Most business websites look fine. They have a logo, photos, an offer and a contact form. And yet they bring in no calls and no bookings. The reason is rarely the design - it is usually the things you cannot see at first glance. Here are seven of them, in the order we most often end up fixing them.

1. Speed - before the customer reads anything

A customer who clicked a search result does not wait. If the page loads slowly, they go back and click a competitor - and you never even know they were there.

Google measures this with three Core Web Vitals:

  • LCP - how long until the main content appears. A good result is up to 2.5 seconds.
  • INP - how quickly the page responds to a tap. A good result is up to 200 milliseconds.
  • CLS - whether the layout "jumps" while loading. A good result is up to 0.1.

The culprits are always the same: heavy photos uploaded straight from the camera, a dozen plugins each loading its own scripts, and fonts fetched from third-party servers.

Test: enter your address at pagespeed.web.dev and look at the mobile score, not the desktop one. That is the one that counts.

2. Mobile comes first, not "as well"

For a local business - a restaurant, a salon, an accounting firm, a hotel - most visits come from a phone. Often on the move, on a weak signal, one-handed.

"Responsive" is not enough if the site was designed on a large monitor and the mobile version was squeezed in at the end. A good site is designed the other way round: small screen first, everything else after. In practice that means a phone number you can tap with a thumb, a menu that does not cover the content, and a form you can fill in without zooming.

3. Technical SEO - the foundation for ranking

Search optimisation is not magic, it is two stages. First the site has to be technically readable for a search engine; only then does work on content and links make sense. Without the foundation, every pound spent on SEO works less hard.

The foundation is:

  • one main heading per page and a logical structure below it,
  • a unique title and meta description for every page,
  • structured data - address, opening hours, services, questions and answers described in a machine-readable format,
  • a sitemap and a correct robots.txt file,
  • content available straight away in the HTML, not loaded later by scripts.

For a local business there is one more thing: consistency. The same details on the website, in your Google Business Profile and in maps.

4. AI visibility - the new channel few people think about

More and more people no longer type a query into a search engine - they ask an assistant: "recommend a Lebanese restaurant nearby" or "which accounting firm near me works with limited companies". The answer is built from what the model can read and understand.

Three things help here:

  1. An llms.txt file - a short description of the business, its offer and its key pages written specifically for language models.
  2. Structured data - the same data that helps with Google.
  3. Open access for AI crawlers and content in clean HTML. What a bot cannot read does not exist for AI.

To be honest: nobody can guarantee that an assistant will recommend your business. But a site that AI cannot read has no chance at all.

5. Security - the fewer moving parts, the better

The most common way a business website gets hacked has nothing to do with a hooded hacker. It is an automated script scanning the internet for a popular system with an out-of-date plugin. The more plugins, the more ways in - and the more updates someone has to keep on top of every week.

That is why a good business website is made of as few parts as possible. No login panel exposed to the whole world, no dozens of add-ons from different authors, and an encrypted connection with an SSL certificate as standard, not as an extra.

There is a pleasant side effect: fewer parts also means a faster site.

6. Cookies and GDPR done properly

A banner saying "this site uses cookies - OK" is not consent. Visitors need a real choice, and maps, analytics and other third-party scripts should load only after consent, not before.

This is not just a formality. A customer who sees a properly built banner and a readable privacy policy knows the business takes their data seriously. And a site that does not load everything up front is faster - points 1 and 6 help each other.

7. Freshness - an old price list is worse than none

Out-of-date opening hours, last year's Christmas offer, a price list from two increases ago. Each of these costs trust, and sometimes an awkward conversation at the till.

Websites go stale not because the owner does not care, but because changing them is a chore: you have to remember the password, find the right place in the admin panel and not break anything. That is why "you can edit it yourself" often matters less than how quickly a change actually reaches the site. With us it works like this: you email the content, and the change is live by the next day.

Check your website in 10 minutes

  1. Open it on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off. Count the seconds until you can start reading.
  2. Check the mobile score at pagespeed.web.dev.
  3. Search Google for your business name and town. See whether the details in the profile match the website.
  4. Ask an AI assistant about your business. See whether it knows what you do and where you are.
  5. Open the site in a private window and click "reject" on the cookie banner. If there is no such button - you have your answer.
  6. Find one out-of-date piece of information on the site. It usually takes less than a minute.

If the answer is unsatisfactory on three or more points, patching the existing site rarely pays off. It is usually cheaper and quicker to build it properly from scratch.

How long it takes

Less than you would think. We deliver a standard business website as a version for approval within 3 business days of confirming that we have the complete materials - a description of the site, photos, your logo and the basic details. If we are late, building the site is free. The details are in the delivery guarantee terms.

See how we build websites and our recent work or book a free conversation - we will tell you plainly what is worth fixing on your site and what to leave alone.