The opening eBook of the Website and Conversion category. It treats a small business website as the working tool it is: the place a stranger decides whether to enquire, book, buy or leave. Every chapter is built around what changes the answer to that question.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 45 minute read
Chapter 6
Speed, Mobile and the Basics That Quietly Cost You Sales
The small set of technical fixes that nearly every small business website needs, in plain English a non-technical owner can act on.
Most small business websites lose enquiries to problems the owner can't see. The home page takes four seconds to load on a phone. The contact form is hard to fill in with a thumb. Half the photographs are too big and slow the page down. The site looks fine when the owner checks it on a laptop, and quietly fails for the seventy per cent of visitors arriving on a phone.
The cost of these invisible problems is not just the lost enquiries. It's the way they undercut everything else the business does well. A clear home page that takes four seconds to load on a phone is a clear home page very few strangers ever see. A perfectly written contact page with a form that won't accept a phone number on a phone is a contact page that doesn't take contacts. The basics quietly decide how much of the rest of the site's good work survives.
This chapter gives you the small set of technical fixes nearly every small business website needs, in plain English a non-technical owner can act on. By the end you'll have a checklist you can run through in an hour, and most of the fixes will be ones you can do yourself or hand to a contractor for a small fee.
The full chapter covers the eight technical basics every small business website needs, the speed checks worth running every quarter and the mobile fixes that nearly always lift enquiries.
Eight basics nearly every small business site needs
Eight technical basics cover the work most small business websites need to be doing and most aren't. None of them require a developer. All of them can be done in an afternoon by a competent contractor at a small fee, or by the owner with a couple of hours of patience.
1. Page weight under one megabyte
Most slow small business websites are slow because the photographs on them are far too big. A single home page banner exported straight from a phone can be four to six megabytes and take three seconds to load on a phone. Resize every image on the site to the width it actually appears at on a phone, save it as a properly compressed JPEG or WebP and aim for the home page to weigh under one megabyte in total. This single fix often cuts page load time in half.
2. Page load under three seconds on a phone
Test the home page using a free tool like PageSpeed Insights or your phone in airplane-mode-then-back-on-3g. If the page takes more than three seconds to show its first content on a phone, fix it. After image weight, the next biggest culprits are autoplaying videos, embedded chat widgets and unused tracking scripts.
3. Mobile-first layout
Open every page of the site on your phone, holding it the way a real person does, with one hand. Tap every button. Fill in every form. Scroll every list. Anything that's hard to do is a fix. The most common mobile mistakes: text under fourteen pixels, buttons under forty-four pixels tall, forms that don't bring up the right keyboard for phone numbers and email addresses, and headers so tall they push the clarity block off the first screen.
4. A working contact route
Every page on the site should have a clear, working primary action. Test it. Submit your own contact form. Click your own phone number on a phone and check it dials. Click your own calendar booking link and check it loads. A surprising number of small business websites have contact forms that haven't worked in months.
5. Working basic search ranking
Each page needs a clear page title (the words shown in the browser tab and on Google), a meta description (the short summary on a Google result) and a clear heading. The titles and descriptions should be plain English and tell the truth: "Bookkeeping for trades businesses in the south west" not "Welcome to our website." The companion eBook Search Ranking for Small Businesses goes much deeper. The bare minimum is unique, honest titles and descriptions on the four core pages.
6. A real address and basic business details
A footer with the business name, contact details, area covered or trading address, company number if you have one and a clear copyright line. These details quietly tell strangers and search engines that the business is real. They also help the Google Business Profile and any local search ranking work the site is doing.
7. A privacy notice and basic legal footer
A short privacy notice covering what data the site collects, what it does with it and how to contact you about it. Standard for any UK business website. Most website builders provide a template you can adapt. It's a one-hour job, not a project.
8. Working basic measurement
A single, simple piece of measurement so you can see how many people visit the site, where they come from and what they do. Plausible, Fathom or Google Analytics 4 all do the job. The companion eBook Website Analytics for Small Businesses goes into how to actually use it. The bare minimum is having it installed so the data exists when you're ready to look.
The hour-long basics audit
Run PageSpeed Insights on the home page
Open every page on a phone and tap every button
Submit your own contact form and check the email arrives
Check page titles and meta descriptions on the four core pages
Check the footer carries the basics: address, privacy notice, copyright
Speed: the practical fixes
Three speed fixes do most of the work. Resize and compress every image to the width it actually displays at; the difference between a 4MB image and a 200KB image is invisible to the eye and dramatic to the page load. Remove any autoplaying video on the home page; replace it with a static image and a play button. Remove any chat widget you're not actively monitoring; an unused widget is two seconds of load time for nothing.
Mobile: the practical fixes
Five mobile fixes lift enquiries on most small business websites. Make body text at least sixteen pixels. Make buttons at least forty-four pixels tall and a finger-width wide. Make forms use the right keyboard type for each field. Move the primary action button into the first screen on a phone. Reduce the header height so the clarity block is visible without scrolling.
What to do this week
Run the hour-long basics audit. Write down everything that fails. Fix the three biggest ones yourself, or pass the list to a competent contractor for a small fee. Don't redesign anything. The website you have, with its plumbing fixed, will earn more than a redesign would.
Make the offer clear: technical basics earn the offer the visibility it deserves. The previous chapter dressed the site. The next chapter, Launching, measuring and improving, sets the rhythm that turns a website into a working tool that quietly gets better.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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