9 signs your business website is quietly costing you customers

The customers your website loses never tell you. They land on the page, something feels off, and they tap back to the search results and call the next business on the list. You never see them.

Here are nine problems we find again and again when we look at local business websites. You can check every one of them yourself, on your own phone, in about ten minutes.

1. You have to pinch and zoom on a phone

Open your site on your phone. If the page looks like a shrunken desktop site, or you have to scroll sideways to read a line, the site was not built for phones. Most local searches happen on one. Google also judges your site primarily by its mobile version.

2. The phone number is not tappable

Tap your phone number on your own site. If nothing happens, a visitor has to memorise it or copy it by hand. That is the single most important button on a service business website, and it is often just text.

3. It takes more than a few seconds to load

Load the site on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi. If you are staring at a blank or half-drawn screen, so is everyone else. Oversized photos are the usual cause, and they are one of the easiest things to fix.

4. The footer still says © 2018

It sounds trivial. But an old copyright year, an expired special offer, or a "Coming soon" page from years ago all tell a visitor the same thing: nobody is looking after this, so is anyone running the business?

5. The browser says "Not secure"

Look at the address bar. If your browser shows "Not secure" next to your address, the site is not using HTTPS. Customers notice, especially on any page with a form, and browsers increasingly warn people away.

6. Images are broken or missing

A grey box where a photo of your work should be is worse than no photo at all. Scroll the whole homepage and check every image loads.

7. The text is tiny

If you are holding the phone closer to your face to read your own services list, your customers are giving up. Body text should be comfortable to read without zooming.

8. Google shows a strange description

Search your business name. If the grey text under your link is a random scrap of the page, your site is missing a proper description, so Google is guessing. That snippet is your first impression in search.

9. It does not say what you do in the first screen

Open the site and read only what is visible before you scroll. Does it say what you do, where you do it and how to reach you? If a stranger cannot answer those three questions in five seconds, they will leave.

What to do about it

Some of these are five-minute fixes. Others mean the site needs to be rebuilt for phones. If you counted three or more, a new site will almost certainly pay for itself in calls you are currently losing.

We check all of these automatically when we look at a business, and we build the replacement before asking you to pay for it. You can compare your current site and the new one side by side on your own phone, then decide.