Why your website isn't converting (and how to fix it)

You have a website. It looks decent. The enquiries are not coming in.

Before you spend anything on a redesign, it is worth knowing that "my website isn't converting" is three different problems wearing the same coat, and only one of them is solved by design. This is how to tell which one you have, the seven things that most often break conversion, and what to fix first.

First, check that you have a conversion problem at all

Most people who say their site is not converting have not done the arithmetic. Do this before anything else. It takes ten minutes and it frequently ends the conversation.

Find two numbers for last month: how many people landed on the site, and how many enquiries you received.

• 200 visitors, 0 enquiries. You do not have a conversion problem, you have a traffic problem. A small service business converting one or two percent of its visitors is doing perfectly normally, which at 200 visitors means two to four enquiries a month. Zero is well inside ordinary variation at that volume. No redesign fixes this. You need more of the right people arriving.
• 2,000 visitors, 1 enquiry. Now it is worth investigating. Something is losing people who arrived interested.
• 2,000 visitors, 0 enquiries. Before reading any further, check the form works. Submit it yourself, from your phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and confirm the email actually arrives. Then check the spam folder of whichever inbox it goes to.

That last one is not a joke. Broken contact forms are more common than broken design and they fail silently, because the only person who would notice is the one who gave up and went elsewhere. We have found dead forms on businesses spending real money on ads. Test yours today whether or not you read the rest of this.

Then find out where people are leaving

You need three things, all of which are free.

• Which page they land on. Not your homepage, usually. If most traffic arrives on one service page, that page is your website as far as those visitors are concerned, and it is the one to fix.
• How far down they scroll. A heatmap tool will show you this in a week. If almost nobody reaches your call to action, the problem is above it, not in it.
• Mobile against desktop, separately. This is the one that catches people out. Most sites now take the majority of their traffic on phones, and most site owners only ever look at their own site on a laptop. A layout that works beautifully at 1440 pixels and falls apart at 390 is invisible to the person who commissioned it.

Look at your own site on your own phone, right now, as a stranger would. That single act finds more problems than most paid audits.

The seven things that most often break conversion

1. Nobody can tell what you actually do

A visitor gives you a few seconds to answer one question: is this for me? Headlines like "Innovative solutions for a digital world" or "We help brands unlock their potential" answer nothing. They could sit above a law firm, a marketing agency or a scaffolding company.

The fix: say the plain thing. Who you help, what you do for them, and where. "Websites and automation for Glasgow businesses" is not a clever headline and it does not need to be. Clarity converts better than cleverness, and the test is simple: could a competitor put your headline on their site without changing a word? If yes, rewrite it.

2. Everything is a call to action, so nothing is

A page with a Get in touch button, a Book a call button, a newsletter popup, a live chat bubble, a downloadable guide and a phone number in the header is not giving the visitor six chances to convert. It is giving them a decision to make about which thing to do, and the easiest decision available is always to leave.

The fix: pick one primary action per page and make everything else visibly secondary. Repeat that same action down the page as people scroll, rather than offering a different one each time. Your contact page should have one job.

3. It is slow, and you have never noticed

You have visited your own site a hundred times. It is cached, it loads instantly, and you have quietly stopped being able to see this problem. A first-time visitor on 4G is having a different experience.

The fix: run your page through Google's PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score, not the desktop one. The threshold that matters is Largest Contentful Paint, which is Google's measure of when the main content appears. Under 2.5 seconds is the "good" band. Above 4 seconds is officially poor, and in practice it is where people start leaving before they have seen anything at all.

The usual culprits are unhelpfully boring: enormous uncompressed images, a page loading six different tracking scripts, and on WordPress a stack of plugins each adding their own overhead. Images are almost always the biggest single win and the easiest to fix.

4. There is no proof you can do it

You are asking a stranger to hand over money and time. Everything on your site is your own claim about yourself. Somewhere on the page, a visitor is thinking "says who".

The fix: add whatever evidence you genuinely have, and be honest that some kinds are worth more than others. A named testimonial with a real person, company and photograph beats an anonymous one by a wide margin. A short case study with a number in it beats a testimonial. Client logos work, but only if the visitor recognises them or you say what you did for each.

