Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
When you run a small business, your website serves the same function as a calling card – it provides essential information about your business. It also could be the first point of contact for potential new customers, so it is important you keep your site up to date and that it gives new visitors a good impression. Here are five important tips that you should keep in mind to ensure that you put your best foot forward.
Make it easy for visitors to find your contact information
When potential new customers visit your website, they want to be able to find essential information quickly. If your site loads slowly, they’re not likely to stay very long and will look elsewhere for the goods or services they want. Even if your site loads quickly, visitors will expect a well-organized site that makes it easy to find key information about your company. Therefore, be sure to include your contact information on your homepage. If you operate a brick-and-mortar store, include your street address and operating hours as well. Everyone is in a hurry these days, and most visitors won’t take the time to search through multiple pages to find it.
Use high-quality photographs
You’re trying to make a good impression, so you should use attractive photos of your products to entice customers. Don’t use generic stock photos. If your customer purchases an item that does not match the photo when it arrives, you’ll have a very unhappy customer who probably won’t ever make a purchase from you again. If you are providing professional services, include photos of key staff members to help start building a relationship.
Make your site mobile-friendly
The trend to use mobile devices continues to grow, so you should assume that many, if not most of your customers will at some point access your site on a mobile device. Customers now expect to have the same experience viewing a website on a mobile device as they do on a desktop computer, and you will lose credibility if your site does not meet that expectation. Not only will you provide your customers with a better user experience, but search engines will also reward you with a higher search rank.
Make judicious use of content
If you’re selling products, keep your product descriptions concise and informative. Customers want information that can help them make a purchasing decision and not a lot of fluff that wastes their time. The same advice holds true for any “about us” web pages and staff biographies if you are a professional services firm.
Provide a clear call to action at key decision points
When customers visit your website, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to make an online purchase? Do you want them to visit your brick-and-mortar store? Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Do you want them to call or email you to set up an appointment? Whatever you want them to do, be sure you have a clear call to action at the appropriate places on your website that encourages them to do it.
It may be a cliché, but it’s true – you only have one chance to make a good first impression. But more of all, make sure that if you’re sending visitors to your website make sure that not only is your website up but that it loads quickly before they click away and go to your competitor instead.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026