Your website's failing. Is it them, or you?

Let's face it, your website isn't working. You're not getting the inquiries that you thought you were going to get. The phone is quiet and everybody you talk to about your website keeps just saying it looks great. So, whose fault is it then that the website isn't working? Because there's only two possible answers here.

Either the person who built it did a terrible job or you did. And let's face it, nobody's going to tell you which one of those ones it is. Your web designer is not going to ring you up one morning and go, "Yeah, this [ __ ] website, it's on me, pal. Sorry." And put the phone down. And you're definitely not going to wake up one morning and realize that the website you've got isn't working because of you.

So that's what this video is. One question from start to finish. Is the website broken because of them or is it broken because of you? So by the end of this video today, you're going to be able to tell on your own website without taking anybody else's word for it. Is your website actually doing its job?

Let's go and do it. First of all, though, we have to agree on what working even means. Otherwise, we're just going to be arguing in this video. Not that I'm against that. Your website generally has one job, and I would argue anybody that says different.

It should turn the right strangers into the right inquiries and make them trust you enough to pick you over the other lot of out there. That's it. Inquiries and trust. It's not about traffic. We're not going to get up in that today.

And I'll say that again because somebody else has already sold you on traffic. Your website success is not about traffic. Trust me. You can have 10,000 people a month landing on your website, but if not a single one of them picks up the phone and asks you to work with them, then that's not a working website. That's just a busy waiting room where nobody ever bothers to book a meeting.

So when I say to you, is your website doing its job? I'm not necessarily asking how many people visited the website because nobody cares about how many people visited your website and you shouldn't either. What I am asking is did any of those people who visited your website turn into a customer. So right, that's the flaw of the video set. Let's get on to the interesting bit.

Here's how I want you to think about your website for the next eight or so minutes. Your website is not a brochure. It's not a project that you did once in 2019 and then just left to rot. Your website is actually a member of staff. You hired somebody, presumably a designer or an agency or your nephew or your dog or whoever it was to train up this one employee.

And this employee works at the front desk of your business 24 hours a day, never takes an holiday, and it's the first person every single customer meets before they meet you. Your website is that employee. So, if that employee is a bit [ __ ] there's only two reasons why they're [ __ ] The first one is whoever trained them did a terrible job of doing it. They built it wrong. They made it slow.

They made it confusing. It has no idea how to take an inquiry. The other one is that you never gave this employee anything to work with. It has no clear offer. It's got no proof on it.

You've never once told them what makes you any good. And now you're stood there going, "Why aren't they selling anything?" Every check I'm going to give you sorts these questions into those two buckets. Five checks I'm going to give you. So, you need to go pull out your website, bring it up on your phone now, whatever you want to do, and I'm going to sit here and wait before we start. Actually, no, I won't do that because this is a video and you can pause it.

Right. Check one. Can a stranger tell what you do within 5 seconds? Probably not. That's why you're here watching this video.

Open your homepage right now. Count to five and then stop. In those first five seconds, could a complete stranger tell you what you do, who it's for, and most importantly, what to do next? Not get a vibe about who you are, whatever that means. Actually say it back to you.

Actually say to you, "This is what this person does in clear text. Go ask somebody else. Ask a partner, a mate, someone down the pub. Anyone who doesn't already know what you do for a living. They've got 5 seconds." And then close the laptop on them.

What do they sell? Who do they do it for? If they go uh or something to do with or is it consulting, you failed the first check that we've done in this video. Now, the second part of it is that their fault, your agencies, or is that your fault? If the web page is a mess and you've got loads of menu items and there's 14 of them and there's a slideshow nobody asked for and the actual point of the website is buried under a stock photo of a bloke shaking hands, then that's the build.

That's the agency's fault. But if the page is clean, tidy, welldesigned, and still nobody can tell you what you do, that's usually because you never decided what you do. You told the agency when they built it, make it about our journey. And you were more worried about your logo being big in the top leftand corner and your mission statement than you were bothered about what you actually did and telling potential customers what that is. You see, a web designer can't position a business that won't position itself.

