I spent an afternoon last week clicking through Sault Ste. Marie business websites. Restaurants on Queen, contractors out near the bypass, professional services in the Station Mall area, retail on Wellington. I’m not naming names. But the pattern is hard to miss: a lot of local sites look like they were built around the time the new bridge plaza opened, and nobody’s touched them since.
This isn’t a roast. It’s a diagnosis. The why matters more than the what.
What “stuck in 2015” actually looks like
A handful of telltale signs show up over and over:
- Auto-rotating sliders on the homepage. A picture of the building, then a picture of a smiling staff member, then a stock photo of a handshake, each with overlapping text. Conversion research killed the carousel around 2017. Almost nobody clicks past slide one.
- Hero text you have to squint at. White text on a beige background. Grey text on a busy photo with no overlay. The owner can read it because they know what it says.
- The everything-homepage. A wall of services, then a wall of testimonials, then a wall of partner logos, then a wall of news posts, then a row of social icons. No hierarchy. No editorial choice about what matters most.
- Stock photography of generic offices. The handshake photo. The diverse-team-around-a-laptop photo. The same handshake from a different angle.
- Contact info buried in the footer. No phone number in the header. No call button anywhere obvious. In a town where most B2B work converts on a phone call, that’s lost money every week.
- Mobile menus that fight you. Tap targets the size of a grain of rice, hamburger animations that take a full second, navigation that vanishes mid-scroll on iOS.
- Sites that load fine on a desktop and die on a 4G phone driving past the locks. Local traffic is mostly mobile now. A five-second load on the Trans-Canada is a bounce.
Three or more of those on your own site and yes, you’re in the cohort.
Why is this so common in the Soo?
It’s not that owners don’t care. It comes down to three things, in roughly equal measure.
Most local web work was done fast, by a freelancer, around 2016. A common path: a business needed a site, paid a freelancer fifteen hundred bucks, the freelancer dropped them into a WordPress theme that was current at the time, the site shipped. The owner has not opened the admin panel since.
The theme aged out three years ago. The plugins are eight versions behind. The freelancer moved to Sudbury or Barrie or Calgary. The site still loads, so nothing alarming has happened. But mobile usage moved on, Google’s ranking criteria moved on, and what competitor sites look like moved on. The site stayed still.
There’s no local pressure to update. In Toronto, when your competitor launches a new site, you feel it within a week. In the Soo, your competitor’s site is also stuck in 2015. Nobody on Queen Street has been disrupted, so nobody feels disruption.
This makes the opportunity bigger, not smaller. The bar to look modern in this town is on the floor.
The shops doing local web work are doing volume. A lot of the firms in town do web as a small slice of a larger print, sign, or marketing business. The output is fine — it ships, it loads, it doesn’t embarrass anyone. But it rarely starts from the question what is this site actually for? It starts from a template and a quote.
What about seasonal stuff?
This is the one most people miss. A surprising number of Sault businesses are seasonal or have seasonal swings — tourism around the locks and Whitefish Island, fall colour traffic up Highway 17, hockey tournaments in the winter, the boat-launch crowd on the North Channel in summer. Their websites do not reflect any of it.
The hours on the homepage are the same in January as they are in July. There’s no banner for the fall colour season or the holiday hours. The “events” page hasn’t been updated since 2022. A visitor lands and can’t tell if the business is still open this year, let alone this week.
Fixing the seasonal piece is genuinely cheap if the site is built right. It is genuinely impossible on most of the templates I see in town.
What would it actually take to fix this?
The bad news: you can’t fix it with a refresh of the existing site. A new colour palette on an old WordPress theme doesn’t change the navigation, the hierarchy, the conversion paths, the mobile behaviour. Those are structural choices made years ago, by someone who isn’t around anymore.
The good news: building a small business site in 2026 is dramatically cheaper than it was in 2015. The tooling is better. Hosting is essentially free. A custom build for a Sault business that takes its presence seriously — somewhere in the $4,000 to $8,000 range — does more, ranks better, and converts harder than the $1,500 template it replaces.
The bar to look great against the local field is low. The bar to convert visitors into paying customers is real, and worth taking seriously.
A small diagnostic you can run today
If you have a website that hasn’t been touched since 2018, try this:
- Open it on your phone, not your laptop.
- Time how long it takes you to find your phone number.
- Toggle Wi-Fi off and time how long the homepage takes to load on cellular.
- Read your homepage out loud as if you’d never heard of your business.
If any of those go badly, that’s your signal. Nothing more dramatic than that.
Bunker41 is a one-person studio in Sault Ste. Marie building custom websites and web apps for Northern Ontario businesses. If you’re curious how your own site stacks up, send me the link — I’ll send back a one-page read with what works, what doesn’t, and what’d matter to fix first. No pitch.