This story starts in February 2026, when Benji, the chef at Restaurante Los Pinochos in Valladolid (Spain), sent me an email that made me laugh and worry at the same time. It said, word for word: “I have my site on Wix, it takes 7 seconds to load, and my cousin tells me that’s normal”. Spoiler: it wasn’t normal. What happened over the next 6 months is what led me to write this post, because what I fixed on his site is exactly what I see over and over in 80% of small business websites in Europe.
I’m not going to give you a generic list of “common website mistakes”. I’m going to tell you what happened, what I found, what I fixed, and where I got it wrong. And at the end, the 5 patterns that repeat in almost every project I touch.
February 2026: the diagnosis
Los Pinochos’ website was a Wix site with 14 dish photos at 4 MB each, 8 widgets enabled that nobody used, and a hero with a full-screen background video that took 7.2 seconds to show anything useful on an iPhone 11. I measured with PageSpeed, GTmetrix, and WebPageTest. All three agreed: the website was a digital Last Frontier.
The first thing I did was not touch anything technical. I went to eat at the restaurant. I asked for a table, looked around, and noticed something that any SEO consultant in a hurry would have skipped: the waiters had to explain the menu three times per table because people didn’t understand the names of the rice dishes from the PDF menu. Translated to the web world, this means the homepage didn’t explain what kind of cuisine the restaurant served or who it was for.
There was the first mistake, and it was the one costing them the most customers.
Mistake 1: your website doesn’t know how to explain what it is
73% of small business websites I audit have this problem. It’s not a bug. It’s a conceptual design failure. The homepage opens with a nice full-screen photo, no text, and the visitor has to scroll to understand what the site sells. And on mobile, that scroll doesn’t happen: the tab gets closed.
What I did at Los Pinochos: I rewrote the homepage in “answer-first” format. The first 3 lines now say exactly what the site is, where it is, what type of cuisine it makes, and how to book. The nice photo stayed, but behind the text, not in front of it. Calls from the homepage went up 40% in 2 weeks, not because the photo was worse, but because the visitor already knew in 3 seconds whether that site was for them.
The lesson I’m taking away: a website that needs 8 seconds to explain itself is a website that loses 60% of its visitors on the first scroll. It doesn’t matter how nice the photo is.
Mistake 2: 7 seconds to load and nobody tells you
Benji’s cousin had told him “7 seconds is normal on Wix”. That’s false. The average user abandons a mobile website after 3 seconds, and after 5 seconds 90% are gone. This is not opinion, it’s data from Google since 2017 that’s been confirmed study after study.
When we measured the Los Pinochos site, mobile took longer than desktop. Why? Because Wix serves a “responsive” version of the site, but with all the editor’s JavaScript loaded. And that, on a real 4G connection, is 7 seconds of waiting to see text that was already in the HTML.
What I did: I converted all photos to WebP (from 4 MB to 180 KB each, no visible loss), removed the 8 widgets nobody used, and in March we built the new site from scratch in Astro, redesigning the whole thing. Load time dropped to 1.4 seconds. But the most important thing wasn’t the speed: it was that online bookings went up 25% in 3 weeks, because people who came in no longer left frustrated after 4 seconds.
The lesson I’m taking away: small business owners almost never complain about speed. They complain about “no one calls me”. But speed is the root cause of 50% of those “no one calls me”.
Mistake 3: “I’m afraid to touch the website”
Here’s what Benji told me, and it stuck with me: “I’ve gone 2 years without updating the menu on the website because the last time I touched something it broke and it took us a week to fix”. This is more common than it seems. I see it in restaurants, clinics, offices, shops. The business pays €80-200/month to a “maintainer” who charges for every small change, and the result is that the website menu is 3 months out of date and the summer hours are still the winter ones.
What I did at Los Pinochos: I built a custom CMS based on JSON. The team edits the menu, the wine list, the featured dishes, and the schedules from structured JSON files, without touching HTML. I made them a 4-page manual and a 7-minute video. In the first week, Benji updated the wine list himself. In the second, he changed three dishes on the menu. In the third, he told me: “I should have had this years ago”.
The lesson I’m taking away: a website that the client can’t maintain without help is a website that becomes obsolete. And an obsolete website is worse than not having a website.
Mistake 4: invisible to Google and to AIs
When I arrived, Los Pinochos wasn’t showing up on Google for “rice dishes Valladolid” or on ChatGPT for “recommend a Valencian cuisine restaurant in Valladolid”. They had a website, they had a Google Business listing, they had good reviews. The problem? Zero Schema.org on the website, zero llms.txt, poor text content, and the address only in the footer.
This is what I call “the invisible mistake”. The website looks fine to a human, but Google and the AIs don’t understand that it’s a local business with X services in Y city. To them, it’s just another page with text and images.
What I did: I implemented complete Schema.org (Organization, Restaurant, Menu, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList on each page), created a detailed llms.txt, rewrote the homepage with 800 useful words, and added a visible FAQ with real questions that people ask (“do you have parking?”, “do you accept group bookings?”, “is there a gluten-free menu?”). In 3 months, Los Pinochos showed up on Google’s first page for “rice dishes Valladolid” and started appearing in ChatGPT for “Valencian cuisine restaurant in Valladolid”.
The lesson I’m taking away: AI and Google don’t read your website the way a human does. If you don’t tell them in a format they understand (Schema, llms.txt, structured FAQ), you don’t appear. It doesn’t matter how nice the design is.
Mistake 5: the homepage says “we’re the best” and provides no proof
Los Pinochos’ old homepage said “contemporary Valencian cuisine by an author chef in Valladolid”. Nice, but empty. How many years of experience? It didn’t say. How many references in the wine cellar? It didn’t say. Who is the chef? A generic photo. What do people think? No reviews on the website. Featured dishes? A gallery with no context.
What I did: I rewrote the homepage with concrete data. “Contemporary Valencian cuisine by chef Benji, trained at [specific school] and with X years of experience”. Wine list with 60+ references, grouped by type and with tasting notes. Featured dishes with photo, short description, price, and allergens. Team section with real photo of each person and their role. Real customer reviews with name, date, and link to Google.
The lesson I’m taking away: empty adjectives (“the best”, “the most authentic”) don’t differentiate. Concrete data (“chef with 12 years of experience, trained at school X, wine list with 60 references, 200 reviews with 4.7 average on Google”) does differentiate.
What I learned in those 6 months
After building Los Pinochos’ new website from scratch in Astro and redesigning the whole site, I did the same process on 4 more projects (a dental clinic, a law firm, a local clothing shop, and a bakery). The 5 mistakes above appeared, in different order, in all 5. And all were fixed with the same strategy: useful visible content, real speed, easy maintenance, correct technical markup, and concrete evidence.
The 5 patterns that repeat in 80% of small business websites:
- Doesn’t explain what the site is in the first 3 seconds (homepage with a photo but no text).
- Slow load without the owner knowing (because they test it at their office on fibre).
- The owner can’t maintain the website without help and pays €100+/month for minimal changes.
- No Schema.org or llms.txt (invisible to Google and to AIs).
- No concrete evidence (only adjectives and generic photos).
If your website has 2 or more of these, there’s work to do. And the good news is that they get fixed with a well-done redesign or a good tune-up, not with a 6-month project or a €10,000 budget.
If you want me to look at your case
If you see yourself in 2 or more of these mistakes, write to me at landinowebs@gmail.com or via WhatsApp and I’ll give you an honest diagnosis. No commitment, and I won’t sell you anything you don’t need.
And if you want to see the complete Los Pinochos case with screenshots and metrics, it’s documented here: Restaurante Los Pinochos — case study.