So, go look at your website. Is it a mess? It's their fault. Is it tidy and clean but still vague? Then, I'm sorry, that's your fault.

Check two, and I think this is the most important one. Is there an obvious, easy way to enquire or take the next first step? How does somebody actually contact you on your website? And before you say, well, there's a contact page. No, I mean, is there a next step that's obvious on every single page or do people have to go hunting for it?

Try it again. Go to your own website. Pretend you're a customer who wants to buy right now today. They've got the money in their hand. How many clicks does it take them to find out how to buy from you?

How much scrolling is the form asking for your inside leg measurement rather than just asking for basic information before they can even submit the form? every extra step you put into your contact form, you are losing people. That's not me being dramatic. That's just the way the web works. And again, is this the agency's fault or is this your fault?

If we're looking at a buried button or the form is broken and you click it and it doesn't do anything or the contact form opens up an email app and then just praise that it works, that's the agency's fault. That's them. Get them to go fix it. Especially if the contact form is broken. But here's the other side of that, and it's usually the thing that nobody says out loud.

Sometimes the form works fine, but the real problem is that you don't actually want people to get in touch. You don't want the inquiries. You've actually accidentally or on purpose made it hard to inquire. There's no prices on the website. There's no clue what working with you looks like.

And the form just goes to an inbox that you check on Tuesday if you remember. deep down, and I see this a lot, you're a bit scared of your phone ringing. If that's the case, that's not your designer. That's your fault. Again, I'm sorry.

Check three. Is your website actually earning trust? I mean, like proper trust. Proper proper tr Yeah, you know, proper trust. This is the big one, and this is the one that a lot of people miss out.

Nobody buys from a business that they don't believe in. And your website is where they decide whether they believe you. Usually when they're sat on the bog at half 9 at night and I know it's not glamorous, but that's how the web works. Your potential customers are going to research you. They're going to look through your website, look to see if you are real, look for testimonials, look for case studies, look to find out if you do what you say you do.

You've done it before and you can do it effectively. So you need to go look at your website like a suspicious stranger. Where is the proof that you are any good at what you do? real testimonials with real names, photos of actual work, actual people, actually you on the website, specifics, numbers, all that stuff that a competitor can't just copy and paste. Or is all of your content industryleading and this is what you're passionate about and there's a gallery of stock photos of a city that you've never been to.

Is that your agency's fault or is that your fault? If your website looks like a generic template that could belong to any business in any town in any part of the world, then that's partly the agency and the build's fault. A lazy designer will hand you an empty shell. But as I said, trust is the one that's mostly on you. Designers can't make up this stuff.

And I'm going to push you here because this point really needs pushing. You probably never sent those testimonials to the agency. You probably kept meaning to get photos done. You had a brilliant project last year, but you never told anybody about it. So, your website couldn't tell anybody about it either.

The best designer alive cannot manufacture proof you didn't give to them. We as designers can build the trophy cabinet, but you have to put something in it. If the cabinet is empty, that is your fault again. And I suggest if you've got no trust on your website right now, no proof, no case studies, no testimonials, go add them with immediacy in whatever way you have to hand and get it done. Check four.

Is your website fast and can people find it? This is two quick technical points because they do matter and they're easy to test. First of all is speed. How fast your website opens. Pull up your website on your phone right now on mobile data, not on Wi-Fi, and count how long it takes for the website to be actually usable.

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, and you've counted higher than three, heaven forbid it's 10, you're hemorrhaging users that people will never see your website because they'll get sick of looking at a white screen. They'll hit back and they'll never return. The other side of it is, is your website findable? Is it searchable? Go over to Google or search and search for the thing that you actually sell in your actual town.

