When we call a website good enough, some people hear “cheap.” We mean a site that does the jobs a customer shows up for, quickly, on whatever device they’re holding. This is the small business website checklist we build against.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
Why people visit your site
Most visitors want a few plain answers. Do you sell what they need? Where are you, and are you open right now? How do they reach you?
They’re usually on a phone, often standing somewhere, and they won’t wait long before they try the next search result. A site that answers those questions fast is doing its job.
The small business website checklist
- Your hours appear once, and they’re right
- Your phone number dials when someone taps it
- Your address opens in a map app
- Pages load in a few seconds on a phone
- Text reads without zooming, and buttons are big enough for a thumb
- Every link goes somewhere real
- Photos and the footer year look like they’re from this decade
- Someone using a screen reader can get through the main pages
- You can change your hours without calling anyone
None of these is hard, and they still go wrong all the time. On a dispensary site we rebuilt this year, the old site listed hours in two places and the two didn’t match. Its Instagram link went nowhere, and the footer still said 2014 to 2018.
How to check your own site
Take your phone and pull up your site the way a customer would, from a search. Then go down the list. Tap the phone number, tap the address, and tap every button on the home page.
For speed, run your address through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights. It tests your site on a simulated phone connection and tells you what’s slowing it down. You don’t need a perfect score, but if the mobile result comes back slow, pay attention to that.
Extras you can skip
These can look lovely, and they’re where a lot of design hours go:
- Animations that play as you scroll
- A video playing behind the home page
- A custom illustration set
- Pages of copy that nobody asked for
They’re also the parts most likely to slow down a phone or break in an update. If your brand lives in that kind of detail, that’s where a $200-an-hour designer earns their rate. Most small businesses do better spending that money elsewhere.
Start with the list
Fix what you can yourself. Hours, photos and dead links are often things you can change in an afternoon.
If more than a few items fail, or you can’t change your own hours, the site probably needs rebuilding, whether you do it yourself with ChatGPT or hire someone. That’s the work our websites built with AI are for.