What actually makes a small-business website work?

The nine things we measure, why each one matters, and which are worth doing first.

Every business website on this site is scored on the same nine checks. None of them is a design opinion. All of them are plumbing, and all nine can be fixed in an afternoon by somebody who knows where the switches are.

The nine, in the order worth fixing them

Does it load? Everything else is irrelevant until this is yes.
Is it HTTPS? Without it Chrome shows a Not Secure warning before a visitor reads a word. Free to fix, usually one switch at the host.
Does it work on a phone? Most local searches happen on one, standing up, in a hurry. A missing viewport tag means the desktop layout shrinks to illegibility.
Is the title tag right? The blue headline in Google. 15–65 characters, the thing you do first, the town second.
Is there a meta description? The grey sentence underneath. It does not rank you; it decides whether anybody clicks the ranking you already have.
Is there one clear H1? One main heading saying plainly what you do, in the customer's words rather than the trade's.
Is there structured data? Address, phone, hours, service area in a form a machine can read. Invisible on the page. This is what earns a map card instead of a plain blue link.
Is there enough text? Under about 300 words there is nothing for a search engine to match a search against.
Is there an llms.txt or AGENTS.md? Two plain text files that tell an AI assistant what you do and who you serve.

Which to do first if you only do one

Mobile, then HTTPS. Those two are what a customer sees going wrong. The rest is what a search engine sees, and search engines are patient in a way that customers are not.

The cheap edge nobody local has taken yet

Across the businesses measured in this county, the ninth check is the one almost nobody passes. Two text files, no visible change to the site, and at the moment it is close to free differentiation. That will not stay true indefinitely.

Check your own site → Free, no signup, about ten seconds.

Terms on this page

Title tag: The clickable headline shown for a page in search results, set in the page's HTML rather than on the visible page.
Meta description: The short summary shown under the title in search results. Influences clicks, not rank.
Structured data: Machine-readable facts embedded in a page - address, hours, phone - usually as JSON-LD.
Viewport: A tag telling a phone browser how to size the page. Without it, mobile visitors get a shrunken desktop layout.
llms.txt: A plain text file at a site's root describing the business for AI assistants.
H1: The main heading of a page. One per page is the convention.

← All knowledge base entries