10 website mistakes small business owners make (and how to fix them)

In nine years of working in digital marketing, I've reviewed hundreds of small business websites. The same problems come up again and again - not because business owners don't care, but because running a business and running a website are two very different skill sets.

What follows are the ten mistakes I see most consistently, and what to actually do about each one.

1. No clear call to action - or too many competing ones

This is the most common mistake of all, and also the most fixable.

Without a clear call to action, an interested visitor has nowhere to go. They've read your homepage, they like what they see - and then they're not sure what to do next, so they leave.

But having too many calls to action is almost as damaging. If your homepage is simultaneously asking visitors to book a call, browse your packages, download a guide, follow you on Instagram and subscribe to your newsletter, they'll freeze. Too many options feels like no direction at all.

Choose one primary action per page. Make it specific and make it visible. “Book a free 30-minute call” tells someone exactly what they're signing up for. “Contact us” tells them almost nothing.

2. Messaging that talks about you instead of your customer

We are a full-service agency offering a comprehensive range of solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Who is this for? Nobody knows - which means nobody feels like it's for them.

This is one of the most honest mistakes I see, because it comes from a genuinely good place. You're proud of what you do. You want to tell people about it. But your homepage isn't a resume. It's the beginning of a conversation with someone who has a problem they'd like solved.

Rewrite your headline to speak to what your customer is trying to achieve, or what they're frustrated by. “Tired of a website that doesn't match the quality of your work?” will connect with the right person far more effectively than “Welcome to [Business Name].” It also immediately tells them they're in the right place.

3. Stock photos that look like every other website

You know the ones. The handshake. The laptop on a minimalist desk. The perfectly diverse team laughing at a whiteboard. The woman talking on a phone with an inexplicably enormous smile.

They're everywhere. And precisely because they're everywhere, they've become completely invisible - or worse, they actively undermine the sense of quality you're trying to create.

For boutique and accessible-luxury businesses especially, photography is part of the product. Visitors are making a judgement about the quality of your work based on the quality of what they see. Generic imagery signals a generic business, even when the business is anything but.

One good professional photoshoot - of your work, your space, your face - pays dividends for years. If you absolutely must use stock images in the interim, look for images that are specific and unusual rather than obviously staged.

4. Contact details that are difficult to find

If a visitor can't find how to contact you within two clicks from any page on your site, you're losing enquiries.

I've seen websites where the only way to contact the business was to find the contact page, scroll to the bottom, fill in a form, and wait. No phone number. No email address. Just a form with no indication of when - or whether - anyone would respond.

Your phone number and email are not the place to make people work.

Put your phone number in the header of your website so it's visible on every single page. Add a contact link to your main navigation. Include both a phone number and an email address on your contact page - not just a form. Make it as easy as possible for someone who wants to get in touch to actually do it.

5. No SSL certificate

When you visit a website, look at the address bar in your browser. A secure website shows a padlock icon and an address that starts with “https://”. An unsecured one shows “http://” - and in most modern browsers, it displays a visible “Not Secure” warning next to the address.

That warning is the first thing many visitors see when they land on your site.

For a business that's trying to build trust, having browsers actively warn your visitors away before they've read a single word is a serious problem. Google also uses security as a ranking signal, so an unsecured site is likely ranking lower than it could be.

The good news: most modern hosting plans and website platforms include SSL for free. Log into your hosting or website platform account and check whether it's enabled. If it isn't, turning it on usually takes less than five minutes.

6. Not updating the site after business changes

New services that aren't listed. Old services that are. Pricing from two years ago. A team member who left in 2023. Awards that feel increasingly historical. A “coming soon” section that has been coming soon for eighteen months.

Stale content signals an unattended website. And an unattended website signals an unattended business.

This one accumulates quietly. No single outdated detail feels critical. But when a potential client is doing their research and they notice that your portfolio hasn't been updated since 2021, or that the service they're interested in isn't listed anywhere, or that the prices on your website don't match the ones you quoted them - it creates doubt.

Review your website every six months. Update your services, pricing, portfolio and about page to reflect your current business. If something is out of date and can't immediately be updated, take it down rather than leaving it to mislead people.

7. Ignoring the mobile experience

The majority of website visits happen on a phone. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. A phone.

This has been true for several years now, and it still catches people out - because most of us build and manage our websites on a desktop, where everything looks exactly as it should. We never actually look at it on the device most of our visitors are using.

Open your website on your phone right now. Navigate through it as if you've never seen it before. Is the text readable without zooming? Are buttons easy to tap? Does anything overlap, break, or disappear? Can you find the contact page easily?

If the answer to any of those is no, that's the experience the majority of your visitors are having. Almost every modern website platform lets you fix mobile issues without writing a line of code.

8. Slow page load times

Visitors expect a page to load quickly. When it doesn't, a significant percentage will leave before it finishes - and they won't come back. Slow pages also rank lower in Google, so you're losing both visitors and visibility at the same time.

The most common cause on small business websites isn't anything complicated. It's images.

When you take a photo on a modern phone or camera, the file is large - often several megabytes. Upload that directly to your website and every visitor has to download it in full before your page appears. Do this a handful of times and your site becomes noticeably slow.

Before uploading any image to your website, compress it first. Free tools like Squoosh and TinyPNG reduce file sizes by 60–80% with no visible quality loss. It takes thirty seconds and makes a significant difference.

9. Copy written for everyone - which means it connects with no one

We work with businesses of all sizes across all industries.

This is one of the most common lines on small business websites, and it's almost always counterproductive. In trying to appeal to everyone, it connects with no one. It's the digital equivalent of a restaurant with a forty-page menu - technically more choice, but actually less confidence in any of it.

Specific businesses, with specific expertise in specific areas, consistently outperform generalists in both search rankings and conversion rates. The more clearly you describe the exact person you do your best work for, the more that person feels like you understand them.

Think about your best clients - the ones where the work was great, the relationship was easy, and the results were strong. Write your website for more of those people. It might feel like you're narrowing your appeal. You're actually sharpening it.

10. No social proof anywhere visible

If your website has no testimonials, no reviews, no case studies, no client names - you're asking visitors to trust you based entirely on what you've said about yourself.

Most won't.

Third-party validation is one of the most powerful trust signals a website can have, and it's one of the most commonly missing. People want to know that someone else has taken the leap before them and it went well.

You don't need a lot. Two or three specific, genuine testimonials - placed prominently on your homepage and services page, not buried on a dedicated testimonials page nobody navigates to - will make a measurable difference to how many visitors take the next step.

If you don't have any yet, ask your five best clients this week. Most people are happy to help when they're asked directly.

A quick self-audit

If you answered no to more than three, you have a clear list of priorities.

Conclusion

Most website mistakes aren't dramatic. They're a series of small things that compound quietly over time - a missing call to action here, an outdated service there, a slow page that's never been looked at, a form that stopped working months ago.

None of them require a full redesign to fix.

They require an honest look at what's actually on the site, the willingness to acknowledge what isn't working, and the discipline to address it methodically. The websites that perform well aren't necessarily the most beautiful or the most expensive. They're the ones that have been thought about.