Seven signs your website is costing you customers

1. Open it on your phone on mobile data

Not on your office wifi. Turn wifi off. If it takes more than about three seconds to show something readable, you are losing people before they have seen a word — and the ones you lose are disproportionately the ones who found you from a search rather than from knowing your name.

2. Count the taps to call you

From the moment the page loads, how many taps to start a phone call? One is right. Two is survivable. Three or more and you are asking somebody with a burst pipe to do homework.

Your phone number should be a tappable link, not text somebody has to select and copy.

3. The five-second test

Show the homepage to somebody who does not know your business. Five seconds, then take it away and ask what you do and where. If they cannot answer both, the page is decorating rather than communicating — and this is by far the most common failure, especially on sites that look expensive.

4. Are your hours and address right, everywhere

Check the site, the Google listing and anywhere else you appear. Wrong hours produce a specific and expensive outcome: somebody drives to you and finds the door locked. That person does not call to complain. They just never come back, and they tell people.

5. Look for the tells that date a site

• A copyright year that is not this year — the single loudest signal that nobody is home.
• Stock photos of people who obviously do not work there.
• A slider or carousel on the homepage that nobody has ever clicked to slide two.
• Text so small on mobile you pinch to read it.
• A contact form you have never actually tested.

6. Actually submit your own contact form

Fill it in and send it. Then check whether it arrived — inbox and spam.

A silently broken contact form is the most expensive fault a small business site can have, and it is close to invisible: the visitor sees "thanks, we'll be in touch" and assumes you are ignoring them. Test yours today, then test it again after any change to the site.

7. Search your own business name

Type your business name into Google as a customer would, including the way they would spell it after hearing it once. Do you come up first? Is the description underneath current? Are the hours right in the panel on the right?

If your own name does not return you at the top, nothing else on this list will matter much until it does.

If several of these landed

None of them require rebuilding anything. Fix the form and the phone link first — those are the ones losing you money this week.

If it is more than a few and you would rather not do it yourself, we'll build you a free design of the fixed version first. You look at it before you decide anything.