Is your website costing you enquiries? Seven checks you can do in 10 minutes

A website costs you enquiries when a visitor who wanted to get in touch could not work out how, could not find a reason to trust you, or gave up waiting. A phone, a laptop and ten minutes are enough to find most of the causes. The seven checks below are in the order we would run them.

Key takeaways

• Most lost enquiries come from a few visible problems: an unclear first screen, a hidden next step, slow pages on a phone, and a contact form that fails or asks too much.
• Test your own site on your own phone, on mobile data, before you look at any tool.
• Google rates a page as good on loading speed when the Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less, measured on real visits.
• If you cannot say how many enquiries the site produced last month, fix the measuring first.

1. Can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds?

Open your homepage on your phone and read only what appears before you scroll. It should say what you do, who it is for and where you work. If a visitor needs the About page to understand that, many will leave before they get there.

The same applies to the page title in search results. If you want to see how a good first screen is structured, our piece on what to put on a professional services homepage goes through it block by block.

2. Is the next step visible without scrolling?

Pick the one action you want most: a call, a booking or a quote request. Then check how fast you can find it. When a page offers four buttons of equal weight, visitors tend to pick none of them.

On mobile, a tappable phone number or booking button at the top of the page does more than a long menu.

3. Does it load quickly on a phone?

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. If a "real user experience" section appears, trust it over the lab score. Google's published thresholds for a good result are a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.

Large uncompressed photos and many third-party scripts are the usual causes. Our guide to website speed explains each metric and what to fix first.

4. Does your contact form work, and does it ask too much?

Submit your own form from your phone. Check that the confirmation message appears, that the email reaches your inbox and not your spam folder, and that you can reply to it.

Then count the required fields. Name, email and a message are enough to start a conversation. Every extra required field is another reason to stop halfway.

5. Is there proof where the decision gets made?

Visitors who are close to getting in touch look for evidence that you have done this before. Named clients, real projects and testimonials with a person's name and role do that job. Generic badges and stock photos do not.

Put proof next to the call to action, not only on a separate page. Examples of how we present it are in our work.

6. Can people find you by name and by service?

Search for your business name. Your site, your Google Business Profile and your phone number should all show up and agree with each other. Then search for your service plus your town or region and see who appears.

If you serve a local market, the local SEO guide covers the profile and listing basics.

7. Do you know how many enquiries the site produced last month?

Without a number you cannot tell whether a change helped. Use analytics that records form submissions, calls and bookings as goals, and write the monthly count down. A privacy-friendly tool such as Plausible does this without a cookie banner.

Once you have the count, compare it with the number of visits and you have your conversion rate.

What to fix first

Start with whatever your own phone showed you in checks 1 to 4, because those problems affect every visitor. Proof and findability come next, and measuring should be switched on before you change anything so you can see the effect.

If you would rather have someone look at it for you, the free website audit checks speed, structure and basic search setup and emails you the findings. For a conversation about what to change, you can book a free 30-minute discovery call. Our services page lists what we build and maintain.