A website can look great and still lose customers every day because of problems nobody can see from the homepage. The form does not deliver, the page takes too long on a phone, or a link sends someone to an error page right when they were ready to call.
These are the seven technical mistakes I find most often when I look under the hood of a small business website. None of them shows up as an error message to the owner, which is why they last so long. Each one ends with a quick check you can run yourself.
1. Forms That Do Not Reach Anyone
This is the most expensive mistake on the list, because it loses people at the exact moment they decided to contact you. The form says thank you, the visitor waits, and nothing ever arrives on your end.
On one client site, a speed setting that combines scripts into a single file quietly broke the form’s spam protection. For about four months, every person who signed up for a free download was marked as spam, so none of them received what they asked for. The site looked fine the whole time. We found it when one of those people wrote in to ask where their download was.
The fix is to test your forms on a schedule, not just when you build them, and to check the spam folder in your form plugin as well as your inbox. Any time a plugin, speed setting, or email setting changes, test again.
Quick check: Submit every form on your site today, including newsletter and download forms. Did each one arrive where it should, and did the person on the other end get what was promised?
2. Slow Load Times on Phones
Many people looking for a local business are on a phone, often on a cellular connection. A page that takes too long to appear gets abandoned, and the visitor picks the next result instead.
The usual causes are oversized images, too many plugins loading scripts on every page, and slow hosting. Resize and compress images before you upload them, remove plugins you no longer use, and turn on caching. If the site is still slow after that, the hosting is often the problem. Why page speed matters goes into more detail.
One warning from experience: speed tools change how your site’s code loads, and that can break things like the form in mistake number 1. After you turn on any speed setting, test the parts of the site that make you money.
Quick check: Run your homepage through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not the desktop one.
3. Broken Links and Missing Images
A link that leads to an error page tells a visitor the site is not being looked after. A missing image leaves a gap or a broken icon right where a photo of your work should be. Neither one is a disaster on its own, but both chip away at trust when someone is deciding whether to call you.
Links break when pages get renamed or deleted, when another website you linked to goes away, and when images are removed from the media library. When you remove or rename a page, set up a redirect from the old address to the closest replacement so visitors and Google both land somewhere useful. A custom error page with links to your main services helps anyone who still slips through.
Quick check: In Google Search Console, open the Pages report and look for pages listed as “Not found (404).” Each one is a dead end someone may have hit.
4. A Layout That Fights the Phone
A site can load quickly on a phone and still be hard to use there. Text that needs pinching to read, buttons too close together to tap, and pop-ups that cover the whole screen all send people back to the search results.
Look at your site on an actual phone, not a shrunken desktop window. Make the phone number tap to call, give buttons room around them, and keep pop-ups small and easy to close. Google uses the mobile version of your site when it decides where you rank, so a site that only works well on a desktop is working against you twice.
Quick check: Hand your phone to someone who has never seen your site and ask them to request a quote. Watch where they get stuck.
5. Security Warnings
When a browser shows “Not Secure” next to your address, visitors notice, and very few will type their name and phone number into a form on that page. Most sites have a security certificate by now, but problems still show up: a certificate that expired, a single page that loads an image or script over an old insecure address, or a site that still answers on both the secure and insecure versions.
Security certificates are free from most hosts, so there is no reason to pay extra for a basic one. Make sure it renews automatically, and make sure every version of your address redirects to the secure one. Keeping WordPress, your theme, and your plugins updated matters just as much, since an outdated plugin is one of the most common ways small business sites get hacked. Six website maintenance tasks that protect your business covers the routine.
Quick check: Visit your contact page and click the icon to the left of the address in your browser. It should say the connection is secure, with no warnings.
6. A Site Some Visitors Cannot Use
Some of your customers use a screen reader, get around a page with only a keyboard, or have trouble reading light gray text on a white background. If your site does not work for them, they cannot become customers, and inaccessible websites can also expose a business to legal complaints.
The common problems are easy to fix once you know about them: images with no description (called alt text), text without enough contrast against its background, form fields with no labels, and buttons that only make sense if you can see them. Images are usually the biggest gap. On one site we worked on recently, 389 of the 631 images in the media library had no alt text at all.
Quick check: Run your homepage and contact page through the free WAVE accessibility checker and start with the errors it lists in red.
7. No Structured Data About Your Business
Structured data is code on your site that tells search engines the facts about your business in a format they can read directly: your business name, phone number, town, hours, and the area you serve. Visitors never see it.
It will not push you up in search by itself, and anyone who promises that is overselling it. What it does is remove guesswork, so Google is less likely to get your details wrong. Yoast SEO adds the basics automatically. A local business can go further with the LocalBusiness type Google documents, which is what we added to our own site this summer to spell out our town, phone number, and service area.
Quick check: Paste your homepage address into Google’s Rich Results Test and see what Google reads about your business.
Where to Start
If you only check one thing this week, test your forms. A slow page or a missing image costs you a little at a time. A form that does not deliver costs you every customer who uses it.
Technical problems are also only part of the picture. The 10 most common digital marketing mistakes covers the marketing side, with a quick check for each one.
If you would rather have someone else look under the hood, start with a free website audit. I will tell you what to fix first, in plain language, with no pitch attached.
This post was previously published and has been updated for content and relevancy.
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