5 signs your website is losing you customers

Most websites don't fail loudly. Nobody calls to say "your site took too long, so I went to the place down the street." They just leave, and you never hear about it.

After more than ten years building and fixing websites, I see the same five problems again and again on small business sites. None of them need a developer to spot. Here's what to look for, with a quick check for each.

1. It's slow on a phone

Most of your visitors are probably on a phone, often on mobile data, often standing somewhere waiting. If your home page takes a long time to show anything, a lot of them will give up before they see your name.

Google's own guidance is that the main content of a page should appear in under about 2.5 seconds. Many small business sites are far slower than that, usually because of huge photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone, or an auto-playing slider at the top.

Quick check: Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and open your site on mobile data. Count how long it takes before you can actually read something useful, like your name, what you do, and a button. If you find yourself waiting, your customers are too. For a more precise answer, I wrote a 10-minute check you can do yourself.

2. There's no clear next step

Someone lands on your site because they want something: a haircut on Saturday, a cake for a birthday, a quote for a move-out clean. If they have to hunt for how to get it, many won't bother.

The fix is usually simple: one obvious button near the top of every page that says exactly what happens next. "Book a cut." "Order a cake." "Get a