A site I audited recently had zero pages indexed by Google after months online.
Not ranked badly. Not buried on page four. Absent — Google did not have a single page of it. The owner had no idea. He had paid for the site, he had paid somebody monthly since, and nothing about it looked broken. It loaded. It had photographs of real jobs on it. If you had shown it to him on a laptop he would have told you it was fine, and he would have been describing it accurately.
That is the part worth sitting with. A site can look perfectly fine and be doing every one of these things.
The faults that cost a contractor work are not the ones you notice. You look at your site on your own machine, where the browser saved a copy last time so it loads instantly, and it looks how you remember it. Meanwhile somebody searched at 9pm, landed on it from a phone on mobile data, and left. You never heard about it. There is no notification for the job that didn’t call.
Why I’m writing this instead of a sales page
I build and maintain websites for trades. Before I will quote anyone, I run their site through a crawler that checks 24 specific things — not opinions about the design, but facts: does it load, does it have a certificate, does it have a page title, is the phone number a link.
I’m publishing the list because the whole check takes about a minute per item and you don’t need me to do it. Some of these you can fix yourself in an afternoon, and I’ve said so plainly where that’s true.
I’ll also tell you the one thing most “free website audit” tools won’t.
Mine refuses to guess. Early on it reported any site returning an error code as “doesn’t load at all.” Then I checked by hand: four out of five sites flagged that way were working perfectly for humans — they were returning bot protection, which is a site defending itself, not a site that’s broken. So those now come back as needs manual check, and the report says nothing.
A checker that admits when it doesn’t know is the only kind whose certainties are worth anything. Keep that in mind when something else scores your site 38 out of 100 and asks for your email.
Act I — The five that lose the visit
Somebody found you. That was the hard part and it already happened. These are the ways the site loses them in the next three seconds.
01It renders desktop-width on a phone
What it is. The site was built to a desktop layout and never told the phone what to do with it. The phone does the only thing it can: shows the whole desktop page, shrunk to thumbnail size.
What it costs you. Your customer is standing in a flooded utility room holding a phone. To find your number they have to pinch, zoom and drag around a page built for a monitor. Most people don’t. This is the most common serious fault I find, and it is invisible from your desk — because your desk has a monitor on it.
Check it yourself. Open your site on your phone with wifi off, on mobile data. If you have to zoom in to read anything, that’s the fault. That’s it.
02The browser tells visitors your site is “Not Secure”
What it is. The site is served over http:// rather than https://. Chrome and Safari put a warning in the address bar where the padlock should be.
What it costs you. A stranger about to hand over a phone number and a home address is being shown a security warning by their own browser, at the exact moment they were deciding whether you’re legitimate. Nothing on the page gets to argue with that warning. It is the browser’s opinion, not yours, and they trust the browser.
Check it yourself. Look at the address bar on your homepage. No padlock, or a “Not Secure” label, and that’s the fault.
You can usually fix this one yourself. Most hosts now issue the certificate free and it’s close to a toggle. If yours doesn’t, that tells you something useful about your host.
03Several seconds of blank screen before anything appears
What it is. Oversized photographs straight off a phone camera, a page loading a dozen things it doesn’t need, or simply a slow host.
What it costs you. The visitor is not watching a loading bar admiring your patience. They are going back to the search results — where your competitor is — and the page they land on next is going to feel fast by comparison. You aren’t only losing that person. You’re making the next contractor look good.
Check it yourself. On your phone, on mobile data, type your address in fresh and count out loud. If you get past three before you see anything real, that’s the fault.
I keep “slow” and “very slow” as two separate entries with different weights, because there is a real difference between a site that drags and one that shows a white screen for five seconds.
04The footer says 2019
What it is. A copyright year typed in once, by hand, when the site was built. Nobody has touched it since.
What it costs you. This one is pure signal and it is brutal. A homeowner comparing three contractors sees a date from six years ago and quietly concludes you might not be trading any more. Nothing further down the page gets read, because they’ve already left. It costs you the job before anyone has read a word about your work.
Check it yourself. Scroll to the bottom of your homepage. Read the year.
It is also, without question, the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
05There is nowhere to actually make contact
What it is. No contact form, no tappable phone number, no email link. Or — far more common, and much worse — a form that submits successfully, shows a cheerful thank-you message, and goes nowhere, because the address it forwards to hasn’t been checked since 2022.
What it costs you. Everything above this point worked. They searched, they found you, they liked the look of you, they decided to get in touch. And then the path ran out. A silent form is the most expensive fault on this list precisely because it only fails for the people who had already decided to call you.
Check it yourself. Two checks, and do both today. Tap your own phone number on your own site from a phone — if it doesn’t start a call, it’s text or an image, not a link. Then fill in your own contact form with a real message and see whether it arrives. I have found sites where the honest answer was “it hasn’t arrived since 2022.”
Five faults in, here’s where most people are
Every one of those is invisible from your own chair. Every one is checkable in about a minute. And not one of them has anything to do with whether your site “looks good” — which is what almost everybody is sold, because it’s the part that’s easy to show you in a meeting.
If you’ve found one already, you now know more about why the phone is quiet than you did ten minutes ago.
And if you’d sooner just talk to somebody: (310) 606-9426, call or text. Given that 413 of those 1,574 businesses publish a phone and 61 publish an email, I’d be a hypocrite to make the phone the hard option.
Act II — The five that stop you being found
Everything in Act I assumed a customer reached your site. For a lot of the sites I check, that assumption is the actual problem — and it’s the one nobody suspects, because it produces no symptom. A site nobody can find looks exactly like a site nobody happens to want.
06The page has no title, or a title that could belong to anyone
What it is. The page title isn’t the heading on the page. It’s a separate line of text that Google shows as the clickable blue link in results. Plenty of sites have none. Plenty more say “Home” or “Welcome to our website”.
