The small business
website checklist.

Score your own site in ten minutes

Open your website on your phone, not your laptop. Most of your visitors are on a phone and the phone view is the honest one. Work down the list and count the ones you fail.

Nought to three failures is a good site. Four to eight is a normal small business site and worth fixing. Nine or more and you are better off rebuilding than patching.

Above the fold

• It says what you do in plain words, without scrolling. Not a slogan. What you do and for whom.
• It says where you are. A surprising number of local business sites never name their city.
• The phone number is tappable and near the top. On a phone it should dial when touched, not require copying.
• It loads in under three seconds on mobile data, not on your office wifi.
• Nothing covers the content. No popup, no cookie wall, no chat bubble over the phone number, before the visitor has read a word.

Reasons to believe you

• Real photos of real work. Stock photography of a generic team is worse than no photo.
• A human name somewhere. Anonymous businesses convert badly.
• Reviews or testimonials with a name attached. Unattributed praise reads as invented, because usually it is.
• Your service area, listed explicitly. People need to know if you come to them.
• Any licensing, insurance or accreditation that matters in your trade, stated plainly.

Making it easy to contact you

• One obvious next step per page. Not four competing buttons.
• A form that asks for as little as possible. Every extra field costs you enquiries. Name, contact, and what they need is usually enough.
• Hours, and whether you are open now.
• An actual reply. The best website in the world loses to the competitor who answers within an hour.

The invisible things that still matter

• HTTPS. If browsers say "Not secure", fix it today. It is free.
• A unique page title for every page, describing that page. Not your business name repeated nine times.
• Analytics installed, so decisions are not guesses.
• Someone whose job it is to update it. The single strongest predictor of whether a site is still good in two years.
• A Google Business Profile, claimed and verified. Separate from your website, free, and it is what puts you in the map.

What to do with your score

Most of these are cheap to fix individually and expensive to fix all at once, which is why sites tend to be either mostly right or mostly wrong.

If you failed nine or more, the useful question is not which to fix first. It is whether anyone is going to keep the site current afterwards, because a site that scores well today and is abandoned scores badly again within two years. That is the actual problem a redesign should be solving, and it is why we sell the maintenance rather than the build.