The site goes live on a Tuesday. You tell a few people, you refresh the visitor numbers twice on Wednesday, and then nothing much happens for a fortnight.
That is normal. It is also indistinguishable, from the outside, from a site that is quietly broken. The first month is about telling those two apart, and about not making decisions on numbers too small to mean anything.
Week one: is it working, and can it be found
Nothing in week one is about traffic. It is about verifying the machine.
- Use your own site on a phone, on mobile data, not on the office wi-fi. Every page, every button, the phone number, the map.
- Submit your own contact form and confirm the message arrives. Then do the same for a booking or an order if you take them, with a real card you then refund.
- Check you are not hidden. New sites are sometimes left switched off from search engines by a setting that was correct while you were building. Run any address through our free website checker, which will tell you if the page is asking search engines to stay away.
- Tell the search engines you exist. Register the site with a search console and submit your sitemap. This does not make you rank. It makes you eligible, and it is the single most skipped step.
If all four are done, week one is a success regardless of what the visitor number says.
Week two: the things that bring people
- Claim and complete your business listing. For a local business this outperforms almost everything else in the first month, and it is free. Local SEO for a one-location business is the guide.
- Put the address everywhere you already are. Social profiles, email signature, invoices, the van, your supplier directories, the trade body you pay for and forgot about.
- Get the first few links. A supplier, a local group, a partner business, a chamber of commerce. Five real links from real local organisations are worth more than any amount of effort spent elsewhere. Five free ways to get your first website visitors has the rest.
- Ask three customers to look at it and tell you what is confusing. They will find things you cannot see.
Weeks three and four: read what happened
Now there is enough data to look at, and the temptation is to look at the wrong part of it. Ignore the total. Look at behaviour:
- Which pages did people land on? Rarely the home page, which surprises everyone.
- Where did they leave? A page everybody exits from is a page with a question it does not answer. Where website visitors drop off covers the diagnosis.
- Did anyone do the thing? Enquiries, bookings, orders, calls. One is a signal. Zero from a hundred visitors is a signal too, and a louder one.
- What did they search for on your own site, if you have search. It is the most honest list of what your pages fail to say.
What to measure on a small business website is the short list worth keeping.
What to ignore entirely in the first month
- Rankings. A new site is not ranked yet in any meaningful sense, and checking daily is a way to feel bad about a normal process. Why your new website is not on Google explains the timeline.
- Bounce rate on its own. Somebody who landed on your opening hours, read them and left got exactly what they came for.
- A quiet week. Weather, holidays and the school run move small business traffic more than anything you did.
- Any comparison with a competitor's numbers, which you cannot see and are usually being told about by somebody selling something.
The one fix worth making in month one
Resist rebuilding. Pick the single page with the most traffic and the least action, and rewrite its first screenful so it says what the thing is, who it is for, and what to do next. That one change beats a redesign, and you can do it in half an hour. Website copy that converts is the method.
Then leave it alone for a month. A website is a slow instrument, and the businesses that do best with theirs are the ones that make one considered change a month rather than five panicked ones in a fortnight. From month two onward, the ten-minute monthly pass is all it needs.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do after launching a website?
In week one, verify rather than promote. Use every page on a phone on mobile data, submit your own contact form and confirm it arrives, check you are not accidentally blocking search engines, and register the site with a search console and submit your sitemap.
Why is my new website getting no traffic?
For the first fortnight this is normal rather than broken. A new site is not meaningfully ranked yet, and being eligible comes before being ranked. The useful work in that period is claiming your business listing and earning the first few real local links.
What should I measure in the first month?
Which pages people landed on, where they left, and whether anyone did the thing you built the site for. Ignore rankings, bounce rate on its own, and a quiet week, all of which move for reasons that have nothing to do with your website.