Your Website Isn't Broken. It's Just Not Working.

What should you do about your website?

Your site loads. The links work. The form sends. So why isn't anyone calling? Here's what's actually going wrong and what to do about it.

You have a website. It loads. The links click. The contact form sends. Nothing is technically wrong with it.

But nobody is finding it. The phone is not ringing because of it. The people who do land on it leave before they get past the first scroll. And you have this low-grade feeling that the site you paid for two or three years ago is not doing what it was supposed to do.

You are probably right.

I work with small businesses in Missoula and across the world, and this is the most common conversation I have. The site is not broken. It is just not doing any work. There is a difference. A broken site throws errors. A site that is not working just sits there, looking fine, generating nothing.

Here is what I see over and over again.

The site was built without a plan

Someone picked a template, dropped in some text and photos, and called it done. There was no conversation about who the site is for, what they need to find, or what you want them to do when they get there. No sitemap. No keyword research. No copy strategy.

The result is a site that looks like a business exists but doesn’t give anyone a reason to pick up the phone. It is a digital placeholder. And Google treats it like one.

Google has no idea what you do

Your homepage says "Welcome to our website." Your title tag is your business name and nothing else. There are no heading tags telling Google what each page is about. The images have no alt text. There is no meta description.

Google is not a seer. It reads your site the way a machine reads it. If you have not told it what you do, where you do it, and why someone should care, it is not going to figure that out on its own. This is why your competitor with a worse-looking site shows up above you. Their site is structured for search. Yours is not.

For businesses in Missoula, and local businesses anywhere for that matter, this is even more important. Local search is where the money is. When someone types "restaurant near me" or "web designer Missoula" or "HVAC repair Missoula MT," Google is looking at title tags, headings, content, Google Business Profiles, and local citations to decide who shows up. If your site is not optimized for those signals, you are invisible.

Nobody checked how it looks on a phone

More than half of all web traffic is mobile. In Missoula, where people are looking things up on the trail, at the farmers market, in the car, it is probably higher than that. Some places it’s around 90% mobile.

If your site was designed on a desktop and never tested on a phone, it is losing people. Text that is too small. Buttons that are too close together. Images that take forever to load on cell data. A menu that doesn’t work with a thumb.

This is not about aesthetics. It is about function. If someone cannot find your phone number in three seconds on their phone, they are going to the next result.

The site is fast enough for you but slow for everyone else

You have visited your own site a hundred times. Your browser has it cached. It loads instantly for you. But for a first-time visitor on a phone, it might take four or five seconds. That is an eternity.

Google measures this. Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint. Cumulative Layout Shift. These are real ranking factors. A slow site does not just frustrate visitors. It tells Google your site provides a poor experience, and Google pushes you down.

Large uncompressed images are usually the biggest culprit. After that, bloated code, too many plugins, cheap hosting, and third-party scripts that load before your actual content does.

There is no reason for anyone to take action

Your site describes what you do. Maybe it has some photos. Maybe a testimonial or two buried at the bottom. But there is no clear call to action. No reason for someone to do something right now.

Every page on your site should answer one question for the visitor: what do I do next? Call. Book. Submit. Buy. If the answer is not obvious within a few seconds of landing on any page, the visitor leaves and you never know they were there.

This is not about being pushy. It is about being clear. A well-placed button that says "Schedule a Free Consultation" is not aggressive. It is helpful.

The fix is not as big as you think

Most of the businesses I work with do not need a brand new website. They need the one they have to actually function. That might mean restructuring the pages so Google can read them. Rewriting the title tags and headings. Compressing the images. Adding a real call to action. Setting up a Google Business Profile that matches the site.

Sometimes it does mean starting over. If the platform is wrong for the business, or the design is so outdated that it hurts trust, a rebuild is the right call. But that is a conversation, not a default.

If you are a business owner in Missoula or anywhere in Montana (or anywhere on the planet!) and your website feels like it’s just taking up space, it probably is. But that’s fixable.

I offer a free initial consultation where I look at your site and tell you exactly what is going on. No pitch. Just a clear picture of where you stand and what it would take to make the site actually work for you.