Your customers look you up before they call

Part 1 of 3 in our series on why your business needs a website.

Before most people call a local business, they look it up online. If they can't find a website, a lot of them move on to someone they can.

I hear the same thing from owners all the time. "My customers find me by word of mouth." That's great, and it's probably true. But even a friend's recommendation usually ends with a quick search before anyone picks up the phone.

People read about you first

BrightLocal surveys US consumers every year about how they pick local businesses. In its 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 97% said they read reviews for local businesses. 41% said they "always" read them, up from 29% the year before.

Reviews are only the first stop. When people liked what they saw in the reviews, 54% went on to check the business's website. Just 20% contacted the business next.

So picture someone who just read your great reviews. Their next move is often to look for your site. If there's nothing there, you're making them work harder at the exact moment they're ready to choose you.

Your competitors already have one

Most small businesses have a website now. Clutch's 2025 small business website report found that 83% do, up from 64% in 2018.

That number changes what customers expect. When nearly every other plumber or salon in town has a site, the one without a site starts to stand out for the wrong reason. People may wonder if you're still open.

A website makes you look legit

People trust businesses with their own website more. Verisign, the company that runs the .com registry, paid 451 Research to survey 5,450 online consumers in 2019 and 2020. In that study, 66% said a business with its own website is more credible than one without. 71% said they were more likely to recommend a business with a professional website.

Keep in mind that Verisign sells .com names, so it has a stake in that answer. Still, it matches what I see when I talk to customers.

How it looks matters too

People judge your site fast, and they judge it by how it looks. Stanford researchers ran a big study on this back in 2002. They had 2,684 people rate real websites and explain why they trusted them or not.

The design and look of the site came up more than anything else. It showed up in 46.1% of the comments. That study is old, but people haven't gotten any less picky.

So a site that looks like it was built in 2009 can hurt you. It sends the same signal as a dirty storefront window.

A slow site loses them anyway

Having a website only helps if it loads fast. Most people look you up on their phone, and they won't wait long.

Google studied this in its 2016 report, The Need for Mobile Speed. It found that 53% of mobile visits were abandoned when a site took more than three seconds to load. Sites that loaded in 5 seconds had 35% lower bounce rates than sites that took 19 seconds. A "bounce" is someone who leaves after seeing just one page.

It gets worse the longer people wait. In 2017, Google and SOASTA trained a computer model on real bounce data. As load time went from one second to seven seconds, the chance of a visitor bouncing went up 113%.

Think about what that means for the person who just read your reviews. They tap your link and stare at a blank screen. Then they hit the back button and call the next business on the list.

That's why speed is the first thing we check. Every site we build scores 95 or higher on Google Lighthouse's performance test at launch. I explain how we get there in our post on page speed.

What's next

Some owners figure their Facebook or Instagram page does the same job. In part 2, I'll explain why social media can't replace a website, even if it's a great place to show off your work.

Want to know what customers see when they look you up? Send me your business name and I'll take a look.