Why you should never let your nephew build your business website

He's your sister's kid, or your buddy's son, or a guy you know from church who "does computers." He offered to build you a website for free or cheap and you said sure. Now you have a website and you feel like the website problem is solved. It's not. Here's what he almost certainly got wrong.

1. The title tags are either blank or say "Home"

The title tag is the text that appears in the browser tab and in Google search results. It's one of the most important SEO signals on your entire website. Your nephew almost certainly left it as the template default ("Home – Untitled Site") or set it to just your business name ("Bob's Service work"). Neither of these helps you rank for anything.

A properly written title tag for a small business owner looks like: "Bob's Service work — Emergency Small business owner, Kansas City, MO." That's what shows up in Google when someone searches "small business owner Kansas City" — and that's what gets clicked. Your nephew's title tag doesn't show up in those results at all.

2. Images are unoptimized

He uploaded photos straight from your phone. iPhone 15 photos are 4-6MB each. Your homepage now has to download 30-40MB of images before it displays. On a mobile connection, that takes 10-15 seconds. Nobody waits that long. The fix is simple — compress images before upload, or use WebP format — but your nephew didn't know to do it.

3. There's no Google Search Console setup

Google Search Console (GSC) is the free tool that tells Google "my site exists, here's the sitemap, please index it." Without it, Google might not even crawl your site for months. Your nephew launched the site and never told Google it exists. You've been invisible in search since the day you launched.

4. The SSL certificate might be expired or misconfigured

The little padlock in the browser address bar — that's SSL. Sites without it show a "Not Secure" warning in Chrome and Firefox. Google also uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. If your nephew used free hosting or didn't properly configure SSL, you may be showing security warnings to every visitor. Modern browsers make this obvious and scary to users who don't know what it means.

5. There's no mobile testing done

He built it on a desktop and it looks fine on a desktop. He may have dragged the browser window narrower to see what it "looks like on mobile." That's not the same as testing it on an actual phone on an actual mobile connection. The real mobile experience may have broken layouts, text that's too small to read, buttons that are too small to tap, or a completely different visual design than he intended.

6. There's no plan for updates

When you need to change your phone number, add a new service, update your hours, or add photos of a new job — what do you do? If the answer is "text my nephew and hope he has time," that's a problem. He's going to be less available in 6 months than he is now. Your site will get stale. Outdated information on a website makes customers distrust you.

The cost of not fixing it

If your nephew's site is invisible on Google, loads in 10 seconds on mobile, and you can't update it without his help — you're not running a business website. You have a business card that nobody finds. The cost of building something properly is $500 once. The cost of running a broken site is measured in the leads you never knew you were losing.