Five signs your website is costing you customers
A website doesn't have to be broken to be losing you business. Here are five quiet signs worth checking today.
A website can be losing you customers every week without ever looking broken to the person who owns it.
That is what makes these problems hard to catch. You know where your phone number is, and your browser has the site cached so it loads faster for you than for anyone else. You already trust the business because you run it, and a first time visitor on a phone in a car park has none of that.
Below are the five we see most often on a small business site that gets traffic but not enquiries. Each one comes with how to check it yourself and what fixing it involves.
A slow page on a phone loses people before they see anything
Speed costs you customers who never even saw your offer. They tapped your listing, waited, then went back to the search results while your homepage was still loading.
Google’s own measure for this is how long the main content of the page takes to appear on a real visit. Under 2.5 seconds counts as good. Past four seconds Google classes the page as poor, and the thresholds are set out in its documentation on Largest Contentful Paint.
To check it yourself: turn wi-fi off on your phone, so you are on mobile data like a real customer, and load your homepage from a Google search rather than from your history. Count the seconds out loud. Then run the same page through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score, not the desktop one.
What fixing it involves, in the order that usually pays off:
- Resizing and compressing images, which is nearly always the biggest single win
- Removing plugins and tracking scripts nobody uses any more
- Turning on page caching so the server stops rebuilding every page from scratch
- Moving off the cheapest shared hosting, which no amount of tuning can rescue
Most sites we look at get from embarrassing to comfortably quick on the first two items alone.
Contact details that need hunting for cost you calls
If someone has decided to get in touch and then has to work for it, some of them just will not bother. Your phone number belongs in the header of every page. A contact page is where people look when they cannot find it anywhere else.
The test is unkind but useful. Hand your phone to someone who has never seen the site and ask them to ring you. Watch how many taps it takes and where they hesitate.
Here is what should be true on a phone, without scrolling:
- The phone number is visible in or near the header on every page
- Tapping the number starts a call, rather than selecting text to copy
- The suburb or region you work in appears somewhere in the first screen
- A form is no more than one tap away, for the people who will not ring
Fixing this is usually an hour of work. The number goes in the header as a proper tap to call link, with a sticky call button on mobile and the full address and hours in the footer. If you want the longer version of why this matters more than clever copy, we wrote about what makes someone pick up the phone.
A page with no clear next step leaves the visitor to guess
Every page should be trying to get the visitor to do one specific thing. Pages that end with nothing but a paragraph of company history leave the decision entirely to the reader, and most readers will not make it.
- Ends with a paragraph about the business
- "Contact us" in the menu and nowhere else
- Three equal buttons, all mild
- Form asks for eleven fields up front
- Nothing said about what happens after you send it
- One action repeated top, middle and bottom
- Specific wording: "Get a quote, usually back same day"
- Tap to call sits beside the form, not competing with it
- Form asks for name, phone and the job
- Says who replies and how quickly
To check it yourself: open each of your main pages and say out loud what you want the visitor to do. If you cannot answer in one short sentence, or the page offers four options of equal weight, the visitor cannot either.
What fixing it involves: picking one action per page, writing it as a specific promise rather than a polite invitation, and repeating it where people actually reach a decision. Then cutting the form down to the fields you genuinely need to quote the job.
A site nobody has touched in years reads as a business that might be gone
Nobody rings a business they think might have closed. The site is where a visitor checks, and old details answer the question for them. A copyright line stuck a few years back does it, and so does a staff page full of people who left.
The awkward part is that this one is invisible to the owner. You know the business is busy, so the site never reads as stale to you.
To check it yourself: read your own services page as if you were pricing a job today. Anything you no longer offer comes off, and any photo of work you would not show a customer now gets replaced. We went through this decision in more detail in redesign or just a few fixes.
With nothing measuring the site, you cannot tell if it is working
This is the sign that hides the other four. If nobody is tracking where enquiries come from, a site can underperform for years and nobody notices, because there is no number to notice it with.
