How to tell if your website is costing you customers
Earlier this year we kept meeting the same local business in different buildings: strong reputation, hundreds of Google reviews, a busy front counter, and a website that fights everyone who opens it. We wanted to know how many of those are out there. So we built an internal tool that scores local business websites automatically, from 2 public sources: Google Places data and Lighthouse, Google's free website audit.
We keep the tool to ourselves, since we use it to find businesses we can help. The method is not a secret. You can run every part of it on your own site by hand, and you should. Here is what we score and why.
The pattern worth finding
A weak website on a struggling business is not the story. The sites that matter belong to good businesses. Hundreds of reviews at 4-plus stars means the business already wins in person, face to face. When that same business has a site that crawls on a phone, the gap between the reputation and the website is where customers leak out.
The 4 signals we score
Load speed on a phone. Most people who find a local business on Google are holding a phone, often on a cell connection. Lighthouse scores that exact experience. A site that feels fine on the office computer can crawl on a phone in a parking lot.
Mobile usability. Text too small to read, buttons too close together to tap, layouts that break at phone width. If a visitor has to pinch and zoom to find your phone number, most will not bother.
Your listing and your site disagree. The Google listing says open Saturday, the site says closed. The listing has one phone number, the footer has another. People notice, and they stop trusting both.
Signs of neglect. Dead links, a copyright year from way back, a menu page that returns a 404 (the page-not-found error). Visitors read neglect on a website the same way they read it on a storefront.
Slow sites lose customers silently
Nobody emails a business to say the website was slow. They tap back and call the next result on the list. That is what makes this expensive: the loss never shows up anywhere. You see the customers who arrived, never the ones who left while the page loaded.
The owners are usually the last to know. The site was built years ago, it looks fine on their desktop, and no complaint ever arrives.
Run the test yourself, 10 minutes
- Open your site on your phone, on cellular, standing outside your own wifi. Count the seconds before you can read it.
- Run PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev. It is free, made by Google, and runs the same Lighthouse audit we use. Read the mobile score first, since that is how your customers arrive.
- Put your Google Business Profile next to your site and match the hours, phone number, and address.
- Tap every link in your own menu.
If the mobile score comes back low and the site is several years old, that is worth a conversation with whoever built it.
You do not need our tool for any of this. The signals are public and the fixes are ordinary work. Ten minutes on your phone tonight will tell you most of what our scoring tells us.
Go tap around your own site. Your next customer already is.