Why your nephew's website is costing you jobs

It was free, it was built with love, and it's quietly sending your customers to the guy across town.

Every trade has one. A site built by a nephew, a friend's kid, or the owner himself on a weekend in 2015. It was free. It looked fine at the time. Nobody's touched it since.

Here's what it's doing today.

It doesn't work on a phone

Most of your visitors are on a phone. If the site was built for a desktop monitor, they're pinching and zooming and giving up.

It loads slow

Old hosting, big uncompressed photos, a plugin that stopped updating. Eight seconds on a mobile connection. Half your visitors are gone at three.

Google doesn't trust it

No SSL, no service pages, no connection to your Google Business Profile. Google sees an abandoned site and ranks it like one.

Nobody can update it

Hours changed? New service? Your nephew's in college now. So the site says you're closed Saturdays when you're not.

What it's costing

Say five people a week find your site and leave because of one of these. One of them would have called. That's fifty jobs a year going to whoever's site worked.

None of this is your nephew's fault. Websites are a job, and it's not his. It's not yours either. It's ours.