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9 website mistakes NZ small businesses keep making

By the GoDigital team, Auckland Published 4 min read

The short answer: the nine repeat offenders — a buried phone number, no service areas, say-nothing copy, wall-to-wall stock photos, out-of-date facts, slow pages, facts machines can’t read, running the business on social alone, and a domain someone else owns. Every one has a same-week fix, and none of them requires a redesign.

We look at a lot of NZ small-business websites — it’s the job. The same nine mistakes appear over and over, on $200 sites and $8,000 sites alike. Here they are, each with the fix.

1. The hidden phone number

The most expensive mistake is the dumbest one: a phone number living only at the bottom of the page, in small grey type, not tappable. A customer on a phone with a leaking pipe will not go hunting.

Fix: number at the top, tappable, repeated at the bottom. Done in ten minutes.

2. No service areas anywhere

“Quality painting at competitive prices” — where? Nothing on the page says Whangārei or Winton. Customers bounce because they can’t tell if you’ll come; search engines and AI assistants can’t recommend you for local queries because you never said where local is.

Fix: a plain sentence naming your suburbs, towns or regions. Our prep list calls this the highest-value sentence on the page.

3. Copy that says nothing

“Welcome to our website. We are committed to excellence and customer satisfaction.” Nobody searched for that, and no machine can quote it. Every sentence a stranger can’t act on is a sentence working against you — remember, when AI summarises you, it can only quote what you actually said.

Fix: replace slogans with specifics — what you do, for whom, at what rough price, how fast.

4. Stock-photo everything

The handshake. The headset woman. The suspiciously gleaming generic kitchen. NZ customers clock stock photography instantly, and it answers none of their real questions: what does your work look like?

Fix: six phone photos of real jobs beat any image library. Real-but-imperfect converts; polished-but-fake doesn’t.

5. Facts that expired

Christmas hours in July. A price list “current as at 2023”. A blog whose last post is three winters old. Stale facts don’t just fail to help — they actively signal “nobody’s home”, and both customers and AI systems weight freshness.

Fix: fix expired facts this week, then delete anything you won’t maintain. No blog beats a dead blog.

6. The slow site

Huge uncompressed photos, heavyweight themes, plugins on plugins. On mobile data it loads like porridge, and browsing is overwhelmingly mobile. Slow loses twice: the human gives up, and Google’s systems grade the experience.

Fix: run PageSpeed Insights, compress the photos, and if the theme itself is the anchor, a lightweight rebuild is often cheaper than surgery.

7. Facts machines can’t read

The menu that’s a photo of a menu. Prices locked in a PDF. Hours that exist only as an image. Humans can squint; search engines and AI assistants mostly can’t — Pew’s research shows people increasingly read answers rather than visiting pages, and answers are assembled from plain text.

Fix: every fact that matters — services, prices, hours, areas — lives as typed text on the page, not inside an image.

8. Running the whole business on social

A Facebook page instead of a website means renting your only shopfront from an algorithm. InternetNZ’s 2025 research found consumers drifting off social while 74% call a business’s website the most important way to engage — and 47% of NZ businesses still have no site to engage with.

Fix: keep social as the flyer; get one owned page as the shopfront. They link to each other and agree on every detail.

9. The domain someone else owns

The quiet catastrophe: the web address is registered to a former web guy, a defunct agency, or a mate from 2019. The day you want to move or they disappear, your address — the one on the van and the invoices — is legally theirs.

Fix: check the registrant today at the .nz register lookup, and read who should own your domain if the answer isn’t you.

Score yourself honestly. One to three mistakes: fix them this week — they’re all small. Four or more: the site is costing you work every day it stands, and a clean one-page rebuild with everything on the checklist done properly is usually the cheaper path. We build exactly those, and you can see yours free before deciding anything.

Common questions

What's the single highest-impact fix for getting more enquiries from my website?

Make contact effortless and proof visible: phone number tappable at the top of the page, one obvious next step, and reviews or job photos in the first screen or two. Most sites lose enquiries to friction and doubt, not to design taste.

How do I know if my website is too slow?

Open it on your phone on mobile data, not office wifi, and count. If you're waiting more than a few seconds, so are customers — and most won't. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool gives a more formal score; giant photos and bloated themes are the usual culprits.

How often should I update my website?

Whenever a fact changes — hours, prices, services, phone — the same week it changes. Beyond that, an annual once-over for dated photos and stale wording keeps the site honest. A visibly out-of-date site tells customers you've stopped looking, which they read as 'might not answer the phone either.'

Should I fix my current website or start again?

Count the mistakes on this list. One to three, and the bones are good: fix them this week. Four or more, or the site's slow and won't render properly on a phone, a rebuild is usually cheaper than renovation — modern one-pagers cost less than most repair jobs.

Are pop-ups a mistake on a small business website?

On a local one-pager, almost always. Pop-ups earn their keep on content sites harvesting newsletter signups; on a site whose whole job is 'read, trust, call', anything interrupting that costs more than it captures. Put the offer on the page, not on top of it.

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