Your Website Brings No Clients: 5 Causes That Have Nothing to Do With Design
When a website brings no enquiries, the first instinct is to rebuild it prettier. The problem is almost always somewhere else: five concrete causes to check before throwing away the work and starting over.
“The website brings us nothing, maybe it needs redoing.” I hear this often, and nine times out of ten it arrives alongside a redesign proposal.
Sometimes a redesign genuinely is the answer. Far more often the site is perfectly presentable and the problem sits elsewhere: nobody finds it, or the wrong people find it, or the right people find it and can't tell what they are supposed to do.
Before paying to rebuild, these five checks are worth running. They take an afternoon.
1. Nobody is searching for it
The first check isn't about the site, it is about demand: how many people each month search for what you sell, using the words you would use? For some trades that is thousands, for others it is twelve.
If your sector runs on word of mouth and relationships, a beautiful website won't change the number of enquiries, because the traffic doesn't exist upstream. The site still matters — as a business card that holds up when someone looks you up by name — but the clients will come from other channels, and the budget should follow them there.
2. You talk about yourself, not about the reader's problem
Open your homepage and read the first sentence. If it is about you — “industry leader since 1987” — you are using the most valuable space on the site to say something that solves nothing for the visitor.
People arrive with a problem in mind and are trying to work out, in three seconds, whether they are in the right place. The first sentence has to say what you do, for whom, and which problem you take away. The company history is interesting, but it comes later, once the reader has decided to stay.
3. It isn't clear what the visitor should do
Many sites end without asking for anything, or ask for ten things at once: call, write, follow us, subscribe, download the catalogue, visit the showroom.
Every page should have one main action, repeated and easy to find. And that action should cost little: a form with four fields receives more enquiries than one with twelve. If you ask for a VAT number and headcount for a first contact, you are running an interview on someone who only wanted to know whether you handle their kind of case.
4. It is slow, especially on a phone
Most visits come from smartphones, often on mobile data. A site that flies on the office laptop can take six seconds on a phone in the street, and six seconds loses half the people.
The cause is nearly always the same: enormous images served at full resolution, and a collection of third-party scripts accumulated over the years. Both are fixable without touching a single line of the design.
5. Enquiries arrive and get lost
This is the most mundane cause and the most common, and nobody suspects it: the form works, but the emails land in spam, or go to an address nobody reads any more, or the server never delivers them at all.
The check is simple: fill in your own form from an outside phone and see whether, and where, it arrives. Worth doing every few months, not just once. On why emails vanish without telling anyone, I wrote Business email on your own domain.
The order to check them in
| Check | Cost to verify | If this is it |
|---|---|---|
| Do enquiries arrive? | 10 minutes | Fixed in a day |
| How much demand exists? | half an hour in analytics | The site isn't the problem |
| How fast is it on a phone? | 10 minutes | Optimisation, not redesign |
| Does the first line speak to the client? | 5 minutes | Rewriting, not redrawing |
| Is there one clear action? | half an hour | Reorganising pages |
Only if all five answers come back clean, and enquiries still don't arrive, might the site itself be the problem. By then, though, you will also know what the new one has to do — which is the part usually missing when a site gets rebuilt from scratch.
Send me your website address and what you would like it to do: I'll run these five checks and tell you what I would fix first. If the answer is “it doesn't need rebuilding”, I'm happy to say so.
