Eight things, and seven of them cost nothing to fix.
None of these are exotic. That is the point: the common faults are common, and most of them are an afternoon of typing.
Prices and hours that stopped being true
The commonest fault and the most expensive, because it is the one that makes somebody drive to a closed door. Whatever cannot be updated from a phone will eventually be wrong.
Text living inside pictures
Menus, price lists and service lists saved as images. Beautiful, unsearchable, and unreadable to anybody using a screen reader or asking an assistant.
Typing them out as text is the single highest return per hour on this whole list.
One language, three audiences
On this coast a serious share of trade happens in Italian and English as well as Albanian. A site in one language is invisible to the people searching in the other two.
Photographs bought rather than taken
Stock images of somebody else's shop, somebody else's staff and somebody else's food. Customers spot it instantly and it costs exactly the trust the page was built to create.
No address, or one that disagrees with itself
Written one way on the site, another on the map listing, a third on Facebook. Each version splits the signal, and the business ends up looking like several half-known ones.
A contact form nobody has ever tested
They break silently. Nothing bounces, nothing errors, and enquiries stop arriving without anyone noticing for months. Send yourself one today.
Pages that describe the business instead of the customer
Founding dates, mission statements and a welcome. Meanwhile the thing somebody typed appears nowhere, so there is nothing for a search to match and nothing for a reader to recognise.
The one that does cost money
Being slow. Usually huge images uploaded straight from a camera. It is the only fault here that generally needs somebody technical, and it is the one Google publishes as a ranking signal.
Questions worth asking
Which of these should I do first?
The hours and prices, then send yourself a message through your own form. Between them they take twenty minutes and they are the two that lose you customers who were already trying to reach you.
How do I know if my images are too big?
Open the site on a phone away from your own wifi and watch it load. If pictures appear in pieces or the page jumps while you read, they are too big.
Is one language really a mistake?
Not if your customers genuinely use one. It is a mistake when a shop that sells to visitors and to Italian speakers is written only in Albanian, which describes a great many shops on this coast.
Do I need professional photographs?
No. You need real ones. A phone from this decade, in daylight, pointed at your actual place beats anything bought, because people can tell the difference immediately.
My site has all eight. Start again?
Almost certainly not. Seven of the eight are content and settings rather than construction, which means they are repairs to what you already have rather than a reason to throw it away.
Send us your address and we will tell you which of the eight you have, and which you can fix yourself before we speak. Get a free audit.
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