5 Things Every Website Should Do

Most business websites are not bad. They are just quiet. They sit there looking professional while the phone does not ring, and the owner assumes the problem is the design, or Google, or the economy.

It usually is not any of those.

A website has one job: take a stranger who has never heard of you and turn them into someone who calls, books, buys, or walks in. Everything else is decoration. When a site fails at that job, it is almost always because it is skipping one of five things. Not fifty. Five.

Nothing here requires a developer. Most of it you can check today, in your kitchen, on your phone.

Read it once end to end, then keep it open and run the scorecard at the back.

One warning before you start. You are the worst possible judge of your own website. You know what you sell, you know where everything is, and you have looked at that homepage two hundred times. Your customer has looked at it for four seconds and knows nothing. Every test in this guide is designed to get you back into that stranger’s head. Take them literally.

When someone lands on your site, their brain is running three questions at once, and it wants all three answered before it decides whether to stay: what is this, is it for me, and why you instead of the other tab I have open.

That decision happens in the first screen, before a single scroll. If your top section says “Welcome to Our Website” or “Quality You Can Trust Since 1998”, you have answered none of them, and the visitor is already gone. They will not tell you they left. They will just be a number in an analytics report you never open.

This is the most common failure we see, and the cheapest one to fix. It is words, not code.

The top of the page tells a stranger what you do, who you do it for, and where, in one sentence they can read without effort. Under it sits one clear button. Around it, three or four short proof points, not paragraphs.

1. Write the sentence before you touch the design. If you cannot say it in one sentence, the problem is not the website. It is the positioning, and no amount of design papers over that.
2. Put it at the very top, in the largest text on the page. Larger than your logo.
3. Cut the throat clearing. Delete "Welcome to", "We are proud to", "Our mission is". Start with the thing your customer wants.
4. Add location if you serve a place. "Serving Naperville and the western suburbs" does more for your phone than any adjective ever will.
5. Say what you do not do. "We do not do new construction" saves you the estimate calls you never wanted, and it makes the customers you do want trust you more, because only someone confident turns work away.

Every page needs one clear thing you want the visitor to do next. Call. Book. Request a quote. Get on the list. One.

Sites lose people by offering too many exits, not too few. A header with nine menu items, a slider with three competing buttons, a chat bubble, a coupon popup, a newsletter box, and a phone number in gray 12 pixel text at the bottom is not a helpful website. It is a decision the visitor did not ask to make, and the easiest way to resolve a hard decision is to make none and close the tab.

Pick the one action that is worth the most to your business and design the entire site to funnel toward it. Then repeat that action down the page, because people decide at different moments. Someone might be sold by your headline. Someone else does not believe you until they read the third review.

One primary action, styled the same way everywhere, repeated three to five times down a long page. A secondary action for people not ready yet. A phone number that is tappable on mobile and visible in the header on every page.

Forms: shorter than you think. Every field you add is another reason to quit. Ask for what you genuinely need to have the first conversation, and get the rest on the phone. Name, phone or email, and one open field covers most businesses. Do not ask how they heard about you before you have earned the right. Do not ask for a budget range on a first contact form unless you are prepared to lose the people who have no idea yet, and some of those people were going to spend the most.

If you must ask for more, tell them why. “We ask for your address so we can check if you are in our service area” turns an intrusion into a courtesy.

1. Name your one action. Write it down. If your team would answer this question three different ways, that is your first problem.
2. Put it in the header, on every page, as a button that looks like a button.
3. Repeat it after each section that does persuasive work.
4. Delete competing asks. The newsletter box, the second slider button, the chat widget that fires at three seconds. If it does not lead toward the one action, it is taking from it.
5. Make the phone number tappable and put it where a thumb naturally rests.
6. Test your own form. Fill it out from your phone, right now, as a customer. Time it. Then wait and see what actually lands in your inbox, and how long it takes. This one check finds broken forms on live business websites more often than anyone wants to admit.

Speed is not a technical nicety. It is the first promise your business makes. A site that takes six seconds to appear has already told the visitor something about how you handle things, and they believe it.

Most of your visitors are on a phone. A good share of them are on a mediocre connection, in a parking lot, in a basement, on hotel wifi. Your site does not get judged on your office fiber connection and your desktop monitor. It gets judged in the worst conditions your customer happens to be in.

Speed also feeds everything else. A slow site drags down how well you rank, how many people reach your form, and how much your ads cost if you run them.

CLS is the one that makes people tap the wrong button because an ad or image loaded late and shoved everything down.

What good looks like: the main headline and the primary button appear almost immediately. Nothing jumps. Images fill their space instead of popping in and pushing content around. Tapping feels instant.

In the order that usually moves the needle most:

1. Images. This is the number one cause, and it is not close. A photo straight off a phone or a stock site can be several megabytes and is often being squeezed into a space a fraction of its size. Resize images to the size they actually display, compress them, and serve modern formats like WebP.
2. The hero video or slider. Autoplaying background video and rotating sliders are the two heaviest decorations in common use, and neither one is persuading anybody. Sliders in particular tend to get one thing seen, the first slide, while carrying the weight of all of them.
3. Plugin and script sprawl. Every tracking pixel, chat widget, popup tool, review carousel, and font library loads code. Audit what is installed. If you cannot name what a tool does for the business, it goes.
4. Fonts. Loading six weights of three font families costs real time. Two families, two or three weights each, is plenty for a business site.
5. Reserve space for things that load late. Images and embeds should have their dimensions set so the layout does not shift when they arrive. This is what fixes the jumping.
6. Hosting. Cheap shared hosting is cheap for a reason. If the server is slow to respond, nothing else you do fully repairs it.

