I want you to sit with something for a second.
You are about to enter the season where your followers go a little quiet. Your inbox slows down. The algorithm gets weird. Your clients are at the pool or at graduation parties or loading up minivans for the first family vacation of the year, and the collective attention span of the entire internet shrinks by approximately forty percent.
That is wonderful. You deserve a slower season. Rest is good. Stepping away is healthy. I fully support all of it.
But here is the thing about your website: it does not get a summer break.
While you are on the couch watching reality television and calling it research, your website is showing up in Google search results for people who have never heard of you. Cold leads who found you through a keyword, a referral, a social share from six months ago. Potential clients who are actively looking for exactly what you offer and landing on your homepage to decide in approximately three seconds whether you’re worth their time.
Your website is clocking in whether you are or not. The only question is whether it’s doing the job.
What Summer Actually Means for Your Business
Let me reframe something that I think a lot of service-based business owners get wrong about the slower summer season.
Slower does not mean stopped. It means different.
Your warm audience, the people who already follow you, who open your emails, who like your posts, those people are indeed checking out for a while. They’re busy. They’re distracted. They’re living their lives and they will be back in September with fresh energy and a renewed willingness to invest in their businesses.
But your cold traffic? Cold traffic does not take a vacation.
Cold traffic is the person who typed “web design for female entrepreneurs” into Google on a Wednesday afternoon because she finally decided this is the summer she gets her website sorted out. It’s the woman who got your name from a friend at a cookout and Googled you on her phone before she even got home. It’s the potential client who has been thinking about reaching out for months and finally has a slower week to actually do it.
Google does not pause its indexing for Memorial Day weekend. The search results keep serving you up to strangers all summer long. The businesses that show up well during the slow season are the ones that planned for it, which means they have a website that works hard even when its owner does not.
Here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question: does yours?
Is Your Website Actually Summer-Ready?
Before we talk about solutions, let’s do a quick audit. Pull up your website right now, on your phone, as a cold visitor who has never met you. Ask yourself the following questions with genuine honesty.
Does your homepage pass the three-second test?
A cold visitor lands on your site and has approximately three seconds to decide whether to stay or leave. In those three seconds they need to understand what you do, who you do it for, and why they should care. Not in a clever, cryptic, “we help visionaries unlock their potential” kind of way. In a clear, direct, immediately useful kind of way.
Read your headline. Does it pass the test? If your first instinct is “sort of” or “it depends” or “I mean if you read the whole thing,” the answer is no.
Does it load fast on mobile?
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load on a phone, a significant portion of those cold summer visitors are gone before they ever see a word of your copy. Pull up Google PageSpeed Insights, which is free, and run your URL. If your score is below 70, this is worth fixing before summer hits.
Are your calls to action current and clear?
Every page of your website should guide a visitor toward a specific next step. Not “learn more,” which tells no one anything. Not a vague button with no context. A clear, action-oriented invitation that makes the next step obvious and exciting. Book a call. Download this guide. Shop templates. Whatever the right next step is for your business, it should be impossible to miss.
While you are at it, check that your CTAs are current. If you have a call to action referencing a promotion from February or a waitlist that closed three months ago, that is what your cold summer traffic is finding. Update it.
Is your availability communicated if you’re stepping away?
If you are planning to take real time off this summer, your website should say so. Not in a way that makes you sound unavailable or unreliable, but in a way that sets clear expectations. A banner, a note on your contact page, an updated booking calendar. A potential client who reaches out and hears nothing for two weeks is not a patient lead. They are a lost one.
Not sure where your website actually stands?
The Website Gut Check is our free 10-point checklist that walks you through exactly what a high-performing website needs and helps you identify what yours might be missing. Takes about ten minutes. Worth every one of them.
Comment CHECKLIST on our latest Instagram post and we’ll send it straight to your DMs. ✨
The Summer Solution: The Fast-Track Website
Okay. So you did the audit. You pulled up your site on your phone and you felt that familiar low-grade dread. Maybe it was the headline that doesn’t quite explain what you do. Maybe it was the load time. Maybe it was the realization that your homepage still has a photo from 2022 and a CTA button that says “learn more” and a color palette that was trendy three years ago.
Here is the good news: there is a solution that fits the summer timeline, and it does not require you to learn Showit from YouTube tutorials or spend your evenings wrestling with backend settings you don’t understand.
Introducing The Fast-Track Website.
Here’s how it works. You choose a Showit website template, and if you choose one of mine, it’s included in the price. You fill out a detailed content questionnaire that gives us everything we need to customize it for your specific business. Then we do the rest. The customization, the setup, the mobile optimization, the SEO foundations, the backend settings that make your eyes glaze over when you try to do them yourself.
