Kalen Tech
Guide
What actually makes a small business website work.
Written for the person who owns the business, not for a designer. Everything below is something you can go and check on your own site this afternoon, and most of it you can fix yourself without paying anybody.
We would rather you had a site that works than a site we built. If you read this, do four of the things on it and never speak to us, that is a good outcome.
Check these today — three things, about half an hour
Understand these — the reasoning, and the evidence for it
Before you start
Find out what your site is built with. It takes a minute.
Half of what follows depends on it, and most people do not know.
Open your website on a computer, right-click anywhere on the page and choose View page source. A wall of text opens. Press Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on a Mac) and search for wix, then squarespace, then wordpress. Whichever one appears is what you are on. If none of them do, somebody built it by hand, and the person who did is who to ask.
If it says Wix or Squarespace, most of what follows is already done for you. They keep the software updated, they include the padlock, and there is nothing for you to patch. Read the phone number rule and the twenty-minute check at the bottom, and you can skip the rest with a clear conscience.
Rule one
Put your phone number where a customer sees it without scrolling.
On most small business websites it is buried at the bottom. This is the commonest mistake there is, and it costs nothing to put right.
On most of these sites the number sits in the footer, in grey, and it is not a link. To use it you have to scroll to the bottom, memorise eleven digits, scroll back, leave the site, open the keypad and type them in. Every one of those steps is somewhere the customer gives up and rings the next name on the list instead.
Put it near the top of your home page, big enough to press with a thumb, and set it up so that pressing it starts the call rather than just showing you the digits. Whoever built your site can do that in about ten minutes. If you built it yourself on Wix, Squarespace or WordPress, look in the settings for “phone” or “call button”.
Two things go next to it, in plain text rather than inside an image: your opening hours and the towns you cover. Those are the two questions the phone number raises, and answering them stops half the calls you do not want.
Check yours in thirty seconds
- Open your own site on your phone.
- Without scrolling, can you see the number?
- Tap it. Does the keypad open with the number already in it?
- If either answer is no, that is the first thing to fix, before anything else on this page.
The basics
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The first screen
Most people never scroll. Assume the first screen is the whole site.
On a phone you get roughly the top six inches. Almost everything that decides whether somebody rings you happens in that space, and it needs to answer four questions without anybody having to move a finger.
- What do you do? Not “quality you can trust” — the actual trade. “MOTs, servicing and repairs.” “Kitchens fitted.”
- Where do you do it? Name the towns. Somebody in Ware needs to know in one second whether you come out to Ware.
- How do I reach you? The number, tappable, right there.
- Are you open? Hours as text. “Open until 9.30 tonight” beats a timetable nobody reads.
If a stranger cannot answer those four from the first screen without scrolling, nothing further down the page will save it.
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Speed
A slow site is almost never slow because of hosting.
It is slow because of what was put on it: a photograph exported at eight megabytes, five web fonts, a video header, a chat widget, an analytics tag, a cookie tool loading a second cookie tool.
Your customer is often outdoors, on one bar of signal, in the rain, with a phone that is three years old. That is the machine your site has to work on, not the desktop it was designed on. Every second of delay is people leaving before they have seen your name.
The fix is subtraction, and it is mostly free. Resize your photographs before you upload them — 1,600 pixels wide is plenty, and turns eight megabytes into two hundred kilobytes. Remove anything that moves on its own. Then load your own site on your own phone, away from the wifi, and count.
Subtraction
What to leave out, and why each one costs you calls.
None of these were added to annoy anybody. They arrive as defaults in templates and as tick-boxes in builders, and nobody ever goes back and turns them off. Going back and turning them off is the job.
- The sliding banner. Nobody waits for slide three. Whatever is on it, put the important one on the page and delete the rest.
- The popup asking for an email address before anyone has read a sentence. On a phone it covers the content and the close button is the size of a pea.
- The chat widget with nobody behind it. If a message sits unanswered until Tuesday, it is worse than not having it. Somebody chose it instead of ringing.
- A cookie banner on a site that sets no cookies. Plenty of small sites set none at all. If yours does not, you do not need the banner, and putting one there is asking permission for something you are not doing.
- The stock photo of two people shaking hands. It tells nobody what you do, and one real photograph of your own work outdoes it every time.
- Automatic music or video. This is somebody’s phone, often in public.
- A contact form nobody has ever tested. This is the quiet one. The form looks finished, the visitor types their name and their job and presses send, the page says thank you, and the message goes nowhere, because the address it was wired to belonged to whoever built the site four years ago. Nobody complains, because the person who sent it thinks you ignored them. Fill your own form in today, from your own phone, and see whether an email arrives.
What goes there instead
Something dull and short: the number, tappable, and a form with three or four boxes that sends you a plain email you can reply to from your phone.
Not everybody wants to ring. Some people would rather message, in the evening or from a train, and if there is nowhere to type, that job goes to whoever has a form.
The rest of it
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Character
It should look like your business, not like a website.
A joiner’s site and a dental practice’s site should not be the same page with different photographs dropped in. Their customers want different things, and that ought to change the layout, not just the colour.
The useful test is blunt: cover up the name. If the page could belong to any other firm in the county, it is not yours yet. The materials to fix that are already in your possession — the sign over the door, the colours you already use, the finished job in your camera roll. A site built from those looks like somewhere real. A site built from a template looks like a template, and customers can tell even when they cannot say why.
We drew six concept designs to show what that means in practice — a garage, a salon, a chip shop, a dental practice, a kitchen fitter and an electrician, no two of them alike.
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The listing
Keep the Google listing accurate. It is seen more than your website.
