Your website is your hardest-working salesperson. Is it doing the job?

If you hired a salesperson who didn’t answer the phone, gave vague pricing, and made customers wait three minutes before saying hello, you’d fire them by the end of the week. Yet most small business owners run a website that does exactly that, every day, and never check.

A website is the only employee that works every minute of the year. It’s also the only one nobody manages. That’s why so many of them are quietly losing you business.

How to tell if your website is working

There are three numbers worth looking at. You can find them all in Google Analytics or your hosting dashboard, for free.

Bounce rate

What percentage of visitors leave after one page. A small business homepage above 70% means most people are arriving, looking, and leaving. The fix is usually the first screen. They couldn’t tell what you do or whether you serve their town.

Average session duration

How long visitors stay. Under 30 seconds means the content isn’t holding them. Either it’s not what they expected from the search result, or it’s too dense to scan.

Pages per session

How deep visitors go. Below 1.5 means they’re not exploring. Either there’s nothing inviting them to click further, or your navigation is hiding it.

If two of those three are bad, your site is the problem, not your traffic.

The fixes that move the numbers fastest

After looking at a couple of hundred small business sites this year, the same handful of things show up over and over.

Speed

Pages that take longer than three seconds to load lose visitors before the content even appears. Google’s research is consistent on this: bounce probability rises 32% as load time goes from one second to three. Test yours on PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab. If you score under 50, the speed is your single biggest leak.

Mobile layout

Visit your own site on your phone, in your kitchen, on mobile data with Wi-Fi off. If the menu is broken, the form doesn’t fit, or the buttons are too small to tap, fix that before you fix anything else. Most of your visitors are on phones.

One action per page

Each page should make it obvious what to do next. On a services page that’s “Get a quote”. On a blog post it’s “See pricing” or “Read next post”. If a visitor reaches the bottom and there’s nothing to click, they leave.

Trust signals near the top

A real photo of you (not a stock person in a hard hat), your town, your number of years in business, and one testimonial with a first name attached. People don’t buy from strangers; help them stop being strangers.

Working contact

A clickable phone number, a working form, an email link. Test your form by filling it out and sending it to yourself. You’d be amazed how many quote forms have been silently broken for months.

What good looks like

A small business website that’s earning its keep loads in under three seconds on a phone, tells visitors who you are and what you do in the first eight seconds, has one obvious next step on every page, and works on the device most visitors are actually using.

Nothing on that list requires a five-figure budget. Most of it can be done by anyone who’s comfortable editing their own site. The hard part isn’t the work; it’s noticing the problem in the first place.

If you’d rather hand it to someone, our Fresh Face package fixes the lot for $500, delivered in five days. We start with the speed, then the mobile layout, then the messaging.

---

Further reading: How Website Design Can Improve or Hurt Your Sales Fast. The article that prompted this one.