Web Design
Three signs your website is quietly costing you business
The trouble with a bad website is that it never tells you.
Nobody fills in your contact form to say “I was going to hire you, but the page took nine seconds to load, so I went with someone else.” They just leave, and you never learn they were there. The loss is real and completely silent.
Here are the three failures we see most often, in roughly the order they cost you money.
1. It's slow
A visitor on a phone with a mediocre connection won’t wait. They came to find out whether you can fix their problem, and if the page hesitates, they move on.
The usual culprit is dull and fixable: enormous uncompressed images, like a photo shot at 4,000 pixels wide being displayed at 400. Nobody notices on a fast office connection. Everybody notices on a phone in a parking lot.
2. It's painful on a phone
Most of your visitors are on one. So look at your own site the way they do: pull it up on your phone, right now, and try to get something done. Find your phone number. Find your prices. Send a message.
If you have to pinch, zoom or hunt, and you already know where everything is, think about what it’s like for someone who doesn’t.
3. Nobody can tell how to contact you
This one does the most damage, and it’s the easiest to fix.
Someone has decided they want to talk to you. That was the hard part, and you’ve won it. Now they’re looking for a phone number, and it’s in the footer, in grey, in nine-point type, and it isn’t tappable.
On a phone, a phone number should be a link. One tap, it dials. If your number isn’t a tel: link, you’re asking a motivated customer to memorize ten digits and switch apps. Some will. Not all.
None of this requires starting over
People often assume a website with problems needs replacing, so they put it off for years.
Compress the images. Make the number tappable. Fix the mobile layout. Each is an afternoon’s work, and together they win back customers you’re losing now without ever knowing their names.
Want a straight answer about your website? We’ll tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and the top three things to fix. Free, no pitch.
General web performance and mobile usability principles. If you want your own site checked against them, we do it free.