Over the past months we've reviewed dozens of websites of restaurants, salons, workshops, and local services, some as client work, some out of professional curiosity. The businesses were all different. The mistakes were not. The same nine problems appeared again and again, and each one quietly costs real customers. All examples below are real, anonymized, and fixable.
1. The menu is a PDF
The single most common restaurant website mistake. A customer on a phone taps "Menu" and gets... a download. Then a PDF designed for A4 paper, requiring pinch-zooming and horizontal scrolling to read a soup price. Many close it before finding the mains. Your menu is the most-viewed content on your site, it deserves to be a real, readable page, not an attachment.
2. Opening hours that are wrong, or missing
One workshop we reviewed had three different opening hours: one on the website, one on Google, one on the door. A customer who drives over based on your website and finds you closed doesn't come back, and often leaves the one-star review to prove it. Your hours must live in one place and be correct everywhere, including holidays.
3. No prices anywhere
Service businesses love hiding prices, "contact us for a quote." Here's what customers read instead: "expensive." You don't need an exact price list; ranges work fine ("haircuts from €18", "standard service from €120"). Businesses that show at least indicative prices get fewer inquiries but dramatically more serious ones.
4. Stock photos of people who clearly aren't your staff
That grinning, suspiciously perfect team in matching aprons? Everyone knows they're not your employees. Stock photos don't make a business look bigger, they make it look like it's hiding something. Ten honest phone photos of your real space, real food, and real people convert better than any stock gallery. Customers aren't choosing a photoshoot; they're choosing you.
5. The phone number isn't tappable
Most of your visitors are on phones. If your number is plain text they must memorize or copy-paste, you've added friction to the exact moment a customer decided to contact you. A phone number on a mobile site should be one tap away from ringing. Same for the address, one tap should open navigation.
6. A contact form that goes nowhere
We tested contact forms while doing these reviews. A worrying number either errored out or, worse, showed "Thank you, we'll be in touch" while delivering the message to an inbox nobody has opened since 2022. Every inquiry lost this way is a customer who tried to give you money and was ignored. Test your own form today. Seriously, go do it, we'll wait.
7. Last update: three years ago
A news section whose latest entry is a 2023 Christmas greeting. A "summer menu" in February. A price list with a sticker-note that prices "may have changed." An outdated site makes customers wonder whether you're still in business at all, some will literally call to ask if you're open, and the rest won't.
8. Slow loading on mobile
Huge unoptimized photos, heavyweight themes, cheap hosting. If your site takes four seconds to appear on mobile data, a chunk of your visitors leave before seeing anything. This one is invisible in your statistics, the customers who gave up never register anywhere. We wrote a whole post about it, including a 30-second self-test.
9. No answer to 'why you?'
The subtlest mistake. The site works, looks fine, loads fast, and says nothing. "Welcome to our website. We offer quality services at reasonable prices." So does everyone. Are you the fastest? Family-run for twenty years? The only ones open on Sunday? Do you use local ingredients? The one sentence explaining why to choose you is the most valuable text on your site, and most sites don't have it.
How many did you count?
- 0–1 mistakes: your website is ahead of most local businesses, keep it maintained
- 2–4 mistakes: fixable in a week, and worth fixing, each one is leaking customers
- 5+ mistakes: a redesign will likely pay for itself within months
“None of these mistakes announce themselves. The customer just quietly chooses someone else.”
Not sure how your site scores? Send us the link and we'll reply with an honest, specific mini-audit, what's costing you customers and what it would take to fix. Free, and yes, even if you built it yourself on Wix.
