Website
Health Check

Website design used to be simple: make it look right on a PC and a Mac. Today most of your visitors arrive on a phone.

Responsive design means your site adapts automatically to the screen it is being viewed on, whether that is a 27-inch monitor or a 6-inch phone. It is no longer a nice-to-have. In South Africa the majority of first visits to a small-business website happen on mobile data, on a mid-range handset, often on a patchy connection.

If your site was only ever designed for desktop, it will feel cramped and awkward on a phone: text too small to read, buttons too close together, forms that are painful to complete. Visitors who struggle simply leave — and you never find out they were there.

The test that matters

Open your own website on your phone, on mobile data, and try to do the one thing you most want a customer to do. If it takes more than three taps or any pinching and zooming, you have found your first fix.

Good user experience is customer service in digital form. Confusing navigation, dated design or a long-winded process will send people to a competitor.

Structure your content. Keep it concise and organised into logical sections. The most important information belongs at the top of the page, visible without scrolling, and a visitor should always be able to find their way back if they take a wrong turn.

Design for everyone. Readable colour contrast, legible fonts, scalable text and descriptive alt text serve people with visual impairments or dyslexia — and search engines reward the same things.

Make actions feel safe. Where someone fills in a form or pays, give clear step-by-step guidance and say plainly that their information is handled securely. Uncertainty at the moment of commitment is where most sales are lost.

Every business wants to appear high in search results — it is how new customers find you. Google guards its algorithm closely, but the fundamentals are well established.

Website structure. Keep your site to roughly three levels: a home page, sections or categories, and sub-sections. Link the home page to every section and link related sections to each other so search engines can crawl and understand your site.

Titles and descriptions. Include relevant keywords in page titles, meta descriptions and page content — but write for humans first. Content that reads naturally always outperforms content stuffed with keywords.

Imagery. Search engines cannot read text inside an image. If your key messages live inside graphics they will not be indexed. Give every image a descriptive file name and an accurate alt tag.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action you want — an enquiry, a booking, a purchase, a sign-up.

Traffic without conversion is just noise. A few simple techniques move the needle more than a redesign ever will.

Build trust. If you want someone to sign up, give them a reason — a discount, early access, or a genuinely useful free resource, provided the value is obvious and immediate.

Simplify the process. People do what is easy. If you want calls, put your phone number on every page. If you want sign-ups, ask for as few fields as you can get away with. Every extra field costs you conversions.

Be clear about who you serve. Make it obvious who your product or service is for. Being specific saves time for you and for the people who were never going to be a fit.

Rule of thumb

One page, one primary action. If a page is asking a visitor to do four things, it is really asking them to do nothing.

Search engines measure how quickly a page loads, because nothing frustrates a visitor more than waiting for content before they can use it.

The most common cause of a slow site is heavy, content-rich pages — particularly oversized images and video. Poor hosting, sloppy code and obsolete formats add to the problem.

Speed is not a technical vanity metric. On a mobile connection, a few seconds of delay is the difference between an enquiry and a bounce. It also affects your ranking directly, so a slow site is penalised twice: once by the visitor, once by Google.

Where the seconds hide

Uncompressed images, too many third-party scripts and tracking tags, cheap shared hosting, and page builders that load code the page never uses.

Large image files are the single biggest drag on most small-business websites — and the easiest thing to fix.

Use sensible formats such as JPEG, PNG or modern WebP, and compress every image so the file size drops without a visible loss of quality. Remove decorative graphics that add weight but no meaning, and use real text rather than text baked into a picture.

Name your images properly. Give each one an informative, hyphen-separated name so search engines understand what it shows: rename IMG000348_resized.jpg to our-company-venue.jpg.

Describe them. A clear alt description adds context for search engines and makes your site usable for visitors relying on assistive technology. It takes seconds per image and compounds over time.

Search engines watch how a website handles user information. Google gives preference to sites using a secure transfer protocol — HTTPS, also known as having an SSL certificate.

An HTTPS connection creates a secure pathway between your website's server and the visitor's device, protecting the data that travels between them. Today it is expected of every website, not only those handling payments.

How to check your own site: open your website in a browser and look at the address bar. If you see https:// and a padlock icon, you are covered. If it still shows http:// or there is no padlock, upgrading should be your next job.

Beyond protection from attacks and breaches, HTTPS brings a trusting relationship with clients, better speed, richer analytics, and eligibility for Google services that require higher security standards.

Do not postpone this one

An insecure site is flagged to visitors by their own browser — a warning screen on your home page undoes every rand you have spent on marketing.

A stale website reads the same as a stale business — even when the business behind it is anything but.

Search engines factor recency into ranking, but visitors judge faster and harsher. An outdated blog post, an expired promotion still live on the homepage, or pricing that no longer matches what you charge tells a visitor nobody is minding the shop — and they leave assuming the same is true of your service.

The five-minute test

Pull up your homepage, your pricing, and your most recent blog post. If anything on screen would embarrass you in front of a client today, that's your first fix.