Over the past few weeks, I’ve probably visited around 50 small business websites while planning a trip.
Restaurants, coffee shops, stores, wellness businesses, attractions and plenty of others.
I wasn’t researching websites.
I wasn’t conducting UX audits, running performance tests or deliberately looking for design problems. I was doing what their customers do: checking menus, comparing prices, looking at services, finding hours, figuring out locations and deciding where I actually wanted to go.
I design and develop websites for a living, so naturally I noticed things I would have done differently.
But that wasn’t actually the most interesting part.
A lot of the things I noticed as a web professional didn’t really matter to me as a customer.
Some websites weren’t particularly attractive but gave me exactly what I needed. Others looked perfectly fine but made something as simple as finding a price or booking a service unnecessarily difficult.
And somewhere in the middle were a lot of websites that were simply... fine.
So rather than turning this into a list of everything 50 small business websites are supposedly doing wrong, I wanted to look at something I think is much more useful:
What actually matters when someone is trying to use your website?
I cared more about finding information than perfect design
Most of the time, I wasn’t visiting these websites to admire the design.
I was trying to answer fairly basic questions.
- What do you offer?
- How much does it cost?
- What is included?
- Where are you located?
- When are you open?
- Do I need an appointment?
- How do I book?
- What does the place, food or experience actually look like?
A lot of the businesses I found through things like Google Maps, social media or recommendations first.
By the time I landed on their website, I already had some level of interest.
The website didn’t necessarily need to convince me that the business existed. It needed to help me decide whether I wanted to go there, buy something or book something.
Those questions eventually became part of a broader framework I use for thinking about small business website content. I break that down in The 7 Customer Questions Every Small Business Website Should Answer.
Missing information bothered me more than mediocre design
This was probably one of the clearest patterns I noticed.
A website can look average and still be perfectly useful.
What became much more frustrating was when I couldn’t find the information I expected to be there.
I came across things like:
- menus that appeared to be outdated
- prices that didn’t seem to line up properly with menu items
- services without enough explanation
- products or food items I had seen elsewhere that weren’t shown clearly on the website
- attractions that didn’t explain enough about what you would actually see or experience
- businesses where it wasn’t clear whether an appointment was required
None of those are particularly exciting web design problems.
They are information problems.
Having a website and having a useful website are not necessarily the same thing.
A business can technically have all the expected pages and still leave out the information customers actually came looking for.
Deciding what information belongs together and what deserves its own page is part of that too. I use a simple test for that in Does This Content Need Its Own Page?.
Pricing is contextual, but sometimes I really expect to see it
I don’t think every business needs to publish an exact price for everything it offers.
There are plenty of services where the final cost depends on scope, complexity, materials, time or the customer’s specific situation.
But there are also situations where hiding pricing feels unnecessarily difficult.
If I’m looking at a restaurant menu, I expect current prices.
If I’m comparing spa or salon services, I want to understand what a treatment costs and what is included before I get deep into the booking process.
The more standardized a purchase is, the stranger it feels when the customer can’t find a price.
Catering, a construction project or a highly customized professional service may reasonably require a quote.
A sandwich probably does not.
Photography wasn’t decoration. It was information.
One of the things that influenced me the most while researching places was photography.
Especially for restaurants, cafés, stores, spas and attractions.
I didn’t want a photo simply because the page looked empty without one.
I was using the photos to make a decision.
What does the food actually look like? What is the atmosphere like? What kind of products are in the store? What will I see if I visit?
Even customer and review photos can be incredibly useful because they provide another view of what the experience is actually like.
For some businesses, photography is part of the information, not just part of the decoration.
That doesn’t mean every website needs a giant gallery.
It means that for businesses where the product, space or experience is visual, imagery helps answer a customer’s questions.
Mobile friction gets annoying incredibly quickly
A lot of this research happened on my phone, which made mobile issues very obvious.
I encountered things like:
- horizontal scrolling
- awkward spacing and layouts
- pricing that didn’t line up properly with the correct item
- large forms asking for a lot of information
- cookie and privacy popups taking over almost the entire screen
One of the things I find especially frustrating is being asked for a large amount of information on mobile just to get something simple, such as a price.
Every extra interaction becomes another little step between the customer and the information they came looking for.
One or two extra steps might not matter.
Enough of them eventually do.
If the main problem with an existing website is how it behaves across smaller screens rather than the entire site structure, Mobile & Responsive Optimization can address that more directly.
Sometimes the website technically worked and I still gave up
One of the clearest examples was a wellness business I found while looking for a head spa treatment.
I was genuinely interested in the service.
But I kept going around trying to figure out exactly what was offered, what it cost and how I was supposed to book it.
Eventually I stopped trying.
The website didn’t necessarily crash. There wasn’t some dramatic technical failure.
It simply made the process confusing enough that continuing wasn’t worth the effort.
A website can technically work and still fail to help someone complete what they came there to do.
Customers don’t submit UX bug reports. They leave.
This is probably one of the more important things I took away from the experience.
