12 mistakes small businesses make on their websites

Look at enough small business websites and you start seeing a pattern. It is rarely anything exotic. It is the same dozen oversights, site after site. The good news is that almost every one of them takes under an hour to fix.

1. The phone number is not clickable

A phone number written as plain text forces a mobile visitor to memorise or copy it. Use <a href="tel:+441234567890"> instead. On sites where we have added this, calls from mobile devices went up 30-40% simply because one step disappeared.

2. An address with no map

If you have a physical location, a line of text is not enough. Embed a map or at least link to directions. Nobody wants to retype your address into their phone.

3. Opening hours buried on the contact page

Hours are one of the three most-wanted pieces of information on a local business site, alongside the phone number and the address. Put them in the footer of every page.

4. 4 MB photos straight from a phone

A photo from a modern phone is 3000-4000 px wide and weighs 3-5 MB. What your site needs is 1600 px and under 200 KB. The difference is dramatic: a page with ten uncompressed images easily exceeds 20 MB and takes 15 seconds to load on mobile data.

5. No HTTPS

Chrome labels sites without an SSL certificate as "Not secure". Certificates are free today and included with any serious hosting plan — in our plans SSL is issued and renewed automatically.

6. A contact form that goes nowhere

Surprisingly common. The form appears to work, shows a "Thank you" message, and the email never arrives — usually because it is sent from an address that does not belong to the domain and lands in spam. Test your form once a month from an outside address.

7. Copy written about the company, not the customer

"Founded in 2011 and committed to quality" tells a visitor nothing. "We repair washing machines in Manchester, same-day callout, £45 diagnostic" is the sentence that makes someone pick up the phone.

8. Outdated prices, or "price on request" everywhere

If you can give even a rough range, give it. A visitor who finds no price anchor usually goes to the competitor who provided one.

9. Never tested on an actual phone

Over 70% of local business traffic is mobile. Open your own site on your phone and try to do the thing you want visitors to do — call, fill in the form, find a price. Anything awkward, fix it today.

10. No Google Business Profile linked to the site

For a local business, the Business Profile often generates more calls than the website itself. Fill it in completely and link it to your site.

11. No analytics at all

If you do not measure, you guess. Analytics takes ten minutes to install, and a month later you know which pages people actually read.

12. Hosting that holds everything else back

You can compress images and trim copy all you like — if the server takes 1.5 seconds to respond, the site is slow. A TTFB under 200 ms is a realistic target and depends mostly on your host. We covered how infrastructure affects search performance on our SEO hosting page.

Where to start

If you only have one afternoon: make the phone clickable, compress the images, confirm the form really sends mail, and open the site on a phone. Those four changes pay back the fastest.