Do you appear in any of those results anywhere at all? Or is it just the same three competitors and a load of directories? Now, is that the agency's fault or is that your fault? Well, this one can be a little bit tricky. If it's a slow website and there's no basic SEO, there's no Google business profile setup, that's on the agency if they agreed to do it.

That's a designer who handed over a pretty thing to you that nobody can find that nobody can load and that's their fault. But if they built you something fast and searchable and then you piled 40 uncompressed photos onto it and installed 19 WordPress plugins and have written precisely nothing on the website for 2 years, you've undone all the work that they did in the first place. A website that you starve and never update and never feed with anything just goes quiet. It doesn't appear in search engines. That's not their fault.

That's your fault because that's neglect. A website has to be maintained. And I mean that in terms of content. You can't just throw up a news post every 6 months and hope that you're going to appear in AI search in search engines and everywhere else around the internet. You have to keep updating it.

You have to keep improving it, adding more case studies, testimonials, new projects, and adding new content. The final point is check five. Can you even see if the website is working? This is the last one, and this is the one that makes the other four pointless if you get it wrong. Can you actually even tell right now if your website is doing its job?

And I'm not talking about do you have Google Analytics installed on it? Everybody has Google Analytics sat there unread. It's frightening. Nobody knows how it works. and it's full of graphs that nobody understands.

What I actually mean is, do you know how many inquiries came through your website last month? Do you ask every new customer, "How did you find us?" Have you even got the foggiest idea what your website is actually bringing in in terms of leads, in terms of money, in terms of potential customers? Because if you don't measure these things, if you don't measure inquiries, you will just sit there staring at visitor numbers going up and feel great while your bank account doesn't change in any way. I'll say this again. Don't judge your website on traffic.

It doesn't mean a thing. Is this the agency's fault though, or is this your fault? If nobody ever set up any way to track an inquiry on the website, and there's no call tracking, there's no form notifications, there's nothing, well then that's the website's problem. you need to ask the agency to fix it. But if all of that is sat there and you've never looked at the analytics, you've never considered how many inquiries you're getting, if you've never once asked a customer where they came from when they came to you, then you don't really have much of a website problem, what you've actually got is a never checked problem.

You never looked at the website and that's all on you. I'm sorry. So, that was five checks. Now, go and read your own scorecard from this video. If most of the failures in this video were them, then the website is the problem.

The agency is the problem. So before you sack anybody off or spend another five grand on another website, go ask your web people these questions and watch how they answer. How many inquiries did the website generate last month? Number one. Number two, can a stranger tell what we do in 5 seconds?

Show me how that works. Number three, why is this website so damn slow on my mobile? A good agency will have answers to all three of those and go, "Well, yeah, fair point. You've caught me out. Leave it with me and I'll fix it." A bad agency will start talking about traffic and bounce rates and try to bamboozle you.

The second they reach for vanity numbers like this, you've got your answer about the agency. If most of the failures on your website were you or you've built your own website, then I've got bad news for you and I've got good news as well. The bad news is, well, it's all your fault. I'm sorry. The good news is you can fix it because you control the website.

You can decide what you want to do next. You can hand over the proof or put the proof on your website, case studies, testimonials, etc. You can feed the website. You don't need a new website. You just need to do the part of the job that was yours, which was adding content to the website.

And honestly, in most cases with websites, it's a bit of half and half. It usually is. Half of the build was probably never done properly by the agency, and the owner just went quiet for the majority of the build and never provided the content that the agency really needed. A website isn't just something you just buy off the shelf. Ultimately, your website is just like any other employee.

If you train it badly and then you choose to ignore it, don't act surprised when it's useless and they decide to get up and leave. So, is it them or is it you? Well, you know the answer now. You've got five checks and you've got the questions you need to ask the agency, which might get a bit uncomfortable. And if it turns out that it was you the whole time, don't worry, I won't go tell your website designer cuz they're probably watching this video as well.

And if you want to see what a good website actually looks like, watch this one next, where I tear a real website apart and show you exactly what I mean. It's this one. It's already there.