Most business owners look at their own website only occasionally, on a fast office connection, already knowing what they're looking for. Your customers don't. They arrive on a phone, in a hurry, comparing you with three other tabs. Here are five signs your site is losing that comparison.

1. It takes more than a moment to load

People are impatient online, and a slow page is often the last page they see. Speed also feeds into how Google judges a page's experience. Test your site on your phone over mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. If you find yourself waiting, so are your customers.

What to do: heavy images, bloated themes and stacks of plugins are the usual culprits. A well-built site serves images at the right size and in modern formats, and loads only what each page needs.

2. It's awkward on a phone

Pinching to zoom, tiny buttons, text running off the edge, menus that don't open. If any of these sound familiar, visitors are leaving. Most local searches happen on phones, so this is now the main way people meet your business.

What to do: design mobile-first. Start with the smallest screen and scale up, instead of squeezing a desktop design down.

3. Visitors can't tell what you do in five seconds

Within a few seconds a visitor should know what you do, who it's for, where you work and how to get in touch. Vague slogans and a wall of text make them work too hard, and they won't.

What to do: lead with a clear headline, put your main call to action where it can be seen, and make your contact details easy to find on every page.

4. It doesn't show up when people search

If you search for what you do plus your town and find only your competitors, your website isn't pulling its weight. Missing page titles, thin content and no local signals all hold a site back.

What to do: build pages around what your customers actually search for, give each one a unique title and description, and connect your site to your Google Business Profile. Our article on what local SEO actually means explains more.

5. It looks out of date

Fair or not, people judge a business by its website. A tired design, an old copyright year or a broken link suggests a business that's tired too, even when the opposite is true.

What to do: a fresh, distinctive design that reflects how good your business is today, plus someone keeping it up to date.

The good news

Every one of these can be fixed, and it doesn't need to cost a fortune or take months. If you recognised your site in more than one of these, start a project and we'll take a look.