Small Business
Most of these problems are invisible to you, but your customers see them every day.
Most business owners check their website the same way they check their car. Occasionally, when something obviously breaks. The problem is a broken website doesn't always look broken. On the sites I look after I see it all the time: a site looks perfectly fine on your computer whilst driving away every customer who finds it on their phone.
Here are the five signs I check first when someone asks me why their website isn't bringing in work. Most of them take less than an hour to fix.
People will wait about three seconds for a page to load. After that they're gone, back to Google, clicking on your competitor. And they won't come back. They won't think "that site was slow, I'll try again later." They just move on.
Go to Google PageSpeed Insights right now. Type in your website address. If you score below 50 on mobile, you have a real problem. Below 70 and you're losing people every single day. The most common causes I find are easy to fix: images that haven't been compressed, plugins that load code the page doesn't need, or hosting that's just too cheap.
This one is embarrassingly common, and I've seen it more often than any of the other four. A business owner set up a contact form years ago, something change with the hosting or email setup, and the form quietly stopped delivering messages. The owner has no idea. The customer thinks they've sent an enquiry. Nobody calls back.
Test your own form right now. Fill it in with your personal email address. See if it arrives. Check your spam folder too. Whilst you're at it, check who that form sends to. If it's an email address that nobody monitors, or one buried under 4,000 unread messages, that's the same as having no form at all.
If your website still runs on HTTP instead of HTTPS, Chrome shows visitors a "Not Secure" warning in the address bar. Even if you're just a landscaper or a bookkeeper with nothing sensitive on the site, that warning kills trust on the spot. People have been trained to look for the padlock. If it's not there, they leave.
An SSL certificate costs almost nothing, often it's free with your hosting. If you don't have HTTPS set up, that's one phone call to fix, and it's usually the first thing I sort out.
Look at your website footer. Does it say 2022? Look at your "About" page. Is it still talking about a service you stopped offering, or a staff member who left? Outdated content tells visitors two things: you're not paying attention, and you might not even still be in business. Google thinks the same way. It notices when a site hasn't been touched in years and ranks it accordingly.
You don't need to rewrite the whole site. My advice: update the year. Fix anything that's factually wrong. Add one new page or post about something you're doing now. Even small signs of activity make a difference.
This one's easy to check. Open your phone (not your computer, your phone) and search for your business type and your suburb. "Accountant Redcliffe." "Café Samford." "Electrician Narangba." See who comes up. If you're not on the first page, most people will never find you. And if a competitor shows up where you should be, every search they do is a potential customer going to someone else. It's the first search I run when I take on a new site.
None of these five issues require a complete rebuild. They're maintenance problems, the digital equivalent of fixing a leaking tap or replacing a blown bulb. They get neglected because they're not flashy and nobody sends you a bill when a customer bounces off your slow website. In my experience that's exactly why they sit there for years.
Every day your contact form doesn't deliver, every person who sees the "Not Secure" warning and leaves, every potential customer who gives up waiting for your page to load. That's real business walking out the door. Start with the check. See how many of the five signs apply to you. Then fix them one at a time.
I'll check your website against all five signs (speed, security, contact forms, content and search visibility) and give you a straight answer on what needs fixing.
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