If you have none of this yet, say so plainly rather than inventing it. "We are two years old and here are the three projects we have done" is more credible than a wall of stock photography and vague enthusiasm. Nobody is fooled by the wall, and being caught inflating is worse than being small.

5. The form asks for too much

Every field is a small reason to stop. Name, email, phone, company, company size, budget range, how did you hear about us, and a required message field is not a contact form, it is a qualification interview conducted before anyone has agreed to talk.

The fix: ask for the minimum that lets you reply. Name, email, and a message is usually it. You can qualify in the reply, when they are already engaged, rather than at the door. If you genuinely need budget or timeline to triage, make those optional and say why you are asking.

Two smaller things worth checking while you are in there. Does the form tell people what happens next, or does it just say "Thanks"? "We reply within one working day" is reassurance that costs nothing. And does it work on a phone, with a real thumb, including the dropdowns?

6. There are no prices anywhere

This is the one agencies argue about, so here is the honest version of both sides.

Hiding prices does work for some businesses, particularly where every project is genuinely bespoke and the sales conversation is where value gets established. But it has a cost that is easy to miss: everyone who was never going to fit your budget still finds you, still fills in the form, and still takes up your time, while a portion of the people who could afford you leave because they assumed they could not.

The fix, if you choose it: publish something. A starting price, a typical range, or worked examples of what recent projects cost. It does not have to be a full price list. We publish ours because it filters both directions before anyone spends time on a call, and because a visitor who arrives at the enquiry form already knowing the number is a substantially warmer enquiry. If you want the reasoning in more detail, our UK website cost guide and Glasgow web design prices are both examples of the approach.

7. It is written about you, not about them

Count the times your site says "we" and the times it says "you". If "we" is winning comfortably, the page is an autobiography.

"We are a passionate team of creative problem-solvers delivering bespoke solutions" tells a visitor nothing they can use. It describes how you feel about yourselves. The visitor arrived with a problem and is trying to work out whether you understand it.

The fix: lead with their situation, then your answer. "Your site takes eight seconds to load on a phone and your enquiries have dried up" is a sentence that stops the right person, because it is about them. Keep the about-us material; just stop opening with it.

What to fix first

Not all seven, and not at once. In rough order of return for effort:

• Check the form works. Ten minutes. Occasionally solves the entire problem.
• Look at the site on your phone. Free, and finds the mobile problems you have been blind to.
• Rewrite the headline so it says what you do. An afternoon, no developer needed, and it affects every visitor who ever arrives.
• Compress the images. Usually the single biggest speed win, and usually the cheapest.
• Cut the form fields back. Half an hour.
• Add one real piece of proof. A named testimonial or a short case study with a number in it.
• Decide about prices. A business decision rather than a website task, and worth making deliberately either way.

Notice that a full redesign is not on that list. Most sites that are not converting do not need rebuilding, they need four specific things fixed. Do these first and measure for a month. If the numbers move, you have saved several thousand pounds. If they do not, you now have evidence about what is actually wrong, which is a much better brief to hand an agency than "it isn't working".

When it really is time to rebuild

Sometimes the answer genuinely is a new site. The honest signals are structural rather than cosmetic:

• You cannot edit it without paying someone, so it never gets updated.
• It is slow because of how it was built, not because of what is on it, and speeding it up means unpicking the foundations.
• It is not really usable on a phone, and fixing that means redoing the layout anyway.
• The business has changed and the site describes a company that no longer exists.
• It is on a platform nobody will touch, or a plugin stack that breaks whenever anything updates.

If two or more of those are true, patching is throwing good money after bad. Our website redesign cost guide covers what that costs and the migration risk that usually costs more than the design, and how to choose a web design agency covers who should do it.

The uncomfortable possibility

Sometimes the website is fine and the problem is upstream. If your traffic is 200 people a month, or it is arriving from the wrong searches, or it is mostly other agencies and job seekers rather than buyers, then a perfect website changes nothing. You will have optimised the conversion of an audience that was never going to buy.

The tell is in the arithmetic at the top of this piece. If you are below a few hundred visitors a month, stop reading about conversion and go and work on being found. That is a different problem with a different fix, and no amount of button colour testing substitutes for it.

If you want a second opinion on which of these is your situation, send us the link. We will tell you what we would change and in what order, including when the answer is that the site is not the problem. Free, and useful whether or not you hire us. What we do when you do is on our web design page.