Thirty-odd blog posts since March. Somewhere in there we covered the domain renewal letter that looks like a bill, what Google Business Profile setup actually costs, the software subscriptions you forgot you were paying for, and what the letters after the dot in your domain actually mean.

That's a lot to hand somebody who runs an HVAC company and has fourteen minutes of free time on a Tuesday.

So here's the recap, and the short version of it. If you ignore every other small business tech tip we've published in 2026 and do exactly three things, do these. They're the ones that came up most often in actual client conversations this year, and they're the ones where the gap between "done" and "not done" costs real money.

1. Get email on your own domain

We wrote about this back in May and it's still the single most common fix we make for a new client.

If your business email is yourbusiness@gmail.com or, worse, bigmike1987@yahoo.com, you are quietly losing work you'll never hear about. Say a property manager in Chandler gets three bids, two come from real domains and one comes from Gmail. The Gmail one gets read last.

People won't tell you this is why. They just go with someone else.

The fix runs about $7 per user per month. That's the current list price for both Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic if you commit for a year; paying month to month costs more, and both vendors have raised these prices within the past year, so check the current number before you sign up. The price you see advertised is usually the annual rate. You already own the domain if you have a website. Setup is a handful of DNS records and a migration of your old mail, which Google's import tool does for you.

Realistically it's a day of light work, most of which is waiting for DNS to propagate. And then every quote you send from mike@bigmikehvac.com lands differently.

One thing people skip: set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC while you're in there. Without them your mail is more likely to hit spam, which defeats the whole point. This stopped being a nice-to-have in 2024, when Google and Yahoo started requiring at least one of SPF or DKIM from everyone sending mail to their users, and both of them plus DMARC from anyone sending in bulk. For DKIM, don't assume Google has you covered: until you publish a key for your own domain, Google signs your mail with a shared default key, which isn't the same thing. Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Authenticate email will show you whether your domain's own key is active, and will generate one if it isn't. SPF and DMARC are TXT records you add wherever your DNS is hosted, which may not be the same company as your email.

2. Turn on automated backups

Here's the question we ask every new client, and the answer is almost never good: if your website vanished tonight, how long until it's back?

Most small business owners say something like "my web guy has a copy." Then we call the web guy and the copy is from 2023, or it's on a laptop that got replaced, or the web guy stopped answering in March.

Picture a plumbing company in Tempe whose host suspends the account over an unpaid card on file. The site comes back after four days. Four days with no website during monsoon season, and if there's no backup, restoring means rebuilding.

What you want:

  • Backups that run on a schedule without anyone remembering to click anything
  • Copies stored somewhere that isn't your web host, because if the host is the problem, backups on the host are also the problem
  • A restore you have actually tested at least once
  • A note somewhere of what restoring actually involves, so it isn't you figuring that out at 11pm

The tested restore matters more than the rest of the list put together. An untested backup is a guess. This is most of what a care plan is actually buying you, whether you pay us for it or handle it yourself.

On WordPress, UpdraftPlus does this for free and pushes to Google Drive or Dropbox. Jetpack VaultPress Backup is the paid option with one-click restore, though it's worth checking whether the price you're quoted is an introductory rate before you sign up for it. If your site is on Squarespace or Wix, know that as of this writing neither one gives you a complete export. Squarespace hands you a WordPress XML file covering one blog page plus basic pages and text, and leaves out product pages, album and index pages, audio and video blocks, and any custom CSS. Wix has no full-site export at all; the closest it gets is letting you download some content as CSV files, and those don't include the actual image files. The real backup there is copying your text and images out by hand and keeping them somewhere you control. If someone built you a custom site, ask them where the code lives and whether it's actually in your name. If the answer is vague, that's your answer.

3. Open your site on your phone and time it

Do this on your phone, on cell data, standing outside somewhere. Your desktop doesn't count. We ran through the ten-second version of this check in July, and it's worth doing again.

On the client sites we watch, most of the traffic comes from phones, and for service businesses it runs higher still because people search when they need somebody right now. Somebody's AC dies in Mesa in July. They're on a phone, in a hot house, and they are not patient.

Google calls anything under 2.5 seconds a good Largest Contentful Paint, and it grades you at the 75th percentile: three out of four visits have to come in under 2.5 seconds. A fast load on your office wifi doesn't save you.

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, which is free at pagespeed.web.dev. Look at the mobile tab, not desktop. Desktop scores are flattering and irrelevant.

It's almost always images. Someone uploaded a 4MB photo straight from an iPhone and the site is serving all 4MB of it to a person on three bars of LTE. Compress your images, serve them as WebP, and you'll often cut load time in half without touching anything else. The second most common culprit is a stack of plugins nobody has audited since installation.

Speed is only the entry fee. What the page does once it loads is a separate question, and a shorter list than most people expect.

Tell us what to write

Two of the ones we kept getting asked about went up this month: where AI helps with local SEO and where it gets you penalized, and the four things that have to be in your name before you own your website. Next up is the walkthrough of what to do when an employee leaves and takes account access with them, because we've watched that go badly twice now. Past that we'd rather write what you want to read. Send us a note and tell us what's been eating your time. The best posts we've written came from somebody's frustrated question, and we'd like to keep it that way.

Do this today

Pull out your phone right now and text yourself the answer to one question: where is my website backed up, and when did anyone last check?

If you can't answer it in thirty seconds, that's your weekend project. Start with UpdraftPlus or whatever your host offers, run one backup, download it to your computer, and open the file to confirm it isn't empty. Fifteen minutes, and you've handled the item on this list most likely to ruin a week.

And if one of these three isn't done and you'd rather hand it off than spend a Saturday on it, that's what Marshland does. We handle the tech so you can run the business. Book a free 15-minute call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth paying anyone for, including us. Some of this you can do yourself in an afternoon, and we'll say so.