Your customers are driving in circles before they reach you
On these islands, an address is not enough to get a customer to your door. The four things a "Find us" page needs to actually bring someone in.
Someone has already chosen your restaurant, your shop, your workshop. They are in the rental car, they have your name, they have your address. And they have been circling for ten minutes.
It ends one of two ways. They call you, and you spend five minutes describing a bend in the road. Or they give up and stop somewhere else, and you will never know they had decided to come to you.
How do you get found when you have no precise street address?
By giving something other than an address: a directions link that opens the phone's navigation app in one tap, GPS coordinates, and a visual landmark the driver cannot misread. A postal address is for the mail carrier, not for a visitor.
This is a local quirk we forget because we live with it. In St Martin and St Barts alike, plenty of businesses have no street number at all. "Route de Grand-Case", "Baie Nettlé", "Gustavia" each describe kilometres of tarmac. Hand that to a GPS and it drops the driver somewhere in the middle, sometimes on the wrong side of the road, occasionally in the wrong bay.
The four things that get someone to your door
A directions button, not an address to retype. A link to your Google Maps listing, or to raw coordinates, launches turn-by-turn navigation in one tap, with current traffic. An address in plain text forces the visitor to memorise it, leave your site, type it again, and trust whatever the GPS makes of it. Every one of those steps loses people.
GPS coordinates written out in plain text. Two numbers, on the page, copyable. They work in Waze, in Maps, in the rental company's app, and they depend on no directory listing. It is the most robust version of where you are.
The visual landmark. The sentence you already say ten times a day on the phone. "Just past the Sol station, on your right." "Opposite the dock, the blue building." Write it down. That is what turns "I'm roughly there" into "I'm outside".
Parking. Where to leave the car, whether it costs anything, how many spaces. It is the question your visitor is asking while driving, and almost no website answers it. On islands where parking a rental is a competitive sport, answering it sets you apart immediately.
The embedded map is often the problem
There is one reflex worth resisting: dropping a big interactive map at the top of the page and calling the job done. An embedded map loads JavaScript, image tiles and third-party trackers. It is frequently the heaviest element on the page, and this is precisely the page people open on mobile data, in a car, with one bar of signal.
Beyond three seconds of waiting, 53% of mobile visitors give up, according to Google's study. Losing half your audience on the one page whose entire job is to bring them in is a particularly expensive kind of waste.
The fix is straightforward: a static map image that renders instantly, with a button over it that opens real navigation in the phone's own app. Your visitor wanted directions, not a map to drag around inside a ten-centimetre frame. That is the kind of trade-off we make on every site we ship out of our web agency in St Martin, where load time from North America shapes everything else.
Write your location identically everywhere
Your location does not live on your website alone. It is on your Google listing, in tourist directories, on your Facebook page. When those sources contradict each other about the name of the bay, the side of the road, the opening hours, it is your visitor who picks one at random.
Your Google Business Profile is in fact the source most people will check before they ever reach your site: it is what supplies the "Directions" button in search results. Dragging the pin to the right spot on that listing's map, rather than simply typing an address, is one of the highest-return gestures in your whole online presence. We covered the setup in our article on the Google Business Profile.
The test to run tonight
Borrow the phone of someone who has never been to your business. Search your name, open your site, and try to reach you knowing nothing else. Count the taps, and note the moment you would have picked up the phone to call.
If you had to call, or if the pin lands on your neighbour's plot, you now know what is missing. This is not a rebuild: it is one page, four pieces of information, and a map that slows nothing down.
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