A client sent me a message a while back that I think about often: the website looks great, everyone says so, and we have had two enquiries in three months.
That gap — between a site people compliment and a site that produces work — is where most of my job actually happens. It is almost never a design problem in the way people mean it. It is usually one of six things.
One: the first sentence does not say what you do
Open your homepage and read the largest text on it. Does a stranger now know what you sell and who you sell it to?
An enormous number of business sites open with a mood: “Building tomorrow, today.” “Where craft meets vision.” “Elevating spaces.” These say nothing. Worse, they cost you the three seconds in which a visitor decides whether they are in the right place.
“Pool builders serving the Gold Coast since 2009” is not poetry. It also removes every doubt a visitor has, immediately, which is the actual job of that line.
Two: the action is not obvious enough
On most underperforming sites, the way to get in touch is a link in the navigation, in the same size and weight as everything else, and a form at the very bottom of the page.
The action should be visible without scrolling, repeated at the natural decision points down the page, and visually distinct from everything around it. If your phone number is the thing you want people to use, it should be large, tappable, and present in the header on every page.
This feels aggressive to owners who are not used to it. It reads as helpful to visitors, who are usually looking for exactly that and failing to find it.
Three: there is no proof
Claims about quality are free, so visitors discount them entirely. Proof is expensive, so it counts.
Proof means photographs of your actual work, named reviews with the platform they came from, a count of jobs completed, licence numbers, years in business, recognisable clients if you have them. Not a carousel of anonymous five-star quotes, which everyone assumes are invented, frequently correctly.
The most underrated form of proof is specificity. “We installed a 12kW system on a two-storey tile roof in Bendigo in February; here are the photographs and the first quarter of generation figures” is worth more than any number of testimonials, because it cannot be faked cheaply.
Four: it is slow, and you have not noticed
You visit your own site constantly. It is cached, you are on good internet, and you know exactly where everything is. Your customers are none of those things.
Test it on a phone, on mobile data, away from your office. If the page takes more than about three seconds to become useful, a large fraction of visitors are gone before they see any of the work above.
Common causes, in order: images uploaded straight from a camera at four thousand pixels wide; a page builder loading everything it can do rather than what the page uses; marketing scripts nobody reads the output of; and fonts blocking the first paint.
Five: the form asks for too much
Every field costs completions. A form asking for name, email, phone, company, budget range, timeline, how you heard about us and a message will be completed by a small fraction of the people who started it.
Ask for the minimum you need to have a conversation. For most businesses that is a name, one way to reach them, and a sentence about what they need. You can ask everything else on the call, where the person is already talking to you and answering costs them nothing.
Related: if the form is the only way to reach you, some proportion of your market simply will not. Older customers and trade customers frequently prefer to call. Give them the option.
Six: nobody responds fast enough
This is not a website problem, and it is more often the cause than everything above combined.
When someone enquires, they are usually enquiring with several businesses in the same sitting. The research on response time is consistent and the effect is large: the business that responds within minutes wins a substantial majority of the time. By the next day, the enquiry is frequently already committed elsewhere.
So before rebuilding anything, find out where enquiries currently land, who sees them, and how long they typically sit. I have watched businesses double their conversion rate by routing form submissions to a phone notification instead of an inbox, at a cost of about twenty minutes of setup.
How to work out which one is yours
In order, because the order matters:
A seventh cause, which is really the first
Everything above assumes people are arriving. Frequently they are not, and no amount of conversion work fixes an empty room.
Before rebuilding anything, look at how many people visited the site last month. If the answer is forty, your problem is not the headline. Doubling a conversion rate on forty visitors gets you from one enquiry to two, which is not a business change. Getting to four hundred visitors is.
The distinction matters because the two problems have completely different fixes, and businesses routinely spend on the wrong one. A traffic problem is solved with search, local listings, referrals or advertising. A conversion problem is solved with the six things above. Diagnosing which one you have takes about ten minutes in an analytics dashboard and saves months.
How to test without rebuilding
You can validate most of this before spending anything.
Give the site to someone who has never seen it — ideally someone in your target market rather than a friend in the industry. Ask them to find out what you do, whether you cover their area, roughly what it costs, and how to get in touch. Watch without helping. Every hesitation is a defect, and you will learn more in five minutes of this than in a month of speculation.
Change the headline for a fortnight. It costs nothing and it is reversible. If enquiries move, you have learned something real about your market's language.
Time your own response. Have someone submit a test enquiry at an ordinary moment — mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, not while you are watching for it. See how long it actually takes.
When it really is the design
Occasionally the problem genuinely is that the site looks untrustworthy, and it is worth being honest about when that applies.
Warning signs a customer reads as risk: stretched or pixelated images, mismatched fonts, text over busy photographs, a layout that breaks on a phone, obviously unfinished pages, and copyright dates several years out of date. These are not aesthetic complaints. Each one is read as evidence that the business is inattentive, and a customer deciding who to trust with a five-figure job weighs that.
But this is less common than people assume, and it is the most expensive thing on the list to fix. Work through the other six first. A plain, fast, clear site that responds in five minutes beats a beautiful one that does not, every time and by a wide margin.
- Check your response time. This is free to fix and frequently the whole problem.
- Open the site on a phone on mobile data and time how long until it is usable.
- Read the first sentence to somebody outside your industry and ask what you sell.
- Count how many taps it takes to reach you from the homepage. More than one is too many.
- Count the fields on your form. Remove any you could ask about on a call.
- Ask whether a stranger would believe the claims on the page. If not, replace claims with evidence.
Most of that list costs nothing and none of it requires a redesign. If you have worked through all six and the phone is still quiet, then the problem is upstream — you have a traffic problem rather than a website problem, and that is a different piece of work entirely.
