7 signs your website is costing you customers

When a website isn’t working for you, it’s rarely down to one big problem. It’s more often lots of little things adding up, and because nothing looks broken, they’re easy to miss while you’re left wondering where all the enquiries went.

If you’ve got a hunch your site could be working harder for you but can’t put your finger on why, start here. These are the seven things we spot most often when we look under the bonnet of a website. If two or more ring a bell, it’s worth taking a closer look.

People can’t tell what you do within five seconds

Here’s a quick test. Show your homepage to someone who’s never heard of you for five seconds, then ask them what you do and who it’s for.

If they shrug, or get it wrong, your headline needs to work harder. Words like “solutions”, “passionate” or “transforming the way you…” tend to fall at this hurdle, because they tell people how you feel rather than what you do and how you can help.

Whether they’ve found you on Google or through a friend, people won’t go digging for answers. If it’s not clear straight away, they’ll look elsewhere.

Your contact form is a black hole

This is where enquiries go missing, and there are three usual culprits:

• The form’s tucked away three clicks deep, so most people never find it
• Someone hits submit, and nothing obvious happens, so they’re not sure it worked and might try someone else just in case
• The message lands in a shared inbox that nobody checks very often

Have a go yourself. Fill in your own form, see what shows up on screen, and time how long it takes for a reply to come back.

Your website doesn’t work for everyone

Around one in four adults in the UK has a disability. If your site isn’t accessible, you could be turning away a big chunk of your audience without ever knowing they stopped by.

You can get a rough idea of where you stand in a few minutes:

• Put the mouse down and use just your keyboard. Tab through the page and see whether you can reach every link and fill in the contact form
• Check that your images have alt text, so people using screen readers know what’s in them
• Look at the contrast between your text and the background. Is it easy to read?

Better still, accessible sites are easier for everyone to use, and they help your SEO and GEO too.

Google can’t find you, and neither can ChatGPT

Search engines and AI assistants are looking for the same thing: clear, up-to-date proof of what you do and why people can trust you. If your site hasn’t had fresh content in a while, has no structured data and doesn’t have many reviews, they don’t have much to go on, so they recommend someone else.

The good news is you don’t need a separate trick for each one. What helps you show up in Google also helps you show up in ChatGPT, and that matters more every month as more people ask an AI for recommendations before they search. We’re already seeing ChatGPT appear among the top traffic sources for the sites we work on. Is your website AI ready?

Your website looks a bit 2017

First impressions happen fast online, and they’re mostly about looks. Tiny dense text, generic stock photos, a layout designed for desktop and squashed onto a phone, or a copyright date from a few years back can all suggest, fairly or not, that nobody’s minding the shop.

People won’t tell you that’s why they went elsewhere, which is exactly what makes it so easy to miss.

You can’t update your website yourself

If changing a sentence, swapping a photo or posting a blog means raising a ticket, waiting a week and paying for it, things just don’t get changed. Slowly the site drifts away from the real business, with people who’ve left still on the team page, old prices hanging around, and services you stopped offering ages ago.

A well-built site lets you make everyday edits yourself and saves your developer’s time for the bigger jobs. If yours doesn’t, it’s worth asking why.

Your site is slow on mobile

Pop your web address into Google PageSpeed Insights and check the mobile results rather than desktop. That’s where most of your visitors are, and where slow sites struggle most. If your page takes more than three seconds to load, plenty of people will have given up before they see a thing.

The usual suspects are oversized images, heavy scripts and plugins that have piled up over the years. They’re all fixable, but it helps to know which one you’re dealing with before you spend any money.

Sound familiar?

If you recognised your website in two or more of these, you’re definitely not alone. The next step is working out which ones apply and what to fix first.

That’s where we can help. Get in touch for a chat about your website. We’ll listen to what’s going on, take a look at where things might be getting stuck, and share some ideas on where to start.

Let’s have a chat