For most local businesses, the Google Business Profile, the box with the map, the hours and the stars, gets far more views than the website does. It is free, you control it, and it takes twenty minutes a quarter.
- Hours, including bank holidays. Wrong hours produce a wasted journey and a one-star review, which is the most expensive fifteen seconds of admin you will ever skip.
- The same name, address and phone number as your website. Word for word.
- Your own photographs, added occasionally. The shopfront, the workshop, the finished job.
- Answer the reviews, especially the bad ones, politely and in public.
Two things make this worth more than it used to be. First, Google shut down the free websites it generated from Business Profiles in March 2024 (Search Engine Journal), so the listing no longer comes with a site attached. If yours quietly disappeared, that is why. Second, around 30% of Google searches now show an AI summary, and 53% of UK adults see them frequently (Ofcom Online Nation 2025). Those summaries are assembled from plainly written facts, so hours, prices and service areas written as ordinary text on your own page are worth more than they were.
And the listing feeds the site: 54% of consumers go on to visit a business’s website after reading positive reviews, up from 32% in 2019 (BrightLocal, US sample). The reviews send people; the site has to be worth arriving at.
Do it yourself
Twenty minutes on your own site, on your own phone.
Take your phone off the wifi first. That is the point. Then work down this list. Anything you cannot tick is a job worth doing, in that order.
- Time the load. Count out loud from the moment you tap. Past four seconds, the photographs are almost certainly the reason.
- Find the phone number without scrolling. If you have to scroll, that is the first fix.
- Tap it. If the keypad does not open with the number in it, it is not a proper telephone link.
- Read the first line as a stranger. Does it say what you do and where, or does it say “welcome to our website”?
- Look for the towns you cover. In text, in the first screen, not on a contact page three taps away.
- Check your opening hours on the site and on your Google listing, and make sure they match each other and reality.
- Count what moves. Sliders, popups, chat bubbles, cookie bars. Each one is a candidate for deletion.
- Cover the business name with your thumb. Could this page belong to anybody else in the county?
- Search your own trade and town the way a customer would, and see what Google shows above the results.
- Ask someone who has never seen it to find your number while you watch, and say nothing while they do it.
If most of those tick, your site is already ahead of the majority and you do not need to spend money on it. If they do not, you now know what to ask for, from whoever you use.
Security
Nobody picked your website. A program found it.
Something works through web addresses all day looking for sites that have not been updated in a while. It has no idea what trade you are in. That is almost always how a small business site gets broken into.
The damage is rarely the break-in itself. It is that nothing looks wrong to you, so it sits there for months while your customers get a red warning page instead of your site.
What to actually do
- Make sure somebody is updating it. If nobody is, that is the job to give someone.
- Keep a copy of the site somewhere that is not the site, and try putting it back once. A backup nobody has ever restored is a belief, not a backup.
- Read the NCSC Small Business Guide. It is free, it is short, and it is written by the government’s own security people. Most trouble arrives by email rather than through your website, and that guide covers the email side properly.
One number you will be quoted
“60% of small businesses close within six months of a cyber attack.” It is invented. There is no study behind it, it traces back to an uncited line in a 2011 news article, and the organisation that popularised it has asked people to stop repeating it. It is still quoted every week, almost always by somebody selling something. If you hear it, you have learned nothing about your own risk and a good deal about whoever is talking.
Hiring
How people actually choose who builds it — including how to judge us.
73% of people who hired a web professional found them through a recommendation, and someone with a personal connection was 2.5 times more likely to be hired (GoDaddy, who asked 204 people). Ask the other businesses on your street who did theirs and whether they would use them again.
When you get to comparing, 71% of buyers in the same survey said portfolio and reviews were their top criteria. 64% were suspicious of a provider with no reviews, and nobody in that survey hired one with no portfolio at all. So ask for both, and ask for specifics:
- Three sites they have built, live, that you can open on your own phone.
- Whether the work shown is real client work or a concept design, and expect a straight answer.
- Who owns the domain name, in writing. It should be registered in your name from day one.
- Who owns the code, in writing. Most sites at this price are rented from a platform: you are paying for access, and if you leave there is nothing to take. Ask whether you get the actual files, and whether another developer could pick them up.
- What happens if you leave: what you take with you, and what it costs.
- How long a text change takes, and who does it.
Judged by our own list
By that standard Kalen Tech is the risky option, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
We are new, we have no reviews, and the work in our designs is clearly labelled as concept design because it has not been built for clients yet. That is exactly why it costs £50 a month and why you see the finished site on your own phone before you pay anything.
Where these came from
The figures on this page, and who published them.
- 78% of UK businesses have a website, rising to 84% of the smallest and 76% of sole traders — DSIT UK Business Data Survey 2026, 4,450 businesses.
- 73% found their web person through a recommendation, and 71% said portfolio and reviews decided it — GoDaddy survey of web-services buyers, 204 people. Small sample, so treat it as a direction rather than a measurement.
- 54% visit a business’s website after reading good reviews, up from 32% in 2019 — BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey. This one is US consumers; there is no UK equivalent, so it shows a direction, not what happens in your town.
- 30% of Google searches show an AI summary, and 53% of UK adults see them often — Ofcom Online Nation 2025.
- Google shut down the free Business Profile websites in March 2024 — Search Engine Journal.
- The “60% close within six months” figure is invented — it traces to an uncited line in a 2011 news article, and the organisation that popularised it has asked people to stop repeating it.
If a number on this page matters to you, go and read the source rather than take our word for it. That advice works on every frightening figure anybody shows you, including ours.
If you would rather not
If you would rather somebody else did all this, that is what we do. What it costs and what is in it. Still stuck, or just want to talk it through first? Get in touch.