team page, and any "latest news" section. Anything more than a year stale is doing damage.
9. A chunk of your customers can't use it
Low-contrast grey text, images with no alt text, forms that don't work with a keyboard, video with no captions. Customers who can't use your site don't complain — they buy from someone whose site they can use. And inaccessible sites draw demand letters: thousands are sent to US small businesses every year, often found by firms scanning sites in bulk.
The test: try to use your site with the keyboard only — Tab, Tab, Tab. Can you reach your phone number and submit your form without touching a mouse? Now zoom the page to 200%. Does the layout survive? Free scanners like WAVE catch roughly a third of the issues in a few seconds.
Almost no designer at the small-business price point will mention this to you, which is precisely why it's still worth checking. We publish our own accessibility commitment because we'd look silly selling it otherwise.
10. AI assistants don't know you exist
A fast-growing share of people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation instead of searching. Those tools lean on the same public signals as Google: your profile, your reviews, and how readable your site's structure is. If they've never heard of you, you're not in the running — and you'll never see it in your analytics.
The test: ask one. "Who are the best [your service] in [your city]?" Are you named? Is what it says about you even correct? Try it in two different assistants — the answers vary more than you'd think.
So you failed a few. Now what?
Fix them in this order, because it's roughly the order of return on your time:
- Your Google Business Profile (#3) — free, an afternoon, biggest single lever
- Test your form (#6) — five minutes, and it might be costing you everything
- Tap-to-call (#2) — one line of code
- Ask for reviews (#4) — start today, compounds forever
- Publish a price range (#7) — free, and filters your enquiries
- Speed (#1) — usually just compressing your images
- Everything else
Notice that the top five cost nothing but attention. You don't need a new website to fix most of this list — and if someone's answer to every one of these is "you need a rebuild," be suspicious.
Or let us run it for you
Everything above is what we check anyway, so we may as well tell you how to do it yourself. If you'd rather not, our free visibility check does all ten and sends you a plain-English scorecard within 48 hours — a real person looking at your site and your Google presence, not an automated PDF. If it turns out you don't need us yet, we'll say so.