If someone can’t figure out how to book, can’t find the price or doesn’t understand what happens next, they probably aren’t going to contact the business and explain exactly where the user experience went wrong.
They work around it.
They look on Google.
They check social media.
They tolerate it.
Or they leave.
That means a website can have genuine customer-facing problems without generating obvious complaints.
A business owner may never know that someone was interested enough to buy or book something and simply gave up somewhere along the way.
That is one of the reasons a UI/UX Audit can be useful. It looks for friction in the experience without assuming that the entire website needs to be rebuilt.
Customers tolerate a surprising amount of mediocre UX
There also seemed to be a threshold.
When a website is excellent, you notice because the experience feels unusually polished or easy.
When it is average, you often don’t think about the website at all.
When it is somewhat poor, you may notice the problems and keep going anyway.
It usually takes a certain level of friction before someone actually gives up.
That matters because not every issue deserves the same priority.
A problem can be real without being important enough to fix first.
There were things I noticed as a designer that I didn’t care about as a customer
This is where the experience became particularly interesting for me.
I noticed layouts I wouldn’t have chosen, weak visual hierarchy, awkward spacing, outdated copyright years and pages that simply weren’t especially polished.
Would I change some of those things professionally?
Absolutely.
Did every one of them stop me from finding what I needed or using the business?
No.
“I wouldn’t design it this way” and “this doesn’t work” are two different criticisms.
That distinction is useful because designers can see dozens of things they would improve on almost any website.
The customer may only care about the ones that actually get in their way.
Some of the simple websites worked perfectly well
Not everything I saw was a problem.
In fact, a lot of the basic website patterns worked exactly as I expected them to.
Navigation labels were generally clear. Menus were often divided into useful categories. Most smaller websites didn’t have enough pages for important information to become deeply buried. Buttons usually went where I expected.
One particularly useful pattern for local restaurants and cafés was keeping hours and location information in the footer.
It isn’t innovative.
It’s useful.
Sometimes predictable design is exactly what a customer needs.
That predictability is one of the reasons website navigation matters more than it might seem. Familiar patterns reduce the amount of work someone has to do just to move around the site.
Visual design still influenced me
None of this means visual design doesn’t matter.
It absolutely influenced where I wanted to go.
If two businesses offer something similar and one presents itself more attractively, that can change how interested I am in it.
That is especially noticeable for businesses where the experience itself is visual, such as food, retail, beauty, wellness, hospitality and tourism.
There are really two different questions:
Can I use this website?
Does this website make me want what the business is selling?
A website can answer the first question successfully and still do very little for the second.
Good UX sometimes means giving people options
Another thing I appreciated was having more than one reasonable way to complete an action when it made sense.
For example, allowing someone to book online or call the business.
Not everyone wants to complete a task in exactly the same way.
That doesn’t mean a website needs ten different contact methods.
It means that when there are multiple sensible options, giving customers some flexibility can remove unnecessary friction.
Clear next steps matter more than clever ones
I noticed this outside of my travel research too.
I recently completed an online voting process where you enter your name and phone number, receive a verification code and then need to enter that code to finish submitting the vote.
The problem was that some people didn’t realize there was another step after submitting their information.
The functionality technically existed.
The process technically worked.
But if the user doesn’t understand that they haven’t finished, the interaction still has a problem.
A customer needs to understand:
- What just happened?
- What happens next?
- Am I finished?
- Do I need to do something else?
Good website experiences don’t just provide functionality. They make the next step understandable.
An outdated-looking website isn’t automatically a bad website
This is something I’ve believed for a while, and using these websites reinforced it.
Some websites weren’t particularly modern or impressive, but they still worked.
If a café website clearly shows what it serves, how much it costs, when it is open and where it is located, it has accomplished quite a lot.
Meanwhile, a newer and more visually impressive website that makes booking unnecessarily difficult can be much more frustrating.
Old isn’t automatically bad. New isn’t automatically good.
The important question is whether the website still works for the business and the people trying to use it.
That is also why I would not recommend a redesign simply because a website looks older. 7 Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign looks at the deeper problems that make a redesign more meaningful.
So what actually matters?
After using all of these websites, the things I cared about most were surprisingly basic.
I wanted to understand:
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- Where are you?
- When can I get it?
- Why should I choose you?
- How do I actually take the next step?
Those questions have started shaping another framework I’m working on around the information every small business website should make clear to its customers.
That framework became The 7 Customer Questions Every Small Business Website Should Answer.
But the larger lesson from these 50 websites was simpler.
A small business website doesn’t necessarily have to impress someone to work. But it does have to help them.
Sometimes great photography, thoughtful branding and strong design make the experience noticeably better.
Sometimes a website is fairly average and does its job perfectly well.
The problems I cared about most weren’t usually the ones I could identify because I design websites.
They were the moments where I couldn’t find what I needed, couldn’t understand what was being offered, didn’t know what to do next or eventually decided it wasn’t worth continuing.
And that’s probably the most useful distinction I took away from the experience:
Would I change it as a designer?
Did I care as a customer?
They’re not always the same question.