The small business website checklist.
Twenty things worth checking on your own site. Most take a minute. None of them require knowing anything technical, and you can do the whole list on your phone in an afternoon.
If you get through it and everything checks out, you're in better shape than most. If a few of them sting, those are the ones to start with.
01
Can a stranger tell what you do?
Your homepage says what you do in the first screenful.
In the words a customer would use, not the words your industry uses.
Your town or service area is visible without scrolling.
People checking you out on a phone want to know you're nearby before anything else.
There is one obvious next step on every page.
Call, book, ask a question. If a page offers five options, most people take none.
Someone outside your business has read it.
You are too close to it. Hand your phone to a friend and watch where they get stuck.
02
Can they actually reach you?
Your phone number is tappable on a phone.
Tap it yourself. If it doesn't start a call, it's just decoration.
Your address opens a map.
Same test. Tap it and see whether directions come up.
Your hours are current, holidays included.
Wrong hours send people to a locked door, and that is the one mistake they tell other people about.
Your contact form goes somewhere a human checks.
Submit it right now from your own phone and see if anything arrives. This one fails more often than any other item on this list.
03
Does it hold up on a phone?
It loads in a few seconds on cell data.
Turn off wifi and try it. Most people who leave a slow site never come back to it.
Nothing has to be pinched or zoomed to read.
If you're spreading two fingers to see the text, so is everyone else.
Buttons are big enough to hit with a thumb.
Standing up, one hand, walking. That's how people actually use it.
There is no popup covering the screen on arrival.
On a small screen a popup is the whole page, and the close button is usually too small to find.
04
Can people find you in the first place?
Your Google Business Profile is claimed and current.
Hours, photos, services, and the category. For a local business this does more work than the website does.
Your name, address, and phone match everywhere online.
Google, Facebook, Yelp, old directory listings. Suite numbers and abbreviations count.
Every page has a title that says something specific.
That's the blue line in search results. "Home" tells nobody anything.
There's a padlock in the address bar.
No padlock means some browsers warn people away before they see your site at all.
05
Are you the one in control?
Your domain is registered in an account you can log into.
Not your nephew's account, not a former employee's. Check today rather than the week it expires.
You can change your own hours and services.
If updating a phone number means emailing somebody and waiting, that's a problem you'll feel every time.
Something tells you when a form comes in.
A text or an email the moment it lands, not a dashboard you remember to open on Thursday.
You can tell where your last five customers came from.
If the answer is a shrug, you're guessing about where your effort should go.
Stuck on a few of them?
That's normal, and most of them are smaller fixes than they look. Bring me the ones that gave you trouble and I'll tell you which are worth doing yourself and which are worth a hand.
Grooms · (252) 725-1060 · rickie@grooms.dev