One caution. Do not install a speed plugin and call it done. Aggressive caching and minification tools can and do break layouts, forms, and checkout. Test every page after any speed change, especially the ones that take money.

You can say you are reliable. Everyone says that. Nobody believes it, because saying it is free.

Proof is different. Proof is a real customer, with a real name, saying a specific thing. Proof is a photo of your actual crew and your actual work instead of a stock model in a hard hat who has clearly never held that tool. Proof is the number of years, the number of jobs, the license number, the service area map.

This is the section most business owners skip because it feels like bragging. It is not bragging. Someone about to spend real money with a stranger is looking for a reason to feel safe. Give it to them, or watch them go find a competitor who will.

Reviews and testimonials placed where decisions get made, not quarantined on a “Testimonials” page nobody visits. Real photography. Named people. Specific detail. Recent dates. Numbers you can actually back up.

Put proof next to the ask. A review sitting directly beside the quote button does more work than twenty reviews on a separate page, because it answers the exact fear the visitor is having at the exact moment they are having it.

1. Get more reviews, systematically. Not once a year when you remember. Ask at the moment of relief, which is right when the job is done and they are happy. A text with a direct link beats a business card with a QR code every time.
2. Take real photos. You do not need a photographer to start. A modern phone in good light is enough. Real beats polished.
3. Turn one job into a story. Pick a project you are proud of. Write four short paragraphs: what the customer needed, what made it tricky, what you did, how it turned out. One page. That is a case study, and it will out-sell your services page.
4. Show your credentials plainly. License numbers, insurance, certifications, years in business, association memberships, service area. Boring, and it closes deals.
5. Keep it honest. Never post a review you wrote, never invent a number, and never claim a certification you do not hold. One discovered fake costs more trust than a hundred real reviews build.

The best website in your town is worth nothing if nobody lands on it, and nearly nothing if the people who land on it cannot get hold of you.

Findable means someone searching for what you sell, in the place you sell it, can actually find you. Reachable means that once they decide, contacting you takes one tap and the message reliably arrives.

That second half is where good businesses quietly bleed. A form that posts into a void, a phone number with a typo, a contact page that only offers a form when half your customers want to call, an email that lands in spam. Nobody complains. They just call the next company.

A claimed and complete Google Business Profile with real photos, correct hours, and reviews you respond to. Your business name, address, and phone number written identically everywhere they appear. One page per service, each with enough substance to be useful. Page titles that describe the page in plain words. Contact options in the header, in the footer, and at the end of every page. Forms that deliver to at least two inboxes.

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. For most local businesses this outperforms everything else you could do this month. Categories, hours, service area, services list, real photos, and reply to every review, including the bad ones, calmly.
2. Keep name, address, and phone identical everywhere. Suite numbers, abbreviations, and old phone numbers scattered across directories create doubt, for search engines and for people.
3. Build one page per service. Explain the problem, your process, what it includes, what it costs or what drives the cost, and what happens next.
4. Write page titles for humans. "Emergency Plumbing in Aurora, IL" beats "Home | Services | Company Name".
5. Offer more than one way to reach you. Phone, form, email, and text if you answer texts. Let people choose their own comfort level.
6. Make the site usable for everyone. Real text instead of words baked into images, meaningful alt text on photos, enough contrast between text and background, tap targets big enough to hit accurately, and a page that works with a keyboard. The published standard asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 on normal text, and for tap targets of at least 24 by 24 pixels, with Apple and Google both recommending closer to 44 to 48. This matters for the customer with reading glasses in a parking lot, and it is increasingly a legal question too, not only a courtesy.
7. Answer fast. None of this survives a three day response time. The fastest honest reply usually wins the job.

The 20 minute self-audit

5 Things Every Website Should Do

Site: ______________________________Date: ________________

Sit down with a phone and a timer and go in order. This page remembers what you tick, so you can come back and run it again next quarter.

0 of 26 done

Clarity

A stranger can say what I do, who for, and where, after five seconds The largest text on my homepage is a sentence about the customer, not my logo There is no "Welcome to our website" anywhere on the page Someone who is not my customer can tell quickly that they are not

The ask

I can name the one action I want visitors to take That action is visible on a phone without scrolling It repeats down the page My phone number is tappable and in the header My form asks for four fields or fewer No page on my site is a dead end

Speed

Mobile LCP is 2.5 seconds or less CLS is 0.1 or less and nothing visibly jumps The site is usable on cell data with a weak signal No autoplaying video or rotating slider at the top I can name what every installed plugin or widget does

Proof

More real photos than stock photos At least one testimonial contains a specific detail Reviews appear next to the places I ask for the sale Names and dates are attached to the praise Licenses, insurance, years, and service area are stated plainly

Findable and reachable

I appear when I search "what I do + my town" in a private window My Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and has recent photos Every service has its own page My name, address, and phone match everywhere I submitted my own form this quarter and the email arrived Phone, address, and email all tap correctly on a phone

Print this checklist Clear my answers

The full guide: truemtn.com/guides/5-things-every-website-should-do/

How to read your score. Anything still unticked is a task, not a verdict. Take the three that are cheapest to fix and do those this week. Words are cheaper than design. Design is cheaper than a rebuild. Most sites need words.

Five ways people get this wrong while trying to fix it