You do not need a reporting suite. Four things are enough to run a small business site honestly:
- How many people land on the site, and which pages they land on
- What they searched for before they arrived
- How many tapped the phone number
- How many sent a form, and which page they were on when they did
Two free Google tools cover all of it once they are connected properly: Google Analytics for what happens on the site, and Search Console for what happens before the visit. Setting them up is a one off job.
Having the tools installed is not the same as tracking enquiries. Plenty of sites have analytics running and still cannot say how many calls came from the website last month, because the phone taps and form submissions were never set up as conversions.
Test your own site in five minutes
Do this now, on your phone, off wi-fi. It takes less time than reading the rest of this page and it will tell you which of the five you actually have.
- Search your business on Google and tap through to the site. Count the seconds until you can read something.
- Without scrolling, find the phone number. Tap it. Did it ring?
- Read the homepage and say what the site wants you to do next.
- Check the footer year, the photos and the services list against what is true today.
- Open your analytics and find how many enquiries came through last month.
Any step you could not complete is a sign, and the order above is roughly the order visitors hit them.
Which of the five to fix first
Fix the cheap ones first, because they change the result fastest and cost the least. The table below is the order we work in when we take over a site that is getting visitors but not calls.
| Sign | How you spot it | Usually takes | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact details hard to find | Cannot ring the business in two taps | An hour or two | More calls from the visitors you already get |
| No clear next step | Cannot say what the page wants | A day | Higher share of visitors who enquire |
| Nothing measured | Cannot say where enquiries came from | Half a day, once | Tells you what to fix next |
| Slow on a phone | Over four seconds on mobile data | A day or two | Fewer people leaving before they see you |
| Untouched for years | Old photos, prices, services | Days, or a rebuild | Trust, and fewer wasted enquiries |
Speed sits fourth on purpose. It matters, but a fast site with no visible phone number still will not ring.
The one thing to do this week
If you do one thing this week, ring your own business from your own website, on your own phone, off wi-fi. A visitor who had already decided to contact you and then could not is the most expensive kind to lose, because you paid to get them there and they were ready.
If the answer is uncomfortable, start there and ignore the rest for now. One fixed sign beats a plan to fix five.
At Crsp Digital we run these checks as part of setting a business up properly, along with the site, the Google listing and the tracking. The Get Found plan covers that groundwork if you would rather not work through the list yourself.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my website is actually losing me customers?
Open it on your own phone using mobile data, then time how long it takes to load and how long it takes to find your phone number. If either takes more than a few seconds, you are losing people who would have called.
How fast should my website load on a phone?
Google treats a page as good when the main content appears within 2.5 seconds on a real visit, and classes anything past four seconds as poor. On a phone, the slower it gets the more people leave before the page has finished loading.
Do I need a whole new website or can these things be fixed?
Four of the five signs are fixes rather than rebuilds, usually a few days of work on the site you already have. A rebuild only makes sense when the structure, the content and the platform are all working against you.
What is the cheapest of the five to fix?
Making your phone number tappable and visible on every page. It is often under an hour of work and it is the change most likely to turn an existing visitor into a call.
How much does it cost to fix a slow website?
It depends what is making it slow. Compressing images and turning on caching is often a small job, while moving off cheap oversold hosting can start from a few hundred dollars a year and does more than any plugin will.
How can I tell where my enquiries are coming from?
You need two free Google tools connected to the site, one for what people search before they arrive and one for what they do once they are on it. Without them you are guessing, and guessing is how businesses keep paying for the thing that is not working.
My website looks fine to me. Could it still be a problem?
Yes, and that is the usual case. You know where everything is, you load the site from cached files on your own laptop, and you already trust the business, so none of the friction a first time visitor hits shows up for you.
Does an out of date website hurt my Google rankings?
Stale content and a slow page can both work against you, but the bigger cost is the visitor who lands, decides the business looks inactive, and leaves. Rankings get you the visit, the site has to earn the call.
