10 Signs Your Website Is Costing You Customers

A site rarely fails loudly. It just quietly converts less than it should, and because nobody sees the enquiries that never arrive, nothing gets fixed. Here are ten specific failures, and how to check for each one on your own site this afternoon.

1. It is slow on a phone, on real data

Not on your office wifi on a laptop. Run PageSpeed Insights and look only at the mobile score, then load the site on your own phone away from wifi. Every extra second past two costs conversions, and mobile is where most first visits happen.

2. There is no obvious next step above the fold

Open your homepage and cover everything below the first screen. Is it clear what you do, who for, and what to press? If a stranger would have to scroll to find out, that is a leak.

3. Your phone number is hard to find

For service businesses, buried contact details are the most expensive design decision on the site. It should be visible in the header, tappable on mobile, and repeated at the bottom of every page.

4. Your forms ask for too much

Every field costs you completions. Ask for what you need to make the first call, not what you would like in your CRM. Name, contact, and one line about the job is usually enough.

5. There is no proof anywhere

No reviews, no named clients, no photographs of finished work, no numbers. Visitors are trying to decide whether you are real. Give them evidence in the first screen, not on a separate page nobody opens.

6. The copy is about you, not them

Count the sentences on your homepage starting with “We”. Then count the ones describing a problem the reader has. If the first number is bigger, the page is a brochure rather than a sales tool.

7. It breaks on real phones

Not in a browser resized narrow — on an actual device. Text overflowing, buttons too small to hit, menus that need two hands, forms that zoom awkwardly when tapped. Test on the cheapest Android you can find.

8. Something on it is visibly out of date

A copyright year that has passed, a blog whose newest post is from two years ago, a team page with people who left. Each one signals nobody is minding the shop.

9. There are no local signals

If you serve an area, the site should say so in words search engines can read: town names in headings and page copy, service-area pages that are genuinely different from one another, an address and consistent business details.

10. You have analytics but never look at them

If nobody can say which page produced last month’s enquiries, decisions are being made on taste. Set up conversion tracking properly, then read it monthly. It changes what you argue about.

How to triage

Fix in this order: speed on mobile, then a clear call to action above the fold, then contact visibility, then proof. Those four move the numbers fastest and cost the least. Everything else can wait for the next redesign — and if you hit four or more of the ten, that redesign is probably closer than you thought.