Why these small mistakes matter

If you run a small business, charity, or community project, your website is usually the first place people check before they contact you, donate, or approve funding. It is your shopfront, bid cover sheet, and reference point all in one.

When the basics are off, visitors rarely send you an email to complain. They just click away and try someone else. Funders and partners do the same thing, they simply use more polite language when they write their notes.

The good news is that most of the problems below are fixable in an afternoon once you know they exist. You do not always need a rebrand or a brand new site, you need a clearer picture of what is already there.

1. No valid HTTPS or security warnings in the browser

If your site still loads with a “Not secure” label or a broken padlock, many visitors will simply leave. They may not understand the details, they only see that their browser is unhappy and decide not to risk it.

Typical causes include expired certificates, misconfigured Cloudflare SSL settings, or a site that still loads images and scripts from old HTTP addresses.

A quick health check of your SSL and Cloudflare configuration usually clears this up. The article on Cloudflare basics for small organisations explains the most common traps.

2. Out of date contact details or broken forms

It is common to see a contact form that looks fine but never reaches anyone. The address behind it was changed, the mailbox is full, spam filters became over eager, or the form plugin broke during an update.

From the visitor side this feels like shouting into a void. For funders or referral partners, it sends a quiet signal that basic communication is not being watched.

At least once in a while, send yourself a message through your own contact page and confirm where it lands. Then write that down so future staff know what should happen.

3. Staff using free email addresses instead of your own domain

When a website uses a professional domain but staff reply from personal Gmail or other free accounts, it creates a subtle trust gap. People start to wonder who really represents the organisation and how long they will stick around.

It also makes it much harder to keep a clear record of communication when staff move on. Old conversations disappear into personal inboxes that you cannot access.

Shifting staff onto email on your own domain is not vanity. It is a basic step in governance, record keeping, and reputation. The knowledge hub article on simple domain strategy for small organisations pairs well with this.

4. Slow, overloaded pages on basic hosting

Small organisations are often sold hosting that is cheap upfront but starts to crawl once a site has a handful of pages, plugins, and images. Shared servers are pushed harder over time, and your site quietly pays the price.

Visitors do not wait long for a page to load. If the homepage takes more than a few seconds, many will leave, and search engines notice this behaviour over time. Slow pages are not just annoying, they are a signal that foundations have not been checked in a while.

Sometimes the answer is to tidy and optimise what you already have. Sometimes the better move is to slim down to a static site, as covered in static sites versus WordPress for small organisations.

5. Important pages buried or missing from navigation

Over time websites grow in odd directions. A key service page sits three clicks away in an obscure dropdown, or the privacy policy exists but is only linked once in tiny text. Nobody planned this, it just happened as things were added in a hurry.

If people cannot easily find basic things like what you do, where you are, or how you handle data, they are less likely to trust you with their own details. If you do any public interest or regulated work, that gap is noticed more sharply.

A short content map and a handful of changes to your main navigation often do more for trust than a brand new colour palette.

6. No clear ownership of the domain and hosting

Many small organisations rely on one person who “looks after the website” and holds all the logins in their head. When that relationship ends, the organisation realises no one knows who actually owns the domain or which provider runs the hosting.

This is a governance issue as much as a technical one. It creates real risk if you ever need to move providers quickly, respond to a data incident, or prove who controls a site during a dispute.

A simple register of domains, registrars, hosting providers, and Cloudflare accounts is usually enough to get you into a safer place. The domain strategy article above gives a straightforward checklist.

7. Pages that look fine on desktop but break on phones

A design that looked acceptable on a laptop five years ago may be almost unusable on a modern phone. Buttons sit too close together, text runs off the screen, or vital information is hidden behind tiny menus.

For many visitors their first view of you is on a small screen while travelling, at work, or in a waiting room. If that experience is painful they rarely come back on a laptop later.

Checking your own site on a real phone, not just a designer mockup, is one of the simplest quality checks you can do.

8. No basic analytics or logs

A surprising number of sites have no effective analytics at all. When that is the case, quiet problems go unseen for months because there is nothing to show that a contact page gets heavy traffic but sends no enquiries.

On the other side, some setups install aggressive tracking that staff do not really understand. That can create GDPR headaches without providing meaningful insight for decisions.

A better pattern is a small number of privacy aware analytics and evidence grade logs that you can actually explain to a board or regulator.

How to start fixing things without getting overwhelmed

The aim is not to turn you into a web technician. The aim is to get to a point where the basics of your site match the standard your work already deserves.

A simple starting checklist:

• Open your site on a phone and a laptop, including the contact page and any donation or booking pages.
• Check the browser does not show security warnings and that the address starts with https://.
• Send yourself a message via the contact form and confirm it lands where it should.
• Look at which email addresses appear on the site and in replies. Are they on your domain or personal accounts.
• Confirm who owns the domain, where it is registered, and where DNS is managed.
• Make a note of any pages that feel slow, broken, or clearly out of date.

That list on its own is enough to frame a short internal discussion or a tidy up project with a supplier.

Next steps if you want help

If you know your website is carrying some of these issues and do not have capacity to untangle it all yourself, the easiest step is often a short foundations review. You keep control of your accounts, I write things down clearly so you can make decisions.

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