10 Website Fixes Your Small Business Could Make This Month
Ten genuinely achievable website improvements for small businesses, from tappable phone numbers to Google Business Profiles, with honest notes on effort and impact.
“Improving the website” sounds like a project. In practice, for a small business, it usually means this: a handful of small changes that each remove one reason someone didn’t get in touch. Here are ten that are realistic within a month, most within an hour, roughly ordered by effort.
1. Make your phone number tappable
If your number is text or, worse, part of an image, a visitor on a phone has to memorise it and switch apps. Make it a proper tel: link and put it in the header on every page.
Effort: minutes. Impact: immediate, especially for trades and services.
2. Fix your three biggest images
Find the largest images on your homepage, resize them to the dimensions they actually display at, and export as WebP. Most small business homepages get noticeably faster from this one change alone.
Effort: an hour. Impact: high.
3. Rewrite your first sentence
Open your homepage and read the first thing a stranger sees. Does it say what you do and who for? “Welcome to our website” and “Delivering excellence since 2004” both fail. “Gas Safe boiler repairs across Stockport, usually same day” works.
Effort: twenty minutes of thinking. Impact: high.
4. Complete your Google Business Profile
Categories, services, hours, description, photos, service areas. All of it. For local businesses this frequently produces more enquiries than the website itself, and it’s free.
Effort: an hour. Impact: very high locally.
5. Shorten your contact form
Every field costs you submissions. Name, email, message. If you genuinely need a phone number, add it, but drop “How did you hear about us?” and the dropdown of enquiry types.
Effort: thirty minutes. Impact: high.
6. Test that the form actually works
Send yourself a test submission today. Then check the spam folder. A remarkable number of small business contact forms have quietly stopped delivering, and nobody notices for months.
Effort: five minutes. Impact: occasionally enormous.
7. Add real photos of real work
Stock photography persuades nobody. Ten honest photos of jobs you’ve completed, with a line of context each, do more than a redesign. A phone camera is fine.
Effort: ongoing. Impact: high.
8. Publish your prices, or a range
You’ll lose enquiries you’d have declined anyway, and win ones from people who were quietly worried you’d be out of reach. “From £X” or “typically £X–£Y” is enough.
Effort: an afternoon’s decision-making. Impact: improves enquiry quality sharply.
9. Ask five customers for a Google review
Not a testimonial for your site, a Google review. They affect your map rankings and they’re what people read before calling. Ask by text, with the direct link, straight after a job goes well.
Effort: ten minutes a week. Impact: compounding.
10. Delete a page
Most small business sites carry pages nobody reads and nobody has updated: an empty blog, a “News” section that stops in 2019, a services page for something you no longer offer. Removing them makes the useful pages easier to find, and stops a visitor concluding you’ve gone quiet.
Effort: an hour. Impact: modest, but it’s free.
Doing them in the right order
If you only do three: fix the phone number, complete the Google Business Profile, and test the contact form. Those three take an afternoon and they’re the ones most likely to be actively losing you work right now.
None of this requires a rebuild, a developer, or a monthly retainer. If you’d like a prioritised list for your specific site, the free website review does exactly that, and plenty of people take it and do the work themselves.