Most of the advice out there is written for people who build websites, not for people who run a shop and barely think about theirs. So here’s the short version, in plain words, of what actually matters.
If you run a business around here, your website is probably not the thing you worry about most. You worry about staff, about the slow months, about the thing that broke this morning. The website sits in a corner doing whatever it does, and you mostly hope it’s fine.
I want to give you a way to tell whether it’s fine. Not a sales pitch and not a lecture about “digital presence.” Just the handful of things a small local website actually needs to do its job, and how you can check each one yourself in a few minutes. If your site does these things, you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, at least you’ll know what to ask for.
I’ve been building for the web since 1996 and working in WordPress since 2007, and the same questions come up from local owners over and over. These are the answers.
It has to load fast on a phone
Here’s the part that surprises people. Almost nobody finds a local business by sitting at a desk with a laptop. They’re standing on the sidewalk in Ridgeway, or parked outside, phone in hand, deciding whether to walk in. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load on that phone, a good chunk of those people are gone before they ever see it.
Speed is the thing owners notice least and customers notice most, because you almost never look at your own site on a phone with a weak signal. Your customer does, all the time.
Check it yourself. Open your site on your phone, on cell data, not your shop’s wifi. Count the seconds until you can actually read it and tap something. If it feels slow to you, it feels worse to a stranger who has three other options. If you ever want the technical version of why this happens, I keep a longer post on real WordPress performance around for the curious, though you don’t need it to do the phone test.
The phone number has to actually call when you tap it
This one is small and it matters more than almost anything else. On a phone, your phone number should be tappable, so that touching it starts a call. No copying, no writing it down, no squinting. Tap, ring.
A lot of older sites have the number sitting there as plain text. It looks fine. But on a phone you tap it and nothing happens, and the person trying to reach you gives up. The whole point of a local website is to get someone to walk in or call. If the call part is broken, the rest barely counts.
While you’re there, check the boring facts. Is the address right? Are the hours right, including the holiday ones you changed last year and forgot about? Nothing loses trust faster than driving to a closed shop the site said was open.
You have to show up on Google for the local search
When someone searches for what you do near here, the thing that usually shows up first is not your website at all. It’s your Google Business Profile, the little box on the right with your map pin, hours, photos, and reviews. That box is your real front door now. The website is the room behind it.
So the two have to agree. Same name, same address, same phone, same hours, in both places. If Google thinks you close at five and your website says six, Google often wins the argument in the customer’s head, and you’ve lost a visit you never knew about.
If you do one thing after reading this, claim and fill in that Google profile. It’s free, it’s the front door, and most of the local owners I talk to have one they set up years ago and never looked at again.
You have to be able to change it yourself
A website is not a poster you print once. Hours change, prices change, you run a special, you hire someone, you close for a week in February. If every one of those changes means emailing whoever built the site and waiting, you stop making the changes. Then the site slowly drifts out of date, and an out-of-date site is worse than no site, because it actively tells people the wrong thing.
You don’t need to become a web person. But you should be able to log in and fix your hours or swap a photo without paying for the privilege every time. Think of it like the lights in your shop. You don’t call an electrician to flip a switch. Changing your own hours should feel about that easy.
It has to say what you do in the first few seconds
Open your own homepage and pretend you’ve never heard of your business. In the first few seconds, can a stranger tell what you do? Can they see where you are and how to reach you? That’s the whole job of the top of the page.
A surprising number of sites open with a big pretty photo and a vague phrase, and you have to scroll and hunt to learn it’s a bakery in Fort Erie. The customer won’t hunt. Tell them plainly, up top, what you are and how to get to you. A place like Wild Daisies should say “flowers, here, this is how you reach us” before it says anything clever.
Fix it or rebuild it? Usually fix.
Owners often assume that if the site is old or a bit tired, the only answer is to tear it down and start over. Most of the time, that’s not true. A site that’s slow, or hard to update, or missing the click-to-call, usually has those problems for specific reasons that can be repaired without a full rebuild. The bones are often fine. It’s the wiring that needs attention.
I mention this because “you need a whole new website” is an expensive sentence, and it isn’t usually the honest one. Before anyone tells you to start from scratch, it’s worth asking what’s actually broken and whether it can simply be fixed. Often it can, for far less.
The short version
If your site loads fast on a phone, calls when someone taps the number, has hours that match your Google profile, lets you make your own changes, and says plainly what you do, it’s doing its job. Most local sites are missing one or two of those, and most of the time they can be fixed rather than rebuilt. If you like working from a checklist, I keep a fuller site audit list too, though it goes deeper than most owners need.
That’s the whole guide. No catch. If you go through this list and get stuck on one of them, you’re welcome to send me a note and I’ll point you in the right direction. I’m just down the road in Fort Erie, and I’d rather you have a site that works than wonder about it.
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