Nobody calls to tell you your website is broken.

They just leave. They hit your site, something does not work or does not load or does not answer the question they came with, and they go back to the search results and click the next business. You never hear about it. Your phone just rings a little less than it should.

That is what makes this hard to notice. A bad website does not fail loudly. It leaks.

Here are the leaks I see most often, and most of them take an afternoon to fix.

1. Nobody can contact you without picking up the phone.

A surprising number of small business sites have no form on them anywhere. Just a phone number and maybe an email address in the footer.

People who already know you will call. People who found you twenty seconds ago will not. They will fill out a form at nine at night because that is when they had a minute to think about it. If there is no form, that person is gone.

2. It takes too long to load on a phone.

Pull your site up on your phone, on cell service, not wifi. Count the seconds.

If you get past four or five, you have a problem. Most of your visitors are mobile, and the usual culprit is photos that were uploaded straight from a camera without being resized. A single image can be four megabytes when it needed to be two hundred kilobytes.

3. The page is so long nobody reaches the bottom.

Scroll your own homepage on a phone and count how many swipes it takes to get to the end. If it is more than ten or twelve, your best content is buried somewhere nobody sees.

Long is not thorough. Long is just long.

4. Your hours are wrong somewhere.

Check your website, your Google listing, Facebook and anywhere else you are listed. Then check whether they agree with each other and with reality.

This sounds trivial. It is the single most common thing I find, and it costs real money, because somebody drove over and you were closed.

5. There is nothing on the page that proves you are real.

No photos of the actual business, no names, no reviews, no faces. Stock photography of people in an office that is not your office.

A stranger deciding whether to trust you with money is looking for evidence you exist. Two real photos beat twenty stock ones.

6. The site does not say where you work.

If someone in Navarre cannot tell from your website whether you serve Navarre, that is a problem, and it is also why you might not be showing up in their searches.

Name the towns. Put them in actual sentences on the page, not stuffed in a list at the bottom.

7. You have not looked at it in a year.

Open it right now. Look for the phone number you changed, the service you stopped offering, the staff member who left, the copyright date that still says 2023.

Every one of those tells a visitor the business might not be paying attention. Fair or not, that is the read.

The good news in all of this is that none of it is a redesign. Six of the seven are things you can look at yourself this afternoon, and most of the fixes are smaller than people expect.

The website you already have is probably closer to working than you think. It is just leaking somewhere, and nobody has gone looking for the leak.

Tye Odom is the founder of Whitewater Digital Marketing in Navarre and has worked in website design and search engine optimization since 2010. Whitewater builds websites and handles search engine visibility for businesses on the Emerald Coast and across the country. whitewaterdigitalmarketing.com