Why is my website not getting enquiries?

Your website isn’t bringing in enquiries. The phone’s quiet, and everybody you show it to says it looks great.

So whose fault is it? There are only two options. Either whoever built it did a bad job, or you did. Nobody’s going to tell you which, either. Your web designer isn’t going to ring you one morning and say “that shit website’s on me, pal, sorry”, and you’re not going to wake up and decide it was you all along.

I’ve been asked “why am I getting no leads?” more times than I can count since 2010. These are the checks I run, in the order I run them.

First, agree what “working” means

A website has one job. It turns the right strangers into enquiries, and it makes them trust you enough to pick you over the other lot.

Traffic isn’t the measure. You can have 10,000 people a month on your website, and if none of them ever get in touch, that’s a busy waiting room where nobody books anything. When I ask whether a website is working, I’m asking whether any of those visitors turned into customers.

Check 1: Can you even tell?

Before anything else, make sure you’d know if an enquiry came through.

• Is Google Analytics (or whatever you use) actually on the website? View the page source and look for the code.
• Is it tracking form submissions and calls as conversions? If you’re running Google Ads, this matters twice over, because Ads uses those conversions to work out who to show your ads to.
• Do you know how many enquiries came through last month? Do you ask new customers how they found you?

I see this all the time. People are getting enquiries, but nothing’s tracking them, so it looks like the website does nothing. Sort this first, otherwise everything below is guesswork.

Check 2: Is enough traffic getting to it?

Look at your visitor numbers. In my experience most business websites turn somewhere around 1% to 3% of visitors into enquiries.

So if you’re getting 100 visitors a month, you’ll get one enquiry if you’re lucky. That’s not enough to judge anything. Some of those 100 are you, your mum and a competitor having a look.

If that’s you, sort the traffic out before you blame the website. Run some Google Ads, start making videos, write useful articles, then come back to the rest of this list.

Check 3: Can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds?

Open your homepage, count to five and close it. Better still, try it on somebody who doesn’t know what you do, like a mate down the pub.

Could they tell you what you sell, who it’s for and what to do next? If they say “uh, something to do with consulting?”, you’ve failed.

Whose fault? If the page is a mess, with 14 menu items and a slideshow nobody asked for and the point buried under a stock photo of two blokes shaking hands, that’s the build. But if the page is clean and tidy and still nobody can tell what you do, it’s because the business never decided what it does. “Make it about our journey” doesn’t give a designer much to work with. A web designer can’t position a business that won’t position itself.

Check 4: Is it obvious how to get in touch?

Pretend you’re a customer with money in hand, ready to buy today. How many clicks does it take to get in touch? Is there a clear next step on every page, or do people have to go hunting? Does the form want their inside leg measurement before it’ll send?

Every extra field costs you people. I once saw a form get a seventh required field added and enquiries went from a few a day to none.

Whose fault? A hidden button, or a form that doesn’t send, is the agency’s to fix, and fast. But sometimes the form works fine and the real problem is that you’ve made it hard to enquire. No prices, no idea what working with you looks like, and an inbox you check on a Tuesday if you remember. That one’s on you. (If prices are the issue, I wrote about putting your prices on your website.)

Check 5: Does it earn trust?

Nobody buys from a business they don’t believe in, and your website is where people decide, usually half nine at night on the loo.

Look at your website like a suspicious stranger. Where’s the proof? Real testimonials with real names, Google reviews, case studies with actual numbers, photos of your actual team and your actual work. Or is it all “industry leading” and a gallery of stock photos of a city you’ve never been to?

Whose fault? A generic template that could belong to any business in any town is partly the agency. But proof is mostly on you. You never sent over those testimonials, kept meaning to get photos done, and had a brilliant project last year you never told anyone about. A designer can build the trophy cabinet. You have to put something in it.

Check 6: Is it fast, and can people find it?

Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, and count how long until you can use it. Past three seconds and people are giving up and hitting back. Then pop it into PageSpeed Insights and see what it flags.

Then search Google for what you sell in your town. Are you anywhere, or is it the same three competitors and a load of directories?

This one can make a huge difference. Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads, because their website took ten seconds to load and over half the people clicking the ads never saw it. After we rebuilt it, it loads in about a second, and they went to 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks. It’s 150 to 200 a month now.

Whose fault? Slow and unfindable from day one is the agency’s. If they built you something quick and you’ve since uploaded 40 massive photos, installed 19 plugins and not written a word in two years, that’s neglect, and it’s yours.

Check 7: Has the content had any effort put in?

Did the words get written properly, or knocked out in an afternoon and emailed over in a Word document? Are there typos? Is it all stock photos?

And how much of it did ChatGPT write? I took on a website a while back that had been online for years and ranked for a handful of keywords. It had hundreds of blog posts, all generic, all full of the same giveaway phrases. Google’s spam policies cover exactly this, and the site had basically stopped moving. If that’s your website, get rid of the AI filler.

A quick way to check yourself is to open five competitors who do a good job and compare them with yours, honestly. Then ask a couple of existing customers whether your website would have sold them.

So is it them or you?

Count up which checks were theirs and which were yours.

If most were theirs, ask your web people three things before you spend another five grand. How many enquiries did the website bring in last month? Show me how a stranger can tell what we do in five seconds. Why is it so slow on my phone? A good agency will say “fair point, leave it with me.” A bad one will start talking about traffic and bounce rates.

If most were yours, there’s good news in there. You don’t need a new website. You need to do your half of the job: add the proof, add the prices, keep it fed.

Most of the time it’s a bit of both, if I’m honest. If you’re still not sure whether yours is worth saving, try our do I need a new website? check.