Your Website Is Not Working. Here Is Why, and What It Costs You.

The four reasons a small business site stops loading

Almost every dead small business website we look at fails for one of four reasons. None of them mean your business is in trouble. They mean a piece of plumbing broke and nobody told you.

You do not need to understand the technology. You only need to recognize which one you have.

Most owners find out their site is down from a customer, not from the company that hosts it. If that is how you found out, you are in the normal group.

• Lapsed hosting. The bill for the computer that serves your site went unpaid, or the card on file expired. The site still exists somewhere. Nothing answers when a visitor knocks.
• A domain or DNS record pointing nowhere. You still own the name, but the record that connects that name to your site is missing or wrong. Visitors land on nothing.
• An expired security certificate. The padlock on your site ran out, so browsers now show a full page warning that the connection is not private. Most people turn around.
• A page builder that shut down or lapsed. Some older site builders stopped being supported, or the license ran out, so the pages stop rendering. You get a blank screen.

How to tell which one you have in under a minute

Open your own site on your phone, not on the computer you always use. The way it fails usually tells you the reason.

• A warning page about the connection not being private, or a message about your clock being wrong, is the security certificate.
• A message that the site cannot be reached, or your business name returning nothing at all in a search, is hosting or the domain record.
• A blank page with your logo at the top and nothing underneath is usually the page builder.
• If it fails on one phone and works on another, ask one person you trust to try it on theirs. It may be a stale copy saved on your own phone.

What a broken site costs you every day

Every day your site is down, people who were ready to hire you see an error instead. Most of them do not try twice. They tap back and call the next name on the list.

A tradesperson who loses two calls a day feels it by Friday. A shop that loses one booking a day feels it by the end of the month. The site is the first thing a stranger sees, and right now it says closed.

• Callers who tap your listing, hit the error, and never come back.
• People who assume you shut down. A broken site reads as a closed business.
• Jobs that go to the competitor whose site simply loads.
• Your regulars losing the page they use for your hours and phone number.
• Your own listing sending people straight to a page that fails. That is the same as paying for a listing you cannot use.

What not to do when your site goes down

The first instinct is to find someone who will make the error go away today. That is only worth it when the site was working well last week and something small changed.

If the site was already old, slow, and unusable on a phone, paying to patch it buys you a few weeks and another invoice.

• Do not pay to patch a site that never worked on a phone. You will pay again in a few months.
• Do not pay a monthly fee to keep a broken design alive.
• Do not rebuild on a platform that can shut down again. Ask what happens to your site if the tool goes away.
• Do not approve work you have not seen. Look at the finished thing on your own phone first.
• Do not ignore it and hope it comes back on its own. It does not come back on its own.

How we handle it: a full rebuild, not a patch

We do not patch the old site. We rebuild the whole thing from scratch, using your own services, your area, and your opening hours.

Everything we need comes from your public listings, so there is nothing for you to fill in and no software for you to learn. You see the finished site before you pay anything, and you keep the preview either way.

We have looked at 12,823 local businesses across 8 US metros and built 330 replacement sites so far. You can see real examples at preview.localsiteshop.com, including 3 Kings Barber Studio in Tucson, A Healthy Smile Dental Center and Aariana Animal Hospital in Colorado Springs, and 1st Choice Painting and Remodeling and Access the Triangle in Raleigh.

What the rebuilt site gives you

The replacement is five pages, built phone first, and it loads in under a second on a normal mobile connection.

It goes live on the domain you already own and already pay for, within 24 hours of you saying yes.

• Five pages: home, services, about, FAQ, and contact.
• Your own services, your area, and your opening hours.
• A real map, and a tap to call button so a caller never has to copy a number.
• Phone first design that loads in under a second.
• 600 dollars flat, one time. No retainer, no contract, no sales call.
• No monthly fee for the first year.
• Payment by card or bank transfer through a link in an email, after you have seen the site.
• No software for you to update and no plug-ins to renew.

Questions we get about this