Google's own research shows that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. On mobile networks — 4G, not fibre — that 3 seconds comes very fast.
To test yours: open Google PageSpeed Insights, paste your URL, and look at the Mobile score. Anything below 70 is a problem. Below 50 is actively losing you business.
The usual culprits are uncompressed images (a 4MB hero photo that should be 200KB), too many third-party scripts loading on every page, and cheap shared hosting that's slow to respond.
If your site runs on http:// instead of https://, Chrome and Firefox display a 'Not Secure' warning in the address bar. On mobile, it can show an interstitial warning before the page even loads.
For a business website, this is a trust killer. A visitor who sees 'Not Secure' before they've even read a word about you is already wondering if you're legitimate. Most will close the tab.
An SSL certificate is free with most hosts (Let's Encrypt). There's no excuse for this one in 2026. If your site doesn't have it, your developer either didn't finish the job or your hosting hasn't been maintained.
Covered in detail in the previous article, but worth repeating here: a broken contact form is one of the most common problems I find on small business websites, and the most expensive. Every submission that silently fails is a lead that went to your competitor instead.
Test it yourself today. Pull out your phone, fill in the form, submit it. Wait 5 minutes. If the email doesn't arrive, it's broken.
More than 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. If your website was built before 2018 or was built using a desktop-first tool, there's a good chance it looks wrong on a phone — text is tiny, buttons are too close together, images overflow the screen, menus don't work properly.
Your visitors are on their phones. If the site isn't designed for it, they leave.
To check: open your site on your phone right now. Can you read the text without zooming in? Can you tap the menu without hitting the wrong link? Does the page scroll smoothly? If not, you know what needs fixing.
A website with a blog post from 2020, prices that are clearly wrong, or a team page featuring people who no longer work there tells the visitor one thing: this business doesn't take its web presence seriously. If they don't care about this, what else don't they care about?
It also hurts your Google ranking. Search engines favour websites that are updated regularly. A stale site ranks lower and attracts fewer visitors over time.
You don't need to update your blog every week. But your services, pricing, and contact information should always be current. If it's been more than 12 months since you touched the site, it's overdue.
Go through this list one by one. Test your site yourself, from your phone, with fresh eyes. Note down everything that doesn't work or look right.
If you want a second opinion, I do free site audits. I'll run through all of the above plus a few more things — SEO basics, broken links, security headers — and send you a plain-English report of what's wrong and what it would cost to fix.
Ready to take action?