5 signs your website is losing you customers

Most websites don’t fail loudly. Nothing crashes and nobody complains. Customers just land on the site, get stuck or put off, and go to someone else instead. You never hear about the sales you didn’t make.

The good news is that you can spot most of the problems yourself in about ten minutes. Grab your phone and work through these five checks.

1. Your enquiry form doesn’t reach you

Fill in your own contact form as if you were a customer. Then time how long it takes to reach you.

If it lands in junk, takes hours, or never arrives at all, every enquiry from your website is at risk. This is more common than you’d think. Forms get set up once and never tested again, and a change of email address or hosting can quietly break them.

Even when the form works, an email that sits unread until the evening can lose you the customer. Getting enquiries sent straight to WhatsApp means you see them within seconds.

2. It’s slow on a phone

Open your website on your phone, using mobile data rather than Wi-Fi. Count how long it takes before you can actually read something.

If you’re waiting more than a few seconds, many visitors won’t. They’ll hit back and tap the next result. Big photos straight off a camera, old plugins and cheap hosting are the usual culprits.

For a more detailed check, put your address into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Look at the mobile score, which is the one your customers feel.

3. It’s a pain to use on a phone

Most people looking for a business are on their phone. While you’re there, check:

Can you read the text without pinching to zoom?
Are buttons big enough to tap without hitting the wrong one?
Does anything spill off the side of the screen?
Can you find what you do and where you work within a few seconds?

If you have to squint, scroll sideways or hunt around, so do your customers.

4. You can’t find it on Google

Search Google for what you do and where you do it, the way a customer would. Try “accountant in Hertford”, “florist near me” or whatever fits your business. Don’t search for your business name, because people who already know your name aren’t the ones you’re missing.

If you’re nowhere to be seen, two things usually help most:

A Google Business Profile, which puts you on Google Maps and in the local results. Here’s how to set one up.
Pages that say clearly what you do and where, rather than one page that tries to cover everything.

5. It’s hard to get in touch, or it looks out of date

A visitor who’s ready to get in touch shouldn’t have to go looking. Check that:

Your phone number is at the top of the page, and calls you when tapped on a phone.
Your photos and news are recent, not from ten years ago.
Your browser doesn’t show a “Not secure” warning next to your address.

Each of these on its own is small. Together, they tell a customer whether you’re still trading and whether you take care over details.

What to do next

If you ticked every box, well done. Your website is working for you. Put a reminder in your calendar to check again in six months.

If a few things failed, start with number 1, because a broken form costs you the customers who were already sold. Then work down the list.

And if you’d like a hand, that’s what I do. A Website Tune-Up checks all five of these for you and fixes the quick ones. If your site needs more than that, I build fast, simple websites for small businesses in East Hertfordshire and beyond. Send me a message with your web address and I’ll take a look.