Pull your site up on your phone, not your desk. That is where your customers see it.
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? Templates are fine for a year. After that they say "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 yes, 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.
Below that price you are getting a template with your logo dropped in. Above $15,000 for a local business you should be getting something specific and someone should be able to explain exactly what.
What is the thing most sites are missing now?
Being quotable. More and more people 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 carries the structured data behind the scenes that tells search engines exactly what the business is.
That is not an add-on. It is just how websites should be written now.
Can I fix the current site instead?
Often, yes. If the bones are fine and the problem 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 it is. 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. The words and the photos are always the slow part, so we start there, 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.