7 signs your website is costing you calls

You don’t need any tools for this. Open your website on your phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, and go through the list.

1. You can’t tap to call from the top of the page

If a customer has to scroll to find your number, or the number isn’t a link, some won’t bother. Your phone number belongs in the header of every page, and tapping it should start the call.

2. The page takes a long time to load

Count while it loads. If you’re still waiting after a few seconds, so are your customers, and some of them have already gone back to search. Oversized photos and old plugins are the usual cause.

3. The first screen doesn’t say what you do, or where

“Welcome to our website” tells a visitor nothing. The first thing they read should be what you do and the town you do it in.

4. The hours, prices or services are out of date

A customer who calls about a service you stopped offering, or shows up when you’re closed, is a customer you’ve annoyed. Check every page for anything that changed.

5. The browser says “Not secure”

That label means the site doesn’t use an SSL certificate. Browsers warn visitors about it, and anything typed into a form on the page isn’t protected. Most hosts can add one quickly.

6. There are pages you never wrote

Search Google for site:yourbusiness.com and scroll through the results. Pages about casinos, pills or anything else unrelated to your business, or strange links on your own pages, are signs the site has been hacked. Fix it quickly: it hurts your search results, and customers notice.

7. Your contact form doesn’t reach you

Fill it out yourself. If the message never arrives, or lands in spam, every lead it collected was lost. Test it again after every change to the site.

What to do next

One or two of these can be fixed in an afternoon. If you checked off four or more, it’s usually faster to start from a redesign than to patch the old site.