What Goes Wrong With Edmonton Small-Business Websites
Most Edmonton small-business websites fail on the same handful of problems, and every one of them is fixable. These are the patterns we find on the local sites we audit before a redesign.
The site was built once and never maintained. A theme bought in 2019, plugins three major versions behind, and a host that quietly stopped patching the server. It still loads, so nobody touches it, until a plugin conflict takes the contact form offline and no one notices the leads stopped. A maintained site is cheaper over five years than the "set it and forget it" build that rots in the background.
Unoptimized images are killing the load time. The most common Core Web Vitals failure we see on Edmonton sites is a homepage shipping several megabytes of full-size JPEGs. On a phone over LTE on the way to a job site, that page takes eight seconds to paint. Google measures it, the visitor feels it, and both give up. Compressing and lazy-loading images usually cuts load time in half before we change anything else.
The site looks fine on desktop and breaks on mobile. Over 70% of Edmonton local search happens on a phone, yet most sites are still designed and approved on a 27-inch monitor. Buttons end up too small to tap, text overflows its container, and the phone number sits four scrolls down. We design mobile-first because that is where your customers actually are.
Nothing on the site is measured. No analytics, no conversion tracking, no call tracking. The owner knows the site "gets some business" but cannot say how much, from which page, or from which channel. We wire measurement in before launch, not as an afterthought, so the redesign can be judged on results instead of opinions.