What I found auditing 10 Wiltshire small business websites

Over the past month I have been offering free audits to Wiltshire small businesses. Ten of them took me up on it, spread across Devizes, Swindon, Trowbridge, Marlborough and Chippenham. A mix of trades, independent shops, hospitality and professional services.

I expected to see a spread of problems. What I actually found was the same handful of issues repeating on almost every site, regardless of sector or platform.

This post is what came up most often, why it matters, and what to do about it. No names, no screenshots, nothing embarrassing. Just the patterns.

1. Pages that take five seconds or more to load

Nine out of ten sites had a Lighthouse mobile score below 50. Half of them were below 30. The biggest cause, by a wide margin, was images.

Sites on WordPress, Wix and Squarespace were all serving enormous uncompressed JPEGs to mobile users on 4G. One site had a hero image that was 6MB. On a village 4G connection that is a four-second wait for the first image alone.

The other common culprit was third-party tracking. One site had Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, Facebook Pixel, two consent managers and a chat widget, all loaded before the first paint. Each one is someone else's JavaScript running on your business's front door.

The fix: compress and resize images before upload. Use modern formats like WebP. Remove tracking scripts you do not actively look at. If Core Web Vitals are unfamiliar, Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool tells you exactly where you stand.

2. No local SEO signals at all

Not one of the ten sites had a complete set of local SEO signals. No LocalBusiness schema. No geo meta tags. No Google Business Profile link. Address buried four clicks deep, if it was on the site at all.

This matters more in Wiltshire than most places. If a customer types "electrician Devizes" or "takeaway Swindon", Google's local pack is what appears first. Local pack rankings are driven by:

• A properly set-up Google Business Profile with reviews
• NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone identical everywhere online)
• LocalBusiness structured data on your website
• Clear location mentions on key pages

A brochure site that never says where you are is telling Google you could be anywhere. And if you could be anywhere, the algorithm is not going to show you to anyone.

The fix: put your town in your page titles, your meta descriptions, and the first paragraph of the page. Add a visible address and phone number in the footer. Claim your Google Business Profile. Add LocalBusiness schema to your home page.

3. Generic copy that could belong to anyone

"Welcome to our website." "We are a leading provider of..." "Our mission is to..."

I read the same three opening sentences across six of the ten sites. Different businesses, different towns, nearly identical copy. The kind of copy that was probably suggested by a template or generated by a free AI writer in sixty seconds.

Google does not care about it and neither do your customers. Nobody searched "leading provider". They searched for a specific problem, and the site that actually answers that problem gets the click.

The fix: write like a person. Say where you are. Say who you help. Say what you do differently. The audit clients who struggled with this were mostly businesses that had been told copy was something the "web designer" handled, which is rarely true when the designer is a template.

4. Contact forms that are one hoop too many

Six of the ten had a contact form. Three of those required users to tick a GDPR consent box, choose a "reason for contacting" from a dropdown of eight options, and confirm they were a human via reCAPTCHA. The form on one site was behind an "Open form" button.

Every field on a form is an opportunity for a prospect to bounce. The law requires you to be clear about what you do with data. It does not require you to interrogate a stranger who has a leaky tap.

The fix: three fields maximum where possible. Name, email, message. Put the form on the contact page, not behind a modal. Be honest about data use in plain English. If you genuinely need more information, let the first form be the opener and ask the rest by email.

5. Nothing on the homepage that says why you, specifically

This was the most painful one. Seven of the ten sites could have been any business in their sector. A Marlborough picture framer's homepage was indistinguishable from any other picture framer in the UK. A Trowbridge accountant's homepage was indistinguishable from any other accountant, full stop.

The differentiator exists, almost always. "Qualified since 1998". "Only framer in town that does archival work". "Specialising in small limited companies, not one-man-bands". Any of those is immediately clarifying.

The fix: ask yourself why a customer would pick you over the next-nearest option, and put that answer on the homepage, above the fold.

6. Outdated content that is quietly embarrassing

Copyright date of 2021. A "latest news" section with a post from 2019. A Covid-19 banner still up. A testimonial from a business that no longer exists. A team page with a photo of an employee who left four years ago.

None of this stops a site working. All of it quietly tells a visitor that nobody is looking after it. Six out of the ten had at least one of these giveaways.

The fix: set a calendar reminder for a quarterly content pass. Update or delete anything with a date on it. Check the team page. Check the services list. Check the contact page's opening hours. It takes half an hour.

What this suggests, more broadly

I am not surprised by any of this. Small business websites almost never get attention after launch. The pattern is: pay for a site, go live, move on to running the business. Nobody is dedicated to the site, nobody is measuring it, nobody is reading it like a customer would.

If you run a small business in Wiltshire and you recognise three or more of these on your own site, you are not alone. The fact that they are widespread is also the opportunity: fixing even half of them puts you ahead of most of your local competition.

I am happy to run a free audit on your site whenever you want. You get a proper PDF back, not a generic automated score. And if the answer is "it is fine, leave it alone," I will tell you that too.