I regularly go through business websites across Wielkopolska — Pleszew, Kalisz, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Jarocin. What I find is a lot of potential and the same handful of mistakes, over and over.

Here are eight of them. Each one you can check yourself in a few minutes, and each one decides whether your site works for the business or merely exists.

Mistake 1: The site is too slow

This is the big one. You click a link and wait. Four seconds. Six. Sometimes ten.

Akamai and Google have been publishing the same finding for years: every extra second of load time measurably reduces conversion. The point isn't the exact percentage — it's the direction. Some people close the tab before they ever see what you offer, and you'll never know it happened.

Why it happens:

  • Large, unoptimised images — 15MB where 200KB would do
  • Too many plugins, each loading its own weight
  • Poor hosting, with the server on the other side of the world
  • No caching, so every visit rebuilds the whole page
  • Excess CSS and JavaScript — code the page doesn't use still has to download

Test it: paste your address into PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. The mobile result is the one that matters — anything in the red is worth fixing.

Where does it come from? Usually a site built three or four years ago that nobody has touched since. Or one built as cheaply as possible, where performance was never a consideration.

Mistake 2: It doesn't work properly on phones

It's 2026, and most traffic to a business site now arrives on a phone — for local services, usually well over half. I still find sites that are simply broken on mobile.

Buttons too small to hit. Text you can't read without zooming. Horizontal scrolling. It's a classic.

Where does it come from? Sometimes the site is old, from when phones were an afterthought. Sometimes the developer checked it on one device and never saw what happened on the others.

How to check: open your own site on your own phone. Can you read everything without zooming? Can you tap the buttons?

Mistake 3: No SSL certificate

That's the padlock in the address bar. It says the connection is secure.

Google treats its absence as a negative signal, and browsers now label the site "not secure" outright. That scares people off more effectively than any mistake in your copy.

The fix costs nothing — Let's Encrypt is free and included with any decent hosting.

Mistake 4: Stale content

I open a company's site and read:

  • "Latest projects 2022"
  • "Spring offer 2023"
  • A blog whose last post is eighteen months old
  • Team photos from 2019

What do I conclude? Either the company has folded, or it doesn't care about its website. The truth is usually neither — they're just busy. But the site says otherwise.

Current content signals a working business. "Latest projects" should actually be the latest. A blog, if you run one, needs a post at least monthly. Team photos from the last two years, not from 2019.

If you can't keep a section current, it's often better not to have it than to have an old one.

Mistake 5: No clear call to action

Every page should answer one question: what do I do now?

I land on a site and look for "Contact" or "Book a call". If I have to hunt for more than a moment, that's already a problem.

The usual failures:

  • Contact details exist, but you have to go looking
  • The button is small or grey and blends into the background
  • There are so many calls to action that none of them reads as the main one
  • A form and nothing else — no phone number, no address

Good practice: one clear, visible button on every page. Other options can sit below it, but the primary one should be obvious.

Mistake 6: No analytics

Plenty of companies don't know how many people visit their site — or how many of those visitors get in touch.

How can you tell whether a site works if you're not measuring anything?

Analytics are free and should be on every business site. With them you know:

  • How many people arrive
  • Where they come from — search, social, direct
  • What they actually read
  • Where they give up and close the page
  • Whether anything converts

Without it you're working blind. You make changes and have no way to tell whether they helped.

Mistake 7: Weak or absent search visibility

A company sells products, but doesn't appear in Google when someone searches for those products plus their town.

Usually because of:

  • No relevant terms in the copy — the text describes what you want to say, not what people search for
  • Missing titles and descriptions, so Google can't tell what the page is for
  • No internal links, leaving pages isolated
  • No links from other sites
  • Content too thin or too generic to rank for anything

There's no magic in search. If you want to appear for "web design Kalisz", those words need to occur naturally in the copy — and the page genuinely has to answer that question, not just contain the phrase.

Mistake 8: No monitoring or security

The site goes down. The owner finds out three days later, because nobody told them.

Or worse: the site gets infected, and the owner hears about it from a customer. I've written up exactly what to do when that happens.

What actually helps:

  • Uptime monitoring
  • Daily backups, stored somewhere other than the site's own server
  • A security plugin, if you're on WordPress
  • Updates applied regularly rather than eventually

None of this costs much — monitoring is often free — and it saves the site on the day it matters. That's the whole argument for ongoing technical support.

Bonus: it just looks cheap

Not a technical fault, but it costs you anyway:

  • Seven colours and four typefaces fighting each other
  • Low-quality photos, or obvious stock images
  • Copy full of typos
  • Pages that don't look like they belong to the same site

All of it adds up to an impression. A site that looks cheap suggests the company either doesn't care about how it presents itself, or can't afford to. Neither version helps you sell.

Check your own site

Go through these in order:

  • Does it load quickly? (a green mobile score in PageSpeed Insights)
  • Does it work properly on a phone?
  • Does it have SSL — does the address start with https?
  • Is the content current?
  • Is it clear on every page what to do next?
  • Is analytics connected?
  • Does the content answer the questions your customers actually type?
  • Are monitoring and backups running?
  • Does it look professional?

Three "no" answers means there's work to do. Five means a rebuild is worth considering.

What to do about it

If you recognise your own site here, most of it is fixable.

Quick wins you can handle yourself:

  • Update the copy and the dates
  • Connect analytics
  • Check SSL and add it if it's missing
  • Go through the site on a phone and fix the obvious breakage

Bigger jobs that need a developer:

  • Performance work
  • A proper search overhaul
  • Redesign
  • Monitoring and backup setup

If you'd like, I'll go through your site and tell you what I'd do with it. Send me the address — no obligation, and I'll be honest about what's working and what isn't. If you're looking for someone to carry out the changes, my guide to choosing a developer is worth a read first.

A business website is a tool. If it isn't working for you, that's a problem with a solution.