17 website mistakes that quietly cost you work

Mistakes that lose the visitor

1. The phone number is an image

Or plain text that cannot be tapped. On a phone, a number that is not a tel: link means copying digits by hand, and a good number of people simply will not. Ten minutes to fix.

2. “Welcome to our website”

The most valuable line on your site, spent on nothing. Replace it with what you do and where. Five minutes.

3. A carousel at the top

Rotating hero sliders test badly almost everywhere they are measured. Visitors ignore them, they slow the page, and slides two and three are seen by nearly nobody. Pick your best message and let it sit still. Half an hour.

4. Stock photographs of people who do not work there

The smiling headset team fools nobody and actively signals that there is nothing real to show. A phone photograph of your actual van outperforms it. An afternoon with a phone.

5. No prices at all

Hiding prices generates more enquiries and worse ones. A starting figure filters out the people who were never going to buy, before they cost you an hour. Twenty minutes.

6. A contact form asking for nine things

Name, contact detail, message. Every extra required field loses you completions. Company size and budget range can be asked on the phone. Fifteen minutes.

7. The action is only at the bottom

People decide at different points in a page. Give them a way to act near the top, in the middle, and at the end. Half an hour.

Mistakes that lose the search

8. One page for eight services

It ranks for none of them. One page per service you actually want more of is the highest-value structural change most sites can make. A day, and worth it.

9. Every page titled the same thing

“Home | Smith & Sons” on all fourteen pages. The page title is the blue link in Google. Write a distinct one for each page, describing that page. An hour.

10. Never claiming the Google Business Profile

Free, and for most local businesses it drives more enquiries than the website. If you have never logged into it, that is the highest-return hour available to you. An hour, plus verification.

11. Industry words instead of customer words

Customers do not search for the thing you call it. Read Google’s autocomplete for your service and use those phrases. An hour of research.

12. Never asking for reviews

Most happy customers would leave one and simply never think of it. A text with a direct link, sent the day after the job, changes this entirely. Ten minutes to set up.

Mistakes that break things quietly

13. Nobody has tested the contact form since launch

Forms break silently: a changed email address, a spam filter, a plugin update. Test yours today, from a phone, using an outside email address, and check your junk folder. Then diarise it monthly. Five minutes.

14. Four-megabyte images

Straight from a camera or a stock site, uploaded as-is. The most common cause of a slow small business site and the easiest to fix. An hour for a whole site.

15. Plugins nobody has updated in two years

This is how sites get compromised — not by anyone targeting you, but by an automated scan finding a known hole. Somebody must own updates. Ongoing, or buy a care plan.

16. No backups, or backups nobody has tested

An untested backup is a hope. Restore one, once, and find out whether it works while it does not matter. An hour, once.

17. Content that is quietly out of date

Old prices, staff who left, a service you stopped offering, a 2023 copyright line in the footer. Each one tells a visitor the business may not be paying attention. An hour, twice a year.