A bad website isn't always obvious. It doesn't crash. It doesn't look broken. It just sits there, gets visited, and sends people away without them contacting you. For most small businesses, the website is the first impression. If it's not working, you're losing leads you don't even know about.
Here are five signs your site is costing you more than it's making you.
1. You can't find it on Google
The test: Search your business type + your town. Do you appear? If not, neither do you to potential customers.
Being invisible for your own service in your own town is the most expensive problem on this list, because it means everything else on the site is academic. Nobody is judging your copy if they never reach it.
The usual causes are boring and fixable: no page dedicated to the service people actually search for, a homepage that tries to cover everything and therefore ranks for nothing, an unclaimed or half-finished Google Business Profile, or a site so new that nothing has been indexed yet. Search your business name too. If your own name doesn't bring you up, the problem is technical, not competitive.
2. It's slow, especially on a phone
The test: Open your homepage on mobile data, not your office wi-fi. Count the seconds until you can read something and tap something.
Three seconds is the point where a meaningful share of visitors give up. Most small business sites that feel slow are carrying the same handful of problems: photographs uploaded straight off a phone at 4MB each, a page builder loading scripts for features the site doesn't use, half a dozen tracking tags, and a font that blocks the text from rendering.
Speed is not vanity. It affects how many people see your offer at all, and Google uses page experience signals as a tiebreaker between otherwise similar results. The fix is usually unglamorous: compress the images, serve them in a modern format, and delete the plugins nobody has opened in a year.
3. Nobody can tell what you do in five seconds
The test: Show your homepage to someone outside your industry for five seconds, then take it away. Ask them what you do and who for.
This one catches out good businesses constantly. The homepage opens with a slogan, a stock photograph and a welcome message, and never plainly states the thing you actually sell. You know what you do, so the gap is invisible to you.
The fix is a headline that would make sense to a stranger: what you do, who you do it for, and where. "Bespoke websites for Kent businesses" beats "Crafting digital excellence" every single time. Save the personality for further down the page, once the reader knows they're in the right place.
4. There's no obvious next step
The test: On a phone, from your homepage, how many taps does it take to contact you? More than one is too many.
Plenty of sites explain the service well and then leave the visitor holding it. No button, no form above the fold, a phone number that isn't tappable, or a contact page that demands a company name and a budget range before someone has decided they want to talk to you.
Every page should end somewhere. A service page should offer a quote. A case study should offer a similar project. A blog post should offer the related service. Ask for the minimum you need to reply — usually a name, a way to reach them, and a sentence about the job.
5. It hasn't been touched in three years
The test: Find the oldest thing on your site. A 2021 copyright date, a service you dropped, a team member who left, an out-of-date price.
Visitors read staleness as risk. If the last news post is from three years ago, a reasonable person wonders whether the business is still trading, whether the prices are real, and whether anyone will answer the enquiry form.
You don't need to blog weekly. You do need the facts on the site to be true: current prices or price ranges, current services, current photos, working links and a contact route somebody actually monitors.
What to fix first
If more than one of these applies, resist the urge to rebuild everything at once. In practice the order that recovers the most enquiries fastest is:
- Findability. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile, and make sure your main service has its own indexed page.
- Clarity. Rewrite the first screen so a stranger knows what you sell in five seconds.
- The next step. Put a working, one-tap contact route on every page.
- Speed. Compress the images and strip what the site doesn't use.
- Freshness. Correct anything on the site that is no longer true.
None of that requires a new website. It requires someone to be honest about which of the five is actually costing you work — and, if a rebuild is the right answer, to make sure the new site fixes the cause rather than just changing the colours.
Not sure which of the five is costing you?
Send me the URL and I'll tell you straight — what's working, what isn't, and whether it needs fixing or rebuilding.
Ask for a quote →