A small business website checklist before you launch

Start with the stranger test

Before anything else, open your own site on your phone the way a stranger would. Not from the admin screen, not from your laptop with the design open beside it. Phone, cold, the way a person finds you at 9pm when they need somebody.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.

Can they tell what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, in about five seconds? That's the whole test. Everything below is a version of it.

The non-negotiables

• Your phone number and your service area go near the top of the first screen, not tucked in a footer. Most people arriving on a small business site want to contact you, and making them hunt costs you more customers than any design choice ever will.
• The site has to work on a phone. More than half the people who find you will be on one, and on a small local site it's often a lot more than half. If you have to pinch and zoom to read your own services, it isn't ready.
• Give people more than one way to reach you. A phone number, an email address or a form, and if you take bookings, a way to book. Some people will never fill in a form and some will never phone, and you don't get to choose which kind of customer needs you.
• Hours and service area have to be true. Wrong hours are worse than no hours. If you serve Kingston, Amherstview, Napanee, and Gananoque, say so in words on the page, because that's what people search and it's what a search engine reads.
• And every page needs a real page title that actually says what the page is, the way "Kitchen Renovations in Kingston" does and "Page 2" never will. The title is the blue line people click in search results, and it's one of the few pieces of basic search hygiene that pays off on day one.

The things people forget at the last minute

This is the part I see go wrong most, and it's almost always the same short list.

• The contact form nobody tested. Fill it in yourself, from your phone, and confirm the message arrives somewhere a human reads. Forms fail quietly, and a broken one can cost you months of enquiries before anyone notices.
• The placeholder text that survived. Somewhere on most unfinished sites there's a line of filler, a stock photo of an office nobody works in, or a heading that still says "About us goes here".
• Old information carried over from the last site. A phone number you stopped using, a price from two years ago, a person who no longer works there.
• Nobody claimed the Google Business Profile. For a local business in Kingston that free listing often sends more calls than the website does in the first few months. Claim it, put the same phone number and hours on it as the site, and link it to the site.
• And no plan for who updates what. Keep it simple: somebody has to own the hours, the prices, and the phone number, and know how to change them.

What this looks like in practice

Run it like a walk-around before a long drive. Nobody rebuilds the engine in the driveway, you check the tires, the wipers, and the gas, because those are the things that strand you. Same idea here. Phone number, phone test, form test, hours, titles, and a cold read on your own phone. It takes half an hour and it catches nearly everything that actually costs you customers.

If you're close to launching and want a second set of eyes, or you're starting from scratch and want to skip this list entirely, tell me about your business and I'll tell you honestly which size fits and what I would check before it goes live. The Kingston page has the three sizes and how I work. If your launch is closer to a larger organization's and needs a proper technical SEO review, that is the work I do at thisismyurl.com.