Seven Small Business Website Mistakes That Cost You Customers
The mistakes that lose you customers aren't design opinions. They're missing phone numbers, buried hours, and a contact page nobody can find on a phone.
Most advice about website mistakes is really about taste. Somebody doesn't like your font! That's not what loses you business.
What loses you business is much more boring. Somebody really wanted to call you and couldn't find the number. Here are the seven we see most, and what to do about each one.
1. Your phone number is not on every page
People land on whatever page Google gives them. That's very often not your home page! If your number only lives on a contact page, you're really asking a ready customer to go looking.
Put it in the header on every page! On a phone it should be tappable, so a thumb starts the call.
2. Nobody can tell where you actually work
Plenty of sites never say what town they're in. That's a very real problem, because half of what somebody wants to know is whether you come to them.
Name your city and the areas around it in plain words. It really helps a person decide, and it happens to be what a local search is looking for too!
3. Your hours are missing or out of date
Wrong hours are worse than no hours! Somebody drives over, you're closed, and they don't come back.
If your hours change seasonally, just say so in a sentence. People are very forgiving about complexity! They're not at all forgiving about a locked door.
4. The site is hard to use on a phone
Most of your visitors are on a phone. If they have to pinch and zoom to read you, they leave!
Open your own site on your phone and try to call yourself. If that's awkward, that's the whole problem, and it's really worth fixing before anything else.
5. There is no clear next step
A lot of sites describe a business beautifully and never say what to do. Should I call? Fill something in? Just show up?
Pick one action and ask for it! One clear button beats five options, because five options is really a decision you handed back to the customer.
6. Stock photos of somebody else
A photo of a smiling stranger in an office tells a visitor nothing about you. Everybody has really learned to skip past those.
Three real photos on your phone beat thirty stock ones! Your work, your van, your actual shop. People are buying from a person, and they really want to see the person.
7. Nothing on the page says you can be trusted
Strangers arrive with no reason to believe you. Reviews, how long you've been going, licences, a guarantee. Any of it really helps!
You don't need many. Two or three specific ones do more than a wall of vague praise, and they're great to have on the page where you ask for the call.
The honest summary
None of this is design! It's just answering the questions a customer already has, in the order they ask them.
If your site is missing most of these, rebuilding it is often faster than patching it. That's what Brennan Builds does. You pick a template, tell us about the business, and your preview lands in 3–7 business days.