Nobody rings you up to say they found your website slow and went with someone else. They just go with someone else. That's what makes website problems so easy to ignore - the cost is invisible, and business keeps arriving through word of mouth, so everything feels fine.
But if any of the five things below describe your site, you're almost certainly losing enquiries you never knew existed. None of them require technical knowledge to check. Grab your phone and have a look at your own site as if you'd never seen it before.
1. It takes more than a few seconds to load on your phone
This is the big one. Google's research found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. The same study measured the average mobile site at 19 seconds over a 3G connection. Half your potential customers can walk out the door before they've seen a single word you wrote.
Test it honestly: open your site on mobile data, not your home wifi. Count. If you get bored waiting, so does everyone else.
2. There's no phone number they can tap
Most people looking for a local business are on their phone, and many of them want to call, not fill in a form. If your number is an image, buried on a contact page, or plain text that can't be tapped, you've added friction to the exact moment someone decided to get in touch. A tap-to-call link is a one-line fix and it's probably the highest-value line of code on a local business website.
3. The copyright year in the footer is old
It sounds trivial. It isn't. A footer that says © 2019 tells every visitor that nobody has touched this site in years - and people quietly wonder what else isn't being looked after. Stanford's web credibility research found that people lean heavily on visible cues like this when deciding whether a business seems trustworthy; in their study of over 2,600 participants, 46% of credibility judgements referenced the site's visual design and presentation. Small details carry more weight than they should. That's just how people work.
4. It doesn't fit a phone screen
If visitors have to pinch and zoom to read your services, the site was built for a world that ended around 2012. Search engines notice too - Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. A site that fights the phone in someone's hand is fighting the way nearly all your customers will find you.
5. There's no obvious next step
Look at your homepage and ask: what does this page want me to do? If the answer isn't obvious within a few seconds - get a quote, book a table, call now - then visitors are left to figure it out themselves, and plenty won't bother. Every page should have one clear action, worded the way a customer would say it.
What to do about it
If you recognised your site in two or more of these, it's worth acting on. You can hand the list to whoever built your site, or run your site through our free AI site check - it checks all of the above and more, and tells you the single most valuable fix in each category. Takes about twenty seconds, and you don't have to give us your email to see the result.