My Website Gets Visitors But No Enquiries. What's Going Wrong?

If people are arriving and not contacting you, the good news is genuine: you've solved the hard problem. Getting found takes months. Getting the people who already found you to pick up the phone is usually a handful of specific, fixable things.

Before anything else — test your own form

Fill in your own contact form, right now, from your phone, and see whether the email arrives. We check this on every audit we run and it fails more often than anyone would guess. Forms break silently when a site moves host, when a plugin updates, or when the notification address belongs to someone who left.

A business convinced its website doesn't work, when actually its website has been working fine and quietly dropping every enquiry into nowhere, is a bad afternoon nobody should have.

Check the visitors are the ones you want

"Traffic" is not one thing. Open your analytics and look at two columns: where people are landing, and roughly where they are. If most of your visits land on a blog post rather than a service page, or the visitors aren't anywhere near the area you cover, then the traffic isn't failing to convert — it was never going to.

That's a different problem with a different fix, and it's worth ruling out before rewriting your homepage.

The things that lose real, local, ready-to-buy visitors

• The phone number isn't tappable. On a phone, a number that's an image or plain text has to be memorised and typed into another app. A meaningful share of people won't bother. It should be a real link that dials on one tap, on every page.
• The page is slow. People who leave before the page appears show up in your analytics as visitors, which makes this hard to spot. They never saw anything to convert on.
• There's no evidence you're real. No photographs of actual work, no reviews, no named human being. Someone about to let a stranger into their house is looking for reassurance, and a stock photo of a smiling handshake isn't it.
• It doesn't say where you work. If somebody can't establish in a few seconds that you cover their town, they assume you don't and leave.
• You're asking for too much. A form with nine fields including budget and a preferred callback window is a commitment. 'Send us a message' or a tap-to-call is not.
• There's no next step on the page they landed on. People don't reliably navigate to a contact page. Whatever page they arrive on needs its own obvious way to get in touch.

Most conversion problems aren't a matter of persuasion. They're friction — small obstacles that each lose a few percent of people who had already decided to contact you.

The bit people skip

Almost everything above is about mobile, because almost all of this traffic is mobile. A site that's been checked on a laptop and never seriously used on a phone will have several of these problems at once, and the owner will never see any of them.

Pick up your phone, go to your own site on mobile data rather than wi-fi, and try to hire yourself. Time how long it takes to load. Try to call yourself in one tap. Try to find out whether you cover the next town over. Whatever annoys you in that minute is what's costing you enquiries.

If you'd rather have someone go through it properly and tell you which of these are actually happening on your site, that's what our free website audit covers — including whether your form is working, which is the first thing we check.