Pull your site up on your phone, not your desktop. Your customers do.
How do I know if my website is hurting me?
Five checks, ten minutes:
- Speed. Count to three. If it is still loading, people left.
- The phone number. Can you tap it in one move from the top of the page? If you have to hunt, so does a customer with a problem.
- The words. Read the first sentence. Does it say what you do and where? "Solutions for your success" is not what you do.
- The look. Does it look like three other businesses in town? A template is fine for a year. After that it says "we did not care enough."
- The date. When was anything on it last changed? Google and the AI assistants both prefer pages that are kept up. A site frozen since 2022 reads as abandoned.
Two or more of those and you need a new one, or at least a serious fix.
What does a small business website cost in 2026?
Mine start at $6,000 for a site with five to eight pages: design, help with the writing, the build, and getting it into Google and Bing the day it goes live. Online ordering, a members area, or a big product catalog are scoped separately. There is no monthly fee to me after launch, and you own everything.
Above $15,000 for a local business, someone should be able to tell you exactly what the extra money buys.
What is the thing most sites are missing now?
Plain sentences an AI assistant can quote. More people now ask ChatGPT, Google, or Siri "who does X near me" instead of searching. Those assistants pull answers from pages that state plain facts in plain sentences: what you do, where, what it costs, who it is for. A site full of slogans gives them nothing to quote. Every site I build is written so a person can read it and a machine can quote it, and it carries the structured data that tells search engines what the business is. That is included, not an add-on.
Can I fix the current site instead?
Often, yes. If the bones are fine and the trouble is speed, words, and the phone number, a fix runs $1,500 to $3,000 and takes a couple of weeks. I will tell you on the first call which one you need, and I do not sell new sites to people who need a fix.
How long does it take?
Four to eight weeks once we have the words and the photos. Those are always the slow part, so we start on them in week one, and I help with both.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.