Almost every bad small business website is bad in one of the same seven ways. None of them are exotic, and none require a redesign to fix. They are worth knowing about because the cheapest improvement to your website is usually correcting something that is already there.
1. The phone number is not where the thumb is
On a phone, the top-right corner of the screen is the hardest place to reach one-handed, and it is exactly where most websites put the phone number. For any business where people ring rather than email, a fixed tap-to-call bar along the bottom of the screen will meaningfully change how many calls you get. It is a couple of hours of work.
2. The menu, price list or brochure is a PDF
A PDF cannot be read on a phone without pinching and zooming, cannot be found by a search engine, and is almost always out of date because updating it means finding the original file. Restaurants suffer worst, but it applies to any business with a price list.
3. The opening hours are wrong
Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Somebody drives to your premises, finds you closed, and does not come back - and they tell people. Bank holidays are the usual culprit, and this is the single most common piece of stale content on any local business website.
4. It takes six seconds to load
Usually because somebody uploaded photographs straight from a camera. A single unoptimised image can be larger than an entire well-built website. Most of your visitors are on mobile data, often with one bar, often standing outside somewhere - and they leave.
5. There is no price anywhere
Hiding prices feels like it protects your position. What it actually does is send people to a competitor who publishes theirs, because a customer with no information assumes the worst. If your pricing genuinely varies, publish a range and explain in one sentence what moves it.
6. It is written about you rather than for them
A homepage that opens with the year the business was founded and the owner's commitment to quality is answering a question nobody asked. The visitor wants to know whether you solve their problem, whether you cover their area, and what happens next. Everything else can wait.
7. Nobody has touched it since it launched
This is the one that causes the others. A website with no owner drifts - prices change, staff leave, services stop, and there is no obvious way to update anything without paying someone by the hour for something small. Three years later it is actively misrepresenting the business.