If you haven’t taken a hard look at your website since before the pandemic, you’re not alone, and it’s fixable.

Plenty of customers in Peru, Ottawa and Streator look you up online before they call. If your site is out of date, some of them call someone else.

We build and look after websites for businesses around the Illinois Valley. These are the five fixes we bring up most this year.

1. Sync your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is often the first thing a potential customer sees before they even land on your website. If your hours, phone number, or address on Google don’t match what’s on your website, customers don’t know which one to trust. Some will call an old number or show up after you close.

Take 15 minutes this week to:

Confirm your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are identical on Google and your website
Update your business hours, especially if you’ve made seasonal changes
Add recent photos of your shop, your team and your work
Check that your website link in GBP actually works

It’s free.

2. Make your site work on a phone

Plenty of your customers will look you up on a phone, from the truck or the parking lot. If someone in Ottawa, Utica, Peru, or Spring Valley pulls up your website on their phone and has to pinch-zoom to read your menu or find your phone number, they may give up and call someone else.

A mobile-friendly website in 2026 means:

Text is readable without zooming
Buttons are large enough to tap with a thumb
Your phone number is a clickable link (tap-to-call)
Navigation menus collapse cleanly on smaller screens
Nothing important is hidden or cut off

Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it uses the phone version of your site for indexing and ranking. If your site breaks on a phone, that’s the version Google sees.

3. Test every contact form and button

Broken contact forms are more common than you’d think. Forms can stop working after a plugin update, a server change or an email switch, and nothing tells you. The leads just never show up.

Right now, go to your website and:

Submit your own contact form and make sure you receive the email
Check that your phone number and email address are correct and clickable
Look at every “Request a Quote,” “Book Now,” or “Get in Touch” button and make sure it goes somewhere useful
Verify your business email isn’t bouncing or routing to spam

For Illinois Valley businesses that rely on word-of-mouth and local referrals, missing a single lead because of a broken form is a real cost. Make it easy for people to reach you.

4. Speed up your website

A slow page loses people before it finishes loading. Google also says its ranking systems look to reward a good page experience.

Common culprits for slow websites include:

Oversized, uncompressed images (the most common problem we see)
Outdated or bloated website plugins
Cheap shared hosting that can’t handle traffic spikes
No caching or content delivery setup

You can test your current speed for free at PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile score is under 90 (orange or red), there’s room to speed it up. A faster site keeps more people around long enough to call.

5. Make sure your site is secure (SSL)

A “Not Secure” warning may seem like a minor thing for a small local website, but it scares people off. If your certificate expires, visitors can get a full-page warning instead of your homepage. A valid SSL certificate keeps that from happening, and every business site needs one.

Beyond trust, Google has said HTTPS is a ranking signal, but a very lightweight one, so a padlock gives a competitor only a small edge.

Here’s what to check:

Open your website in a browser and look for the padlock icon in the address bar
Make sure your URL starts with https://, not http://
If you see a “Not Secure” warning, contact your hosting provider. Most include SSL for free, and it may just need to be renewed or turned on.
Check that all pages redirect to the https version, not just your homepage

Certificates can expire without anyone noticing, so check every few months. It takes five minutes.

Want help with the list?

If you’d rather hand this list to someone, we’re in Peru, IL. Call Scott at (815) 408-1975 or get a quote.

What every Illinois Valley small business should update on its website in 2026