Is your website costing you enquiries? Six checks to run this week
Your website can look fine on the office screen and still lose enquiries. Six checks you can run yourself, most of them in under ten minutes.
Most business websites are judged on how they look on a large office screen. Your customers mostly see them on a phone, often on mobile data, often in a hurry. These six checks show what they see. You do not need a developer for any of them.
1. Load it on a phone, on mobile data
Turn off wi-fi, open your homepage, and count. Then open a service page and the contact page.
For a number rather than a feeling, run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result. The figure to watch is Largest Contentful Paint: how long the main content takes to appear. Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good.
A slow site is rarely one big problem. It is usually oversized images, too many plugins or apps loading on every page, and cheap hosting, all at once.
2. Fill in your own contact form
Send yourself an enquiry through every form on the site. Then check:
- Did it arrive? Look in spam as well.
- Who else received it? Former staff are more common than you would think.
- How long did it take to arrive, and would anyone have replied the same day?
A form that quietly fails costs more than a slow page, because nobody knows it is happening.
3. Ask who can change it
Pick three ordinary changes: update a price, add a staff member, publish a news item. Can someone on your team do each of them today without calling a developer?
If the answer is no, every small change becomes a queue, and the site drifts out of date. A good build lets the business edit the content while keeping the design locked.
4. Find out what it runs on
Write down, in one place:
- where the site is hosted, what it costs and when it renews;
- where the domain is registered, and whose name it is in;
- the platform (WordPress, Shopify or something else), and the plugins or apps it depends on;
- who holds the logins.
The domain is the one that bites. If it is registered to a former developer or agency, you do not fully control your own website or email.
5. Check whether you are found
Search for your business name, then for your main service plus your suburb or city, the way a new customer would. Then look at how your pages appear in the results: the title and the short description underneath. If they read “Home” or are cut off mid-sentence, they are costing you clicks.
If you serve a local area, make sure your Google Business Profile is claimed and matches your website.
6. Follow an order or enquiry past the website
This is the check most people skip. When an enquiry or order arrives, what happens next? If someone retypes it into a CRM, an order book or the accounting system, the website is only half-connected. That retyping is time, and it is where errors get in.
It is also where a website problem turns into a business problem, which is why our diagnostic looks at the website and the systems behind it in the same pass.
When a rebuild is, and is not, the answer
A rebuild makes sense when the platform itself is the obstacle: nobody can update it, it cannot be made fast, or it cannot connect to the systems the business runs on. It does not make sense when the problem is a handful of slow images, a broken form or a domain in the wrong name. Those are fixes, not rebuilds.
If you ran these checks and are not sure which side you are on, the technology and systems practice explains what we build and fix, and contacting us is the quickest way to find out.
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