A website that looks fine and delivers nothing is the most common problem we get called about. It is also the most fixable, because the causes are boringly consistent. Here they are, in the order worth checking.
1. Nobody is finding it
Start here, because everything else is irrelevant if this is the answer. Open a private browser window and search for what you sell plus your town. If you are not on the first page, your website is not underperforming, it is unattended.
Check your analytics for actual visitor numbers. Under a hundred a month and you do not have a conversion problem, you have a visibility one. That is an SEO job, not a redesign.
2. It is too slow
Roughly half of visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds on a phone. They do not complain, they just leave, and they never appear in your enquiry figures.
Test it on mobile data rather than office wifi. If it feels sluggish to you, it is losing you people. Speed is usually the cheapest meaningful fix available and it helps your rankings at the same time.
3. It does not say what you actually do
Show your homepage to somebody outside your industry for five seconds, then ask them what the business does and who for. A surprising number of sites fail this.
The usual culprits are a headline that says something like “Excellence, delivered” and a first paragraph about your journey since 1998. Nobody is buying your journey. Say what you sell, who it is for, and why you.
4. There is no obvious next step
Every page should make the next action obvious, and it should mostly be the same action. If a visitor has to hunt for the contact page, some of them will not.
Count the clicks from your homepage to a submitted enquiry. Three or fewer is healthy. Five or more and you are losing people at each one.
5. You are asking for too much, too early
An eleven-field form with “how did you hear about us” is a filter, and it filters out people who were mildly interested and would have become customers. Name, contact, and a sentence about what they need is plenty. Ask the rest when you reply.
6. There is nothing to trust
People buy from businesses that look like other people have already bought from them successfully. If your site has no reviews, no named clients, no photographs of real work and no evidence of results, you are asking a stranger to take you entirely on faith.
Reviews are the highest-value thing here and the most neglected. Ask every happy customer. It is free.
The order to fix them in
Traffic first, because conversion improvements on a site nobody visits do nothing. Then speed, because it is cheap and helps everything. Then clarity and the route to enquiry, which are usually a copy and structure job rather than a rebuild. Then proof, which you gather over time.
Notice that “redesign the whole thing” is not on that list. Sometimes it is the answer, but it is worth being the last conclusion rather than the first.
Want someone to look?
We will go through your site and tell you which of these is actually your problem, in writing, for free. Ask for a review and you will get a straight answer within a couple of working days, with no calls unless you want one.