Why your website brings no customers

First: where is it broken

There are three places a person disappears. Only one of them is usually your real problem, and people mostly fix the wrong one.

• Traffic. Is anyone arriving at all?
• Conversion. Do the arrivals get in touch?
• Response. Does anything come of the enquiries?

Open your analytics and look at one number: how many people reach the site each month.

If the answer is a couple of dozen, the site is not broken. You are simply not being found. If it is hundreds or thousands and no enquiries come, then it is the site. If enquiries come but deals do not, the problem is in the response or the offer.

That one question usually saves a month of solving the wrong problem.

If there is no traffic

Two quick checks, both free.

Does Google know about you? Search for site:yourdomain.com. That shows how many of your pages are indexed. If it returns nothing, or only the homepage, there is a technical problem and everything else is secondary.

Is anyone searching for what you sell? Google Ads Keyword Planner is free without buying ads. Enter a few words you think customers use and look at the search volume in your market. Sometimes it turns out three people a month search for your category, and then the site was never the issue.

There is no clear next step

The most common failure. The site describes nicely what the company does and then leaves the visitor to decide what happens next. The menu has eight options and none of them is obviously the one expected of them.

The test: show your homepage to someone who knows nothing about your business. Give them five seconds and ask two questions. What does this company do? What are you supposed to do here? If no answer comes, you have your answer.

Every page should be built for one action.

The site talks about you, not the customer

“We have been operating since 2015 and our team is dedicated.” That is true, and nobody cares until they know whether you solve their problem.

Write down the three questions customers ask you most often on the phone, and the answers you give them. If those are not on the site, you now know what to write. It is the simplest way to get copy that actually answers something.

The site is slow

Slowness never shows up as a complaint. The person simply leaves.

Check it with PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile view, not desktop. Three things to look at:

• LCP, the time until the largest thing on screen becomes visible. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
• CLS, whether content jumps around while loading. Should be effectively zero.
• Images. The report names the heavy ones directly. It is usually one old photo someone uploaded straight from a camera.

Enquiries disappear

The most painful version: the site works, the enquiry is sent, and then nothing happens.

Test it yourself, now. Fill in your own contact form with real details. See whether the message arrives, how long it takes and where it lands. Surprisingly often the form sends to an address nobody opens any more, or it goes to spam.

The other issue is timing. The enquiry arrives Friday at six, the reply goes out Monday, the customer has already bought elsewhere. Design does not help there. Automatic follow-up that replies immediately does.

The checklist

Twenty minutes, in order:

• How many visitors a month? Under a hundred means the problem is visibility.
• site:yourdomain.com in Google. Are the pages indexed?
• The five-second test on someone who does not know your business.
• PageSpeed Insights, mobile view.
• Send yourself an enquiry through your own form and see if and when it arrives.
• Open the site on your phone and try to get in touch yourself.