You get a professionally customized website built on Showit, one of the best platforms available for service-based businesses, and you do not have to touch a single line of code or spend a single night on YouTube trying to figure out why your nav menu is broken on mobile. Ask me how I know that is a real risk of DIYing a Showit template. Actually, do not ask me. The stories are upsetting.
The investment is $3,500 for your main content pages. Home, About, Services, Contact, and the supporting pages that make your site a complete, functional, professional presence rather than just a few pretty pages with nothing connecting them.
The timeline is fast. That is literally in the name. Get it done in May, and you show up all summer with a website that works while you’re resting, traveling, attending every graduation party on your calendar, or doing whatever it is you actually want to be doing.
That is the whole pitch. You provide the content. We handle everything else. Your website gets done, for real, before summer fully arrives.
Two spots left. Just so you know.
What to Do Right Now
Whether or not The Fast-Track Website is the right move for you, here is a practical action plan for getting your website into shape before summer hits.
Step one: Run the Website Gut Check.
It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and it will give you a clear picture of exactly what your site is doing well and where it is quietly losing you business. Comment CHECKLIST on our latest Instagram post and we’ll send it straight to your DMs. Do this first, before anything else. Know what you’re actually dealing with.
Step two: Fix the quick wins yourself.
Based on your gut check results, there will almost certainly be a few things you can address on your own this week. Update a CTA button. Rewrite your homepage headline. Add a testimonial you’ve been sitting on. Compress a few images to improve your load time. These small improvements add up fast and cost you nothing but an afternoon.
Step three: Decide what needs a professional.
Some website problems are quick fixes. Others are structural. If your site is built on a platform that is limiting your design flexibility, if your copy is fundamentally unclear, if your branding is so outdated that no amount of tweaking is going to close the gap, those are not DIY problems. Those are problems that benefit from a professional who knows exactly what she’s doing and can get it done before you spend the whole summer avoiding your own website link.
That is what we are here for.
Ready to Show Up All Summer?
Here is what I know about the women who are reading this post right now. You are good at what you do. You have clients who love you, work that speaks for itself, and a business you have built with real effort and real care.
And your website might not be showing any of that to the strangers who find you this summer.
That gap is fixable. It does not have to be complicated or expensive or a months-long project that bleeds into fall. The Fast-Track Website exists specifically for this situation, for the business owner who needs a website that works and needs it done before summer fully takes over the calendar.
Two spots left. June is coming fast.
Start with the free audit: Comment CHECKLIST on our latest Instagram post and grab the Website Gut Check. Ten questions, ten minutes, instant clarity.
Want to see what a customized Showit template can look like? Browse our Showit templates →
Ready to book your Fast-Track Website spot? Book a connection call → Tell me you’re interested in The Fast-Track Website and we’ll get you on the calendar before the spots are gone.
Your website should be your hardest working team member this summer. Let’s make sure it actually earns it.
xo, Makena
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Fast-Track Website and how is it different from just buying a template?
Buying a template means you get a beautiful starting point and then you are on your own to customize it, troubleshoot it, optimize it for mobile, set up the backend, configure your SEO settings, and figure out why something broke at 11pm on a Tuesday. The Fast-Track Website means we do all of that for you. You get the professionally customized result without the DIY process. Same beautiful Showit foundation, completely different experience of getting there.
What is Showit and why do you use it for website design?
Showit is a drag-and-drop website platform that gives you full creative flexibility without any coding. We build every website at Makena Creative on Showit because it looks incredible, performs beautifully on mobile, integrates with WordPress for blogging and SEO, and is genuinely easy to update yourself once it’s built. No developers required. No coding knowledge needed. It’s the platform we recommend for every service-based business that wants a site that looks custom and works hard.
How quickly can The Fast-Track Website be completed?
The Fast-Track Website is designed to be completed in two to three weeks from the time we receive your completed content questionnaire. The timeline depends on how quickly assets like your photos and copy are provided, but the process is streamlined specifically to move fast without cutting corners. Book your spot now, get your content together, and you can have a new website live before summer is in full swing.
What does improving website engagement actually mean in practice?
Website engagement refers to how visitors interact with your site: how long they stay, how many pages they visit, whether they take an action like clicking a button or filling out a contact form. High engagement means your site is clear, relevant, and compelling. Low engagement, high bounce rates, short time on page, no form submissions, usually means something is unclear, slow, or not speaking to the right person. The Website Gut Check will help you identify exactly which of these issues your site is dealing with.
Is The Fast-Track Website right for an established business or more for someone just starting out?
Both, honestly. The Fast-Track Website is a great fit for an established business that has been running on a website that no longer reflects its current level, and equally great for a newer business owner who needs a professional web presence quickly without the custom project timeline. The key is having your content, your photos, and a clear picture of your services ready to go when we start. If those pieces are in place, we can move fast.
