Fix your business website and help customers find you
If your business website is not bringing enquiries, check three things: whether customers can find it, whether it answers their questions and whether contacting or booking actually works. Start by testing it on your phone and sending an enquiry yourself. Fix a broken customer journey before deciding that you need more traffic or a completely new website.
Is something stopping customers from contacting you?
Test the route a customer takes before you change anything else. Send yourself an enquiry through your own form, from your own phone, and see whether it arrives. A form that fails silently looks exactly like nobody being interested.
Then use the site on mobile data rather than office wifi. Slow pages and a booking step that will not finish lose people who had already decided.
- Website Contact Form Not Working? Here's How to Check How to test whether enquiries reach you, and where they usually go missing.
- Mobile Page Speed: Is Your Website Fast Enough? How to check what your site is like on a phone, and what to do about it.
- Dog Groomer Online Booking: Is It Worth It? Whether letting customers book themselves is worth the setup, using grooming as the example.
Is your website doing its job?
Judge it on what it was meant to do rather than on how it looks. Decide what one visit should produce, a call, a form, a booking or a trip to the shop, then check whether that is happening.
If you cannot tell, that is the first thing to fix. A site nobody measures gets replaced on a hunch.
- Is My Website Working? How to Check A plain way to work out whether your site is earning its keep.
Does the page give customers enough confidence?
People decide on what they can see: your words, your photos and what you claim about yourself. Vague copy and stock pictures make a real business look like every other one.
Say what you do and where you do it, show work you actually did, and keep claims to things you could back up if somebody asked.
- Website Copy That Works: What to Actually Say What to say on a page so a stranger understands you and gets in touch.
- Website Photos: What Do You Actually Need? Which pictures a small business site needs, and how to get them.
- Can Your Website Say 'Best in Town'? What the Rules Say What you can and cannot say about being the best, and where that comes from.
Can local customers find and assess your business?
Your listing is part of what a local customer sees, not only your website. Claim the listing, keep the details matching the site, and treat your reviews as part of what people are reading.
Replies matter too. A reply is read by the next customer rather than by the one who left the review.
- Google Business Profile: The Free Fix for Being Found How to claim and set up the free listing that puts your business on the map.
- How to Get More Google Reviews (Without Breaking the Rules) How to ask for reviews in a way that stays inside the rules.
- Google Review Replies: Should AI Write Them? How to handle replies, including whether to let AI write them.
What changes when customers use AI search?
The same pages do the work, read by something else. An assistant answering on your behalf draws on what it can find about you, so pages stating plainly what you do, where and for whom are what it has to go on.
Leave this until the practical checks above are done. It is the same content, described accurately, rather than a separate project.
- Does ChatGPT Know Your Business? How to see what an assistant says about your business, and what shapes it.
- Write for AI Overviews: What Actually Works What decides whether an AI-written answer quotes your page.
- AI Overviews: Why Your Website Gets Fewer Clicks Why some pages get fewer clicks once an answer sits above them.
- AI Review Summary on Google: Can You Control It? Where the summary of your reviews comes from, and what you can influence.
Should you fix the site or replace it?
Fix first, and replace when fixing stops being enough. A rebuild earns its place when the site cannot do something you now need, when nobody can edit it, or when the repair work costs about as much as starting again.
Work through the list below before you decide. A new site with the same broken form is the same problem in a new coat.
- The enquiry route works, tested by you on a phone
- Pages load acceptably on mobile data
- The words say what you do and where you do it
- The photos are yours and recent
- Your listing details match the website
- You, or someone you can reach, can edit the pages
Where next: Compare website costs and choices