What it costs you. Somebody searched “emergency plumber Torrance” and is looking at ten blue links. Yours says “Home”. It doesn’t say what you do or where you are, so there’s nothing in it to pick — and a title that could belong to any business in any town can’t rank for a specific one either.
Check it yourself. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Read the blue links it comes back with. That’s what customers see. If your homepage says “Home”, that’s the fault.
07Both the www and non-www versions of your site load
What it is. yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com both open the site, and neither redirects to the other. To a person those are obviously the same site. To a search engine they can be two different ones.
What it costs you. Whatever credit the site has earned gets split across two addresses instead of pooling into one. Nothing looks broken — this is a fault you can only see by testing for it deliberately, which is precisely why it sits on so many sites for years.
Check it yourself. Type your address both ways, with and without the www. If both load and the address bar doesn’t snap to one version, that’s the fault.
08The page arrives almost empty
What it is. Some sites ship a nearly blank page and then build the real one in the visitor’s browser afterwards. Done properly, with a known framework, this is fine. Done carelessly, a search engine asks for your page and receives essentially nothing.
What it costs you. This is what produces the situation I opened with — zero pages indexed after months online. Not ranked badly. Absent. The owner sees a working site because his browser did the assembly. Google saw an empty room.
Check it yourself. This one’s harder by hand, so use the same site:yourdomain.com search. If Google returns far fewer pages than your site actually has — or none — something is stopping it reading them.
09No sitemap, so Google is guessing
What it is. A sitemap is a plain list of every page you have. Without one, a search engine finds pages only by following links from page to page.
What it costs you. Pages nothing links to are invisible. Not ranked low — undiscovered. The service page you had written for the work with the best margin may simply never have been found, and no report you’ve been sent would show that, because it isn’t a failure, it’s an absence.
Check it yourself. Open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Either a list appears or you get an error.
10Your Google listing points somewhere you don’t control
What it is. The Google Business Profile — the box with your name, stars and directions — is separate from your website. It can be unclaimed, wrong, or aimed at an address that no longer exists.
What it costs you. I’ll use my own client, because it’s the clearest example I have and it isn’t flattering. Dink’s Plumbing has a site I built. Their Google listing is unclaimed, rated 1.0★, and points at a dead .com that isn’t theirs any more. Anyone searching them meets a one-star box and a broken link before the site is ever in the running. The site is not the constraint. It was never the constraint.
Check it yourself. Search your business name. Look at the box on the right. Is it claimed? Is the website link the site you actually use? Is the star rating one you’d want a stranger to see first?
Ten faults, and a pattern
Five ways to lose somebody who found you. Five reasons fewer people find you.
Notice that not one of the ten is “the design is dated.” That’s not an oversight on my part — it’s the finding. The things that measurably cost trades work are mechanical, checkable, and mostly invisible in the meeting where somebody shows you a nice-looking mockup.
The part where I tell you what I can’t promise you
Every page shaped like this one ends with a promise about how much more work you’ll get. I’m not going to make that promise, and I want to be plain about why, because it’s the most useful thing in this article.
I don’t have that evidence. I have no measured before-and-after figures of my own showing what fixing these faults did to anybody’s phone volume. To claim a number I haven’t measured would be a straightforward lie, and an unsupportable earnings claim is a legal problem as well as a dishonest one.
So here is the honest division.
What I can tell you, because it’s measurable: exactly which of the 24 faults your site has. What each one does, mechanically. Which ones you can fix yourself. What it costs to have the rest fixed and kept fixed. Three sites I’ve built that are live right now, with the reasoning behind every decision written out — so you can judge the work rather than take a reference on faith.
What I can’t tell you: what any of that will do to your calendar.
When somebody shows you a revenue chart going up and to the right, look closely at whose revenue it is. It’s almost always the agency describing itself, or one client’s claim about themselves. That’s a testimonial, not evidence about you.
I’d rather hand you a list you can verify in ten minutes than a number you have to believe.
Act III — The reason it doesn’t stay fixed
11Nothing has changed since the day it was built
What it is. The site was finished, signed off, and left alone. That’s not neglect — it’s what almost everybody is sold. A build is a project, and projects end.
What it costs you. A page that ranked third for two years and now sits eleventh almost certainly wasn’t penalised. Nothing was taken away from you. Ranking is a comparison, not a score — competitors published, links broke, the ground moved, and the page stood exactly still. Standing still is the whole mechanism.
Check it yourself. When did anything on your site last change? Not the hosting invoice — the site. If you can’t remember, that’s the answer.
This is also why “I already had a website built” and “I already pay somebody monthly” can both be true while every fault in this article is present. The question isn’t whether money is going out. It’s whether anybody has looked.
So what does it actually cost to fix
Quotes for the same site genuinely range from $500 to $15,000. The number isn’t the confusing part. What’s inside it is — and most quotes don’t say.
Mine is published, for the same reason the fault list is: $250 a month, no setup fee, live within the month. That includes the hosting, the upkeep and the changes, because the upkeep is the product. A build that’s left alone becomes this article again in three years.
There are two larger options — automation that answers and follows up on the calls you can’t take, and a version that covers the Google listing side as well. They’re on the offer page with their prices next to them.
Where to start
If you’ve read this far you’ve probably found at least one of the eleven on your own site. Most people find three.
Fix the free ones yourself — the copyright year, the certificate, the tappable phone number. I mean that; none of those need me.
For the rest, or if you’d rather just know:
Or call or text (310) 606-9426. Of the 1,574 businesses I pulled records for, 413 published a phone number and about 61 published an email — so I’d be a hypocrite to make the phone the hard option.
— Nick Volpe, Volpe Web Development, Hawthorne CA