We get to look inside a lot of marketing sites — the kind sold to small businesses by general-purpose web shops, and the kind cobbled together by the founder's cousin. The work is rarely incompetent. It's almost always incomplete. The same four or five fundamentals get skipped, the same way, on almost every site.
The list below is what we run through before we'll let a Catalyst build go live. It's not exotic. None of these are hard. They're just the things that nobody insists on, and then everybody wonders why the site doesn't perform.
1 · Mobile-first, not just “responsive”
“Responsive” usually means the desktop layout shrinks down acceptably. Mobile-first means the mobile experience was the design starting point and the desktop is the variation. Real mobile-first sites have type sizes that don't require zoom, tap targets that are at least 44 pixels, and buttons that don't sit under the iOS bottom bar. Test on a real phone, not a browser window pretending.
2 · Semantic HTML
It's amazing how many marketing sites are still <div> all the way down. Use <header>, <main>, <article>, <section>, <nav>, and <footer>. Use <h1> through <h6> as an outline, not as a styling shortcut. Screen readers will thank you and so will Google. Search engines are pattern-matchers; semantic structure is a pattern.
3 · Anti-spam on every form
Every public form needs a defense or your inbox becomes a casino. The cheapest, most reliable option is a honeypot: a hidden field that real users can't see and bots reliably fill in. If the field has a value, throw the submission away. No reCAPTCHA, no friction. We use this on the Catalyst contact form. Nine out of ten spam attempts get caught with one input element.
4 · Schema markup for the business
If you're a local business, your homepage should ship a LocalBusiness JSON-LD block with your name, address, phone, hours, and area served. If you have reviews, add AggregateRating. If you have services, add a Service graph. Google uses this to populate the knowledge panel that sits to the right of search results. Without schema, you're leaving that real estate up to scraping and guessing.
5 · Analytics that actually fire
Half the sites we audit have a tracking tag installed and configured wrong. The events don't fire, the conversions don't attribute, and the owner is making spend decisions on data that isn't there. Verify the install with the network tab. Verify the conversion goals with a test submission. Watch the realtime view light up before you call it done.
6 · Lead capture that lands somewhere a human sees
This is the failure that hurts most. A form gets submitted, an autoresponder fires, and the email goes to an inbox the owner hasn't opened in a week. Send leads to a place where someone is paid to look at them: a shared inbox, a CRM that pages on new leads, a Slack channel, an SMS. Reply within 24 hours or you've lost the deal to the next search result.
7 · NAP consistency wired into the site
Your business Name, Address, and Phone need to match exactly across the homepage, the footer, the contact page, the schema markup, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing. “Suite 100” vs “Ste 100” vs “#100” matters more than you'd think. Pick one canonical form and make every surface reflect it.
8 · Compressed images
Every marketing site has at least one 4 MB hero image. Most have several. Run them through a compressor or convert to WebP and you'll routinely see 90% reductions with no visible quality loss. (The screenshots on this site's portfolio went from 24 MB total down to 1.6 MB.) Lazy-load anything below the fold.
9 · Cached static assets with sane headers
Browsers will hold onto your images, fonts, and stylesheets for a year if you tell them to. The default for many hosts is to tell them to cache for nothing. Set a long max-age on hashed asset URLs. Use immutable for files that don't change. The second page load is then almost free.
10 · A 404 page that actually helps
The default 404 page is a dead end and a missed opportunity. Yours should match the site's design, explain what happened, link to the homepage, list the most useful pages (services, contact), and ideally include a search box. A good 404 page recovers visitors. A bad one is a quiet bounce.
The honest bar
None of these are exotic. None of them require a custom framework or a dedicated developer. They're just discipline at the moment of launch. Before you call any marketing site “done,” walk through this list. If you get to the bottom and have hit all ten, congratulations — you're in the top 10% of SMB sites we audit.
