The sixty-second answer
Not from a traffic graph. A small business site is working if searching your own name and town finds it first, the phone number and hours are correct, your contact form actually delivers, and enquiries arrive that people say came from the site. Check those four monthly.
Why traffic is the wrong number
Almost every website report leads with visitor counts, and for a small local business that number is close to meaningless. A plumber covering three towns might see forty visits a week. That is not a small audience, it is forty people deciding whether to call. Meanwhile a site can pull thousands of visits from the wrong province and produce nothing at all.
The measures that matter are smaller, cheaper and more honest, and they are all things you can check yourself. It is worth remembering who this advice is for: as of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada, 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — small [1]; in New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 [1]. Dashboards built for brands with marketing teams do not tell an owner-operator anything they can act on.
The four checks
Check 1: can a stranger find you under your own name? Search your business name, then your name plus your town, on a phone that is not yours and not logged in as you. Your current site should be at or near the top, with a phone number that works. This is the check that matters most, because most visits begin with someone who already heard about you. If an abandoned listing, an old site or a former business name outranks you, that is the whole to-do list this month. Background in how do customers actually find my website?
Check 2: is what it says still true? Phone number, hours, service area, prices, staff names, the year in the footer. Stale information is the most common way a working site quietly stops working — nothing breaks, it just starts sending people to a number nobody answers. Two minutes a month.
Check 3: does the contact route actually work? Submit your own form and time how long the email takes to arrive, including whether it lands in junk. Ring your own listed number from a phone that is not in your contacts. Broken forms are extremely common and silent by nature: nobody complains that they could not reach you, they simply call someone else. See contact form or phone number?
Check 4: are enquiries arriving, and do you know from where? Ask every caller how they heard about you and write the answer down. One optional field on the form and one question on the phone will give you better attribution than any analytics package, because it captures the part analytics cannot see — the neighbour who recommended you before the search happened.
Diagnosing "visits but no calls"
This is the most common real complaint, and it is almost always one of three things, in this order.
The phone number is not in the first screen. On a phone, in text, tappable. A number in an image or three scrolls down is a number that does not get called.
The page does not name the place. Visitors need to see their own town, or one nearby, in ordinary text. "Serving the region" makes a reader check whether you come out to them, and checking usually means leaving.
The price question goes unanswered. You do not have to publish a fixed price, but silence sends people to a competitor who at least said "from $X" or "hourly, typically half a day". Whatever you publish must be honest and attainable — section 74.01 of the Competition Act makes a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect actionable and requires a performance claim to rest on an adequate and proper test, with the burden of proof on the person making it [6]. More in what can I legally claim on my website? and how do I show prices with GST/HST?
The ten-minute monthly routine
Put it on the same day you do invoices and it will actually happen. Search your business name on a borrowed phone. Search your trade plus your town and see whether you appear anywhere. Read your own home page as though you had never seen it, and time how long it takes to find what you do, where, and how to reach you. Submit the contact form. Check the hours against the hours you actually keep. Write down, from the past month, how many enquiries came in and what people said when you asked how they heard about you.
That last number is the only trend line worth keeping. Six months of it tells you more than any analytics report, because it counts the thing you care about — people trying to give you money — rather than the thing that is easy to count. It also gives you a baseline to hold any marketing pitch against.
The technical checks worth doing once a year
Three things quietly break sites, and none of them announce themselves.
Crawler access. The Robots Exclusion Protocol, standardised as RFC 9309, is the method by which site owners control how automatic clients known as crawlers may access their content [2]. The failure is rarely deliberate: a blanket disallow left over from a staging site keeps the whole thing out of search indefinitely. Look at the file and confirm it says what you intend.
The page list. A sitemap is an XML file with a urlset and one url entry per page, entity-escaped, UTF-8 encoded, with all URLs from a single host [3]. It removes guesswork about what your site contains and takes minutes to check.
Machine-readable facts. The Schema.org LocalBusiness type carries properties including address, telephone, email, openingHours, areaServed, geo and priceRange [4]. Its value is that it removes ambiguity for anything summarising you — but it only restates the visible page, so if the markup and the page disagree, fix the page. See how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business?
Worth adding to the same annual pass: open the site on a phone and check that nothing overlaps, and that facts are real text rather than pictures. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas where barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [7], and a page that a screen reader can read is the same page an answer engine can quote.
If you do install analytics
Measurement is not free of obligations. Analytics collects information about the people visiting you, which brings PIPEDA's Schedule 1 into play: purposes identified at or before collection, knowledge and consent for collection and use, policies and practices readily available to individuals, and information no longer required destroyed, erased or made anonymous [5]. If you do add it, keep the retention short, say so in your privacy page, and be honest with yourself about whether you will ever open the dashboard. Many small sites are better off counting enquiries in a notebook. See does my small business website need a privacy policy?
A realistic timeline
A new site should be findable under your own business name within days to a few weeks. Being correct and reachable is immediate and entirely within your control. Enquiry volume moves slowly and depends far more on what you do offline — jobs finished, cards handed out, listings kept current — than on anything on the page. Judging a four-week-old site by call volume is the fastest route to changing something that was fine. Expectations for the build itself are in how long should a website take to build?
What to do when a check fails
Fix the facts first, always: hours, phone, service area. Then fix the route: form delivery, a tappable number. Then answer the price question. Then, and only then, consider anything that costs money. Most sites that "are not working" need thirty minutes of correction, not a redesign — and if you can make those edits yourself, do: can I update my own website?
Where we sit
We would rather you judge our work by whether your phone rings than by a dashboard. A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; past that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images $2 each and extra hours $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own, live within 48 hours of the brief. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. If the four checks above pass and the phone still is not ringing, the problem is upstream of the website, and we will tell you that rather than sell you another page.