Is Your Business Website Helping or Hurting You?

Think about the last time you looked up a business you hadn't used before. Chances are you pulled out your phone, searched, and tapped on their website. In a few seconds you decided whether they looked open, trustworthy and easy to deal with.

Your customers do the same thing with your business. For many of them, your website is the first impression, long before they call or walk through the door. A site that is current, easy to use on a phone and secure quietly does its job every day. A site that is out of date or broken can send people to a competitor without you ever knowing they were there.

Why your website matters more than you might think

A small business website doesn't need to be fancy. It needs to answer a few simple questions quickly: What do you do? Where do you work? How do people reach you? Are you still in business?

It also affects how easily people find you. Google looks at the mobile version of a site when deciding how to rank it in search results, so a site that is hard to use on a phone can be harder to find, too.

Sign 1: The information is out of date

Old phone numbers, former staff, last year's hours, services you no longer offer, or a "latest news" post from several years ago all send the same message: nobody is minding the store.

Take ten minutes and read your own site as if you were a new customer. Check your phone numbers, email addresses, hours, service area and the copyright year at the bottom of the page. If anything is wrong, it's time for an update.

Sign 2: It's hard to use on a phone

Most people will visit your site on a phone at least some of the time. Open it on yours and look for:

• Text so small you have to pinch and zoom to read it
• Menus or buttons that are hard to tap
• Pages where you have to scroll sideways
• Phone numbers that don't dial when you tap them
• Pages that take a long time to load on a cellular connection

A responsive website (one that automatically adjusts to the size of the screen) fixes most of these problems at once.

Sign 3: Browsers say "Not secure"

If your site doesn't use an SSL certificate, browsers show a "Not secure" label next to your address. The certificate is what turns on the padlock and the "https" at the start of your web address. It protects the information visitors type into your contact forms.

This matters more than ever. Starting this fall, Google's Chrome browser is moving to secure connections by default, which means visitors may see a full-page warning before they can even open a site that only works without https. Many customers will simply hit the back button.

Sign 4: You're not sure who controls your domain or hosting

Your domain is your web address (yourcompany.com). Your hosting is the service that keeps your website online. Both are usually renewed every year.

Ask yourself:

1. Whose name and email address are the domain and hosting registered under?
2. Do you have the logins, or are they with a former employee, a relative or a web designer you can no longer reach?
3. When do they renew, and is the payment method still current?

If a domain expires, your website, and often your business email, can stop working overnight. Getting control back can take time and paperwork. Make sure your business owns its domain and that someone at your company can log in.

Sign 5: Nobody is maintaining it

A website isn't a one-time project. The software behind many sites needs regular updates to stay secure, and an unmaintained site is an easy target for hackers who use it to send spam or spread malware. Backups matter too: if something goes wrong, you want a recent copy you can restore.

If you can't remember the last time someone updated, backed up or even looked at your site, put it on the list.

Your website works for you around the clock. Make sure it's giving the right impression.

A few quick wins

Even if a full redesign isn't in your plans right now, you can usually make real progress with:

• Correcting your contact details, hours and service list
• Adding or renewing an SSL certificate
• Putting the domain and hosting in the business's name, with logins stored somewhere safe
• Setting up regular updates and backups

We can help

GNTI has been helping businesses in King, Pierce and Kitsap counties with their technology since 1999, and that includes their websites. We build new websites and redesign older ones so they work well on phones and computers, and we handle website hosting, domains, business email, SSL certificates, and ongoing updates and maintenance.

Learn more about our Web Design & Hosting services, or contact us for a friendly look at your current site. Call Seattle at 206.569.4684, Tacoma at 253.267.6727, or email support@gnti.com.