Before You Build (or Fix) Your Website, Answer These 3 Questions
Most small business websites are built back-to-front. These three questions, answered honestly, are the foundation every site should be built on.
Here's how most small business websites come to life: someone picks a template they like, writes some copy about what they do, adds a few photos, and hits publish. Job done.
Except the job isn't done. Because somewhere in that process, the most important questions never got asked.
What do you actually want this site to do? What are your visitors looking for when they land on it? And is there a clear path connecting those two things?
Without answers to those questions, a website is essentially a brochure sitting in a drawer — it exists, but it isn't working. And for small business owners who've invested real time and money into their site, that's a frustrating place to be.
The good news: these aren't complicated questions. You don't need to be a web developer or a marketing expert to answer them. You just need to know your business — which you already do.
Let's work through them one at a time.
Question 1: What Do You Want Visitors to Do?
Your website should have a job. Does yours?
Every business website needs a primary goal — one clear action it's designed to drive. Not six actions, not a vague sense of 'building awareness'. One thing.
For some businesses that's making a purchase. For others it's submitting an enquiry form, calling the business directly, booking an appointment, or reading content that builds trust over time. There's no universally right answer. What matters is that you've chosen one, and that your entire site is designed around making that action as easy as possible.
If a visitor could only do one thing on your website, what would you want it to be?
The problem with having no clear goal is obvious: if you don't know what you want visitors to do, they won't know either. They'll look around, find nothing that compels them to act, and leave.
But there's an equally common trap on the other end — too many goals competing for attention at once. A homepage that simultaneously asks visitors to book a call, sign up to a newsletter, follow on Instagram, browse the shop, and read the blog is a homepage that asks visitors to do nothing. When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Secondary goals are absolutely fine. It's good to have people follow you on social, or read your blog, or sign up to your email list. But those should sit in the background. Your primary goal should drive every major design and content decision — where the most prominent button goes, what the headline says, what visitors see the moment they land on your page.
Think about it: Write down the one action you most want a new visitor to take on your site. Now open your homepage and ask: is that action obvious? Is it easy? Is it the first thing that catches the eye?
Question 2: What Do Your Visitors Expect When They Arrive?
Your goals only matter if your visitors' needs are met first.
Here's something that trips up a lot of business owners: they build their website around what they want to say, rather than what their visitors want to find.
It's an understandable mistake. You know your business inside out, you're proud of what you've built, and you want to tell that story. But your visitors arrive with their own agenda — and if your site doesn't address that quickly, they're gone.
So what do visitors to a small business website typically want? A few things tend to come up consistently:
- Immediate clarity — 'Is this business relevant to me?' People decide within seconds whether to stay or leave. Your headline and opening section need to answer this question fast.
- Answers to basic questions — what you do, who you help, where you're based, and how to get in touch. These should never be hard to find.
- Evidence that you're trustworthy — reviews from real customers, photos of your actual work, credentials, a real address and phone number. These signals matter more than most business owners realise.
- A fast, easy experience — especially on mobile, where the majority of web browsing now happens. A slow or awkward mobile experience is a fast exit.
- A sense that they've come to the right place — that you understand their situation and can genuinely help.
Notice that none of those are about you. They're all about the visitor. The businesses that get this right don't just have nicer websites — they have websites that actually convert visitors into enquiries and customers.
The best websites aren't built around what the owner wants to say. They're built around what the visitor needs to know.
Understanding your visitors also makes everything else easier. It helps you write better copy, choose images that actually resonate, and structure your pages so that the most important information is where people naturally look for it.
Think about it: Think back to the last time you visited a business website as a customer — not as a business owner. What did you want to find in the first ten seconds? Did you find it? Now
Question 3: Is There a Clear Path to Get There?
A great goal and a willing visitor still aren't enough if the road between them is unclear.
You know what you want visitors to do. You understand what they're looking for. Now the question is: does your website actually make it easy to get from one to the other?
This is where a lot of otherwise decent websites quietly fall down. The business is good, the service is solid, the site looks fine — but the path from 'I'm interested' to 'I've taken action' is full of friction. Confusing navigation, no obvious next step, too many clicks to reach the thing that matters most.
Some of the most common obstacles:
- Navigation that uses internal jargon instead of plain language — if your menu says 'Solutions' when you mean 'Services', visitors have to do extra mental work to figure out where to go.
- Key information buried too deep — if your phone number is only on the Contact page, you're making people search for it. It should be visible everywhere.
- No clear calls to action — or calls to action that blend into the background. A 'Contact Us' link in small grey text at the bottom of a page is not a call to action.
- Too many choices at once — presenting visitors with eight different options at every decision point creates decision fatigue. People opt out rather than choose.
- A contact or checkout process that has too many steps — every extra field in a form, every extra page in a checkout, is a point where you lose people.
A clear path looks like this: a headline that immediately confirms the visitor is in the right place, a prominent and obvious next step visible without scrolling, navigation that uses the words visitors actually use, and a logical flow from awareness through to action.
The test is simple:
The 3-tap test: Open your website on your phone as if you're a first-time visitor. How long does it take to figure out what to do next? Can you complete the main action — making an enquiry, booking, or buying — in three taps or fewer? If not, there's friction worth fixing.
The Question Behind the Questions
Once you can answer all three, you have the brief for your entire website.
Put the three questions together and something interesting happens. You have a clear primary goal. You understand what your visitors need. And you've mapped a path between the two. That's not just good web strategy — that's the brief every website should be built from.
Which raises the obvious follow-up question: does your current website actually do all of this?
There are some reliable signs that it might not:
- You get decent traffic but few enquiries or sales — people are finding you, but something is stopping them from acting.
- Customers call or email asking questions that are answered on your site — your content is there, but it's not findable.
- You're not sure what your website's 'job' actually is — which means it probably doesn't have one.
- The site was built a few years ago and hasn't been touched since — the goals may have changed, but the site hasn't.
None of this means your website is beyond saving. In most cases, a clear-eyed review and a set of targeted improvements can make a significant difference — without rebuilding from scratch.
The three questions are also worth revisiting regularly, even if your site is already performing well. Businesses evolve. Audiences shift. What worked two years ago might be quietly underperforming today.
To Bring It Together
Before you build, redesign, or even tweak your website, get clear on three things:
- What do you want visitors to do? — Choose one primary goal and build everything around it.
- What do your visitors expect? — Design the experience around their needs first, and your goals will follow.
- Is there a clear path connecting those two things? — Remove the friction. Make the next step obvious at every stage.
These aren't big, complicated questions. But they're the ones most websites never get asked — and the reason most websites never quite do what their owners hoped they would.
Answer them honestly, and you're already ahead of most.
Not sure how your site stacks up?
I offer a website review for small businesses — no jargon, no obligation, just an honest look at what's working and what could work harder.