WEB DEVELOPMEND
Most small business websites are built, launched, and then left to die. Here’s what that actually costs you.
A website is not a brochure. The moment you launch it, it becomes a competitor. Competing with businesses that are updating their website weekly, Google’s preference for fresh websites, and the customers who visited 3 years ago and remember a site that is no newer than a brochure.
The businesses that consistently win work from their sites, treat them like a team member. Not a one-off project.
what ‘built on WordPress’ means
Most small business sites in the UK are on WordPress, and most of them are running outdated themes, unpatched plug-ins, and a PHP version their hosting company is just as outdated as.
This is important for two reasons. First, let’s talk about security. A WordPress site with plugins that haven’t been updated for eight months is a time bomb waiting to be compromised. Second, this is important in regards to speed, or rather the lack of it. Since 2018, Google has used page load speed as a ranking criteria, so a site that takes 4 seconds to load on a mobile connection, isn’t only frustrating to users, but it is also ranking below competitors who take time to optimize their sites for Core Web Vitals.
Don’t guess a developer is worth hiring; look at your PageSpeed Insights scores. It’s worth hiring a developer for your score to be higher than 70.
Hiring A Developer
Most small business sites don’t take advantage of structured data markup, which is very unfortunate. A good developer can implement structured data markup in a matter of a few hours, which will increase the search visibility of the site for many years to come, as it will take Google a while to figure out what your small business is about, where it is located, what it charges, and how many stars it has.
First means mobile-first. It’s been built from the small screen upwards, not a desktop site that just happens to work on mobile. Because the majority of your customers are searching from a small screen.
Not glamorous work, yet time invested compressing images, deferring scripts, setting up a caching layer, and organising a decent hosting environment is quietly responsible for more enquiries than any amount of redesign.
What you can probably not do pay for
A complete redesign / rebuild every 2-3 years just because the site “feels dated.” In most situations the content is the issue, not the code. Rewrite the words, update the images, and the site feels new again for a fraction of the cost.
Your site does not need to be impressive, it just needs to be faster, clearer, and more trustworthy than your competitors.
That is the priority.
Published by Blogs for Business · blogsforbusiness.co.uk
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