Chip from MachSites
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Hey! 👋 Want to see how fast your site could load? Drop your URL and I'll run a free audit right now.
Most sites we check score under 30/100. Takes about 10 seconds to find out where yours stands.
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No jargon, no sales pitch dressed up as advice. Just the questions local-business owners actually ask about their websites — answered with Google's own data, so you can verify every number yourself.
Almost always because visitors leave before they ever see your offer — most often from a slow load (Google found 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes over 3 seconds), a phone number or form that's hard to find, or a site that's clumsy on a phone. It's rarely one big thing; it's several small leaks. You can measure every one of them in about ten minutes.
Almost always because of weight the visitor's phone has to download and process: oversized images, a stack of plugins or apps, and scripts that block the page from painting — often sitting on cheap shared hosting with no CDN. Google's line for a good experience is under 3 seconds on mobile, and every one of these causes is something you can measure in a few minutes with a neutral tool like PageSpeed Insights.
It ranges enormously: DIY site builders run roughly $0–60 per month, freelancers commonly charge $500–$5,000 for a small-business site, and full-service shops typically quote $3,000–$40,000 or more. The price is driven mostly by how the work is scoped and who does it — not by the number of pages. MachSites takes a different approach: a flat $1,299 to rebuild your existing site on faster infrastructure, so the number is known before you start.
The clearest signals are all checkable: it doesn't fit a phone screen, it loads slowly, the text is tiny, it leans on generic stock photos, the browser shows 'Not Secure' instead of a padlock, and the fonts or effects feel a generation behind. Most of these you can test yourself in a few minutes on your own phone — no opinion required, just a look.
It depends on what your time is worth and how hands-on you want to be. A do-it-yourself builder like Wix or Squarespace is cheapest and gives you full control, but every edit is yours to make. A hired designer or freelancer builds it once for you, then usually hands it back for you to run. A done-for-you rebuild service sits in between — you keep the look you have, someone else builds and maintains it. None is 'best'; they're built for different owners.
For a new small-business site in 2026, expect roughly $0–$60 a month to do it yourself, $500–$5,000 one-time for a freelancer, $5,000–$40,000 for a studio, or a flat done-for-you rebuild fee plus monthly hosting. But the sticker price is only half the story — the real number is total cost of ownership over a few years, which includes hosting, maintenance, and every edit you'll need.
Get more leads by removing friction between a visitor and contacting you, then measuring what works. In practice that means a fast load, an obvious tappable phone number and call-to-action, a short form, a site that behaves on a phone, visible proof, a claimed Google Business Profile, dedicated pages for any ads you run, and basic tracking so you know which of those is actually producing calls. Fix the biggest leaks first; the same traffic starts converting.
For the four classic categories — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO — 90 or above (green) is good, 50–89 (orange) needs work, and under 50 (red) is a problem. In 2026 Lighthouse also added a new 'Agentic Browsing' category that grades how ready your page is for AI assistants; it isn't scored 0–100 — it shows a simple pass-ratio like 2 of 3 checks passed.
Chip from MachSites
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