The worst red flags on a small business website are the ones a customer runs into, not the ones they look at. A booking or quote form that never sends, a phone number that’s wrong or missing, links that go nowhere, a page that takes forever on a phone, and nothing that says which towns you serve. Any one of them can lose you a customer who was ready to call.
Does your booking or quote form actually work?
Fill it out yourself and see if the email shows up, because a form can look perfect and send nothing.
A hair studio owner showed me her website this summer. It was pretty, and the booking form was broken. She told me it had cost her clients and caused negative reviews, and the developer who built it wasn’t answering her. A smart-home installer had a site built with an AI tool, and the quote form was a leftover template form that didn’t go anywhere, with the template’s note still showing on the page. His logo image was broken too, so all you saw was the text where the picture should be.
Someone lands on your site and decides pretty quickly whether you’re a real business. A form that goes nowhere means they decided yes and you never found out.
Can a customer call you straight from their phone?
For one contractor I work with, 35 of the 56 people who looked at their Google profile in a month were on a phone. So the number has to be on the page, and it has to work when they tap it.
That same contractor’s old site was only a couple of years old and built by a professional company, and the phone number on it was wrong. Nobody had noticed, including the company they were paying to look after it. I wrote more about that site in should I build my own website or hire someone.
While you’re down at the bottom of the page, tap the little Facebook and Instagram icons too. A cleaning company’s site I opened had them pointing at Wix’s own accounts and not hers. A general contractor’s site had three that went to accounts that weren’t active anymore.
How long does your website take to load on a phone?
Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights where you paste in your web address and it scores your site out of 100 for phones. The installer’s site took 11.5 seconds for the main part of the page to show up. That’s a long time to look at a blank screen when the next company is one tap away.
The hair studio’s site wasn’t really built for phones at all, and it scored 60. Mine scored 85 when I tested it in September. I don’t chase 100, I’d rather it stay above 85 and spend the time on the things customers actually tap.
Does your website say where you work?
The general contractor’s site was built in 2024, and it was clean and worked on a phone. But there was no service area anywhere on it, so a person in Acton or Erin couldn’t tell if they’d come out, and Google couldn’t either.
Your website and your Google Business Profile should say the same things, so the same name, the same phone number, the same hours and the same towns. Google checks one against the other. If your profile isn’t showing up, the site is part of it, and I wrote about the rest in why your Google Business Profile isn’t showing up. If you’re thinking about ads, fix these first, because an ad just sends more people to the same broken form (should I run ads before my website and Google profile are fixed).
If a friend asked me to check one thing first, I’d tell them to make sure the phone number is right everywhere on the site. I’ve seen more than one site with different numbers on different pages, and some of them were just wrong.
Tonight, grab your phone and go through your own site like a stranger in Milton would. Tap the number, send yourself the form, and click every link and icon. If you’d like me to do it with you, the Free Online Audit is where I look you up the way a customer would and tell you what to fix first. You can also see how I do website design in Georgetown and Halton Hills.