Part of my week involves looking properly at small business websites. Not glancing at them, actually opening the contact page, reading the footer, checking whether the email address works.
You find the same things over and over. Not bad design. Not bad writing. Small mechanical faults that the owner has never noticed, because the owner never arrives at their own website as a stranger.
Here are six from this week alone. Every one is real, every one was on a working business's live site, and not one of them is the kind of thing anybody would ever ring you up to report.
1. Two different email addresses on the same site
One site showed its contact address in two places. The two addresses were not the same. One letter different.
Only one of them can be real. So roughly half the people who copy that address by hand are writing to nothing, and their message bounces or vanishes. The owner does not see a bounce, because it is not their mailbox doing the bouncing. They just see fewer enquiries than they expected and have no way of knowing why.
How to check: search your own site for the @ symbol, on every page including the footer. Make sure every result is identical, character for character.
2. The address you display is not the one the link goes to
This is the sneakier version of the same fault, and I found it on a swim school's contact page.
The page displayed one address. The clickable link underneath it pointed somewhere else entirely. What had happened was mundane: somebody edited the text in the website builder, and the first letter got left behind inside the link while the rest of the address was replaced.
So a visitor who clicks gets one address, and a visitor who copies the text gets another. One of those groups is writing to a mailbox nobody reads.
How to check: do not just look at the address. Click it. See what actually appears in the To field of the email that opens.
3. The template's demo content is still on the page
Two sites this week. One had a Latest Matches section showing fixtures that were never played, with scores and dates that came with the theme. Another had a customer testimonial from a person who does not exist, with their job title spelt wrong, sitting there in quotation marks as though a real human had said it.
Neither owner put those there deliberately. They came with the template, and templates are designed to look populated so you can see what the layout does. The intention is that you replace them. It is very easy not to.
The damage is worse than it looks. A visitor who spots that the testimonial is fake does not think "ah, unfinished template". They think the business invents its reviews. See this piece on fake numbers for why that is so expensive.
How to check: read every quote, name and number on your site and ask whether you could point at the real person or the real event behind it. Anything you cannot, delete.
4. A copyright date stuck several years back
One site's footer read 2022. The rest of the site was current, the business is active, the coaching is still running.
Nobody consciously reads footers. But a visitor deciding whether a business still exists is looking for exactly this kind of signal, and a four year old date is the clearest "possibly closed down" marker a website can carry. It is doing active harm in a place nobody thinks to look.
How to fix properly: do not type this year's number in, because you will be back here next January. Have it generated automatically so it is right forever.
5. A page still advertising something that finished years ago
I found a coach whose summer camps were listed with dates in July and August. Of 2023.
It was the main thing that came up when you searched his business name. So anybody who heard about him from a friend and went looking found a camp that had finished three years earlier, and reasonably concluded he had stopped.
The same pattern turns up on booking pages showing sessions that have already happened, which is arguably worse, because it looks like a system nobody is maintaining.
How to check: search for your own business name the way a stranger would, and look at what comes back. Not your homepage. Whatever actually ranks.
6. Your contact page asks the visitor to do the work
Less dramatic than the others, and more common than all of them.
A contact form and nothing else. No address, no phone number, no indication of when you might reply. Some people will not use a form, because a form gives them no copy of what they sent and no evidence anyone received it.
The fix is not to remove the form. It is to put a real address next to it and say how quickly you answer. "I usually reply within a day" costs you one sentence and removes the main reason people hesitate.
What these six have in common
None of them is a design problem. You could hire the best designer in the country and still have every single one of these, because they are all maintenance, not aesthetics.
They also share a second quality, which is the real reason they survive for years: nobody tells you. A customer who emails a dead address does not ring up to say so. They assume you are not interested, or they are busy, and they go to whoever answers. The failure is completely silent from your side of it, and from your side the website looks fine, because you never arrive at it cold.
The twenty minute version
If you do nothing else with this, do these in order. It is about twenty minutes.
- Open your site on your phone, not your computer, and go to the contact page as though you were a customer.
- Click the email address. Check what actually opens.
- Read the footer. Check the year.
- Search your business name and look at whatever comes up first, not your homepage.
- Read every testimonial, number and date on the site and delete anything you cannot point at a real source for.
- Add one line to the contact page saying how quickly you reply.
None of that needs a developer and none of it costs anything. It is the cheapest work available to a small business website, and it is almost always worth more than a redesign, because a beautiful site with a broken email address is still a broken email address.
If you want someone to do that pass for you, or you have found something on this list and would rather it was fixed properly, the Process page explains how I work and the Pricing page covers what a build costs. If you are still deciding whether a new site is the right spend at all, this one goes into what actually makes one work.
One more that is not a fault so much as a habit: galleries that only ever grow. Why your best 25 photos beat all 80 of them.