Your website looks fine. So why isn’t the phone ringing?

Most small business owners who come to us with a website problem don’t have an ugly website. They have a website that looks perfectly respectable and produces almost nothing.

That’s a harder problem to spot, because there’s nothing obviously wrong. The logo is there. The colours are fine. Someone was paid a reasonable amount of money and delivered something reasonable. And yet the enquiries that were supposed to follow never turned up.

Here are the ten things we check first. You can run all of them yourself this afternoon, and every tool involved is free.

Start with the five-second test

Before any of the technical checks, do this one.

Open your homepage on your phone. Look at it for five seconds. Look away. Now answer three questions:

• What does this business do?
• Where does it do it?
• What am I meant to do next?

If you can’t answer all three, a stranger can’t either, and a stranger gives you considerably less than five seconds.

This is the most common single failure we see. The business name is the largest thing on the page and the actual service isn’t mentioned above the fold. It costs nothing to fix and it changes more than a redesign would.

Can people find you?

1. Check what Google has actually indexed. Search for site:yourdomain.com with no space after the colon. That’s every page Google knows about. If your service pages aren’t in that list, they cannot rank, no matter how well written they are. We’ve seen businesses spend two years wondering why a page got no traffic when Google had simply never seen it.

2. Set up Google Search Console. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and most small businesses don’t have it. It tells you what people actually typed before they landed on you, which is almost never what you assume they typed. The gap between those two things is usually where your next month of work is.

3. Give every service its own page. A single page titled “Our Services” listing nine things will rank for none of them. If you do bathroom renovations in Parramatta, there needs to be a page about bathroom renovations that says Parramatta. This isn’t a trick to game anything. It’s just being specific about what you do and where you do it.

Can people use it?

4. Check your speed. Paste your URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The number to care about is Largest Contentful Paint, and you want it under 2.5 seconds. In small business websites the usual culprit is images. Someone uploaded a four megabyte photo straight off a camera and nobody compressed it. That’s an afternoon of work, not a rebuild.

5. Test mobile properly. Not “does it load on a phone” — everything loads on a phone. Does it work? Can you tap the buttons with a thumb without hitting the wrong one? Is the text readable without pinching? Does the menu open? Roughly two thirds of your visitors are on a phone, and most owners only ever look at their own site on a desktop.

6. Make your phone number tappable. In the header, on mobile, and it should dial when tapped rather than being an image or plain text. It sounds trivial. It’s the difference between a call now and a call someone meant to make later and didn’t.

Will people trust you?

7. Have one call to action, not five. One. Not call us or email us or fill in the form or book online or message us on Facebook. Pick the one you actually want and make it obvious above the fold, then repeat it down the page. Choice slows people down at exactly the moment you need them to act.

8. Submit your own contact form. Today. Then check your inbox, and check your spam folder. We have found forms that had been silently failing for eight months while the business assumed the market had gone quiet. This is ninety seconds of work and it is the highest-value ninety seconds on this list.

9. Add real trust signals. Photographs of your actual work and your actual team, not stock images of someone else’s office. Reviews on the page, not only on Google. Licence numbers, ABN, insurance, association memberships. A physical address if you have one. People are checking whether you’re a real business before they pick up the phone, and they’re doing it quickly.

10. Make sure you can tell what’s working. Analytics installed, and conversion tracking on your forms and phone taps. Without it you can’t tell which page produced the enquiry, which means every decision about where to spend money is a guess.

What to do with this

Don’t try to fix all ten. Run the list, write down what fails, and pick the two that would make the biggest difference. For most businesses that’s the five-second test and the contact form, and neither costs anything.

See it done live, free, in October

We’re running Website Health Check Live as part of NSW Small Business Month 2026.

It’s a free 30-minute session, straight to the point. We cover the checks that find the most problems fastest, then run them live on a real small business website so you can see what each issue actually looks like on screen. You’ll leave with the full ten-point checklist and the free tools to work through the rest yourself.

Wednesday 14 October 2026, 12:00pm to 12:30pm AEDT. Online. Free.

Short enough to fit in a lunch break. You can volunteer your own website for the live check when you register, if you’re brave enough. Everything covered is something you can do yourself, and nothing is being sold.

Register for Website Health Check Live — free, Wednesday 14 October