The costly website mistakes are rarely visual. They are questions about ownership, access and where things go, and a contractor usually discovers them at the worst possible moment, which is when the relationship with whoever built the site ends.
Who owns the domain name
Start here, because everything else depends on it. If your domain is registered in an agency’s account rather than yours, you do not control your own address, your email, or anything that runs on it.
Most of the time this is not malice. It is convenience at setup that nobody revisited. But it means a disagreement, a company folding, or an unanswered renewal email can take your website and your email offline together, and recovering a domain from an uncooperative or absent third party ranges from slow to impossible.
Look up your own domain in a public registration lookup. The registrant should be your business, and the contact email should be one you can access.
Who owns the hosting, and can you leave
The related question is whether you can take the site with you. Some arrangements, particularly bundled deals where the site is effectively rented, mean you own the content in principle but cannot obtain a copy of the working site in practice.
Ask directly, before you need to know: if we parted company, what exactly would we receive. If the honest answer is a folder of images and some text, you are renting, and that may be fine as long as it is a decision rather than a discovery.
Who owns the Google Business Profile
For a local trade this is often worth more than the website. It carries your reviews, and reviews do not move.
Profiles set up by a former marketing company are common, and losing access means losing years of accumulated reviews. Confirm your own account has ownership rather than management access, and that a second person in the business has it too.
Where do form submissions actually go
Send a test enquiry through your own website today. A surprising number of contractor sites deliver into an inbox nobody opens, an address belonging to somebody who left, or into a spam folder.
The failure is invisible from every direction. Visitors see a confirmation message. Analytics records a conversion. Nothing arrives. This is one of the most expensive faults on this list and one of the easiest to check.
Can you change your own opening hours
If updating a price, a holiday closure or a phone number requires somebody else, those things will not get updated. The site drifts out of date because keeping it current is somebody else’s task and never urgent.
Being able to make small edits yourself is worth more than most design features, especially in a trade where the seasons change what you want the site to lead with.
Is anybody measuring anything
Plenty of sites have no analytics at all, or had it removed during a redesign and never restored. Without measurement you cannot tell which pages bring work, whether last month was better or worse, or whether a change helped.
Call tracking matters more for a trade than form tracking, because the calls are the business. If you cannot say how many calls the website produced last month, that is the gap to close before any design work.
Does your phone number match everywhere
Trades accumulate numbers: a tracking number, an old line, a mobile, a number on van livery. When the website, the Google profile and the directories disagree, customers reach dead lines and local search results suffer for the inconsistency.
Pick the canonical number and make everything agree with it.
The small ones that still cost you
- An expired security certificate. Browsers show a full-page warning. Most visitors will not click past it.
- A “coming soon” page still live on a section launched two years ago.
- Copyright dates frozen years back, which reads as abandoned.
- A blog whose most recent post is from another era. Either maintain it or remove the dates.
- Nobody holding the logins. One person having everything is one person leaving.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check who owns my domain?
Look your domain up in a public registration lookup. The registrant should be your business and the contact address should be one you can actually open. If it is your agency, ask for a transfer while relations are good.
My web company set up my Google profile. Is that a problem?
It is if they hold ownership rather than management access. Reviews cannot be moved to a new profile, so losing access means losing them. Take ownership and add a second person from your business.
How can I tell if my contact form works?
Submit one. Do it monthly. Visitors see a confirmation whether or not anything arrives, so this fault is invisible until you test it yourself.
What should I insist on when hiring someone to build a site?
Domain registered to you, administrative access to hosting and the site, ownership of your Google profile, analytics in an account you own, and a clear answer about what you receive if you leave.
Where to start
Three things this week: look up who owns your domain, send yourself a test enquiry through your own form, and check whether your Google profile is in an account you control. None takes ten minutes, and each one has cost contractors far more than a dated layout ever has.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our website design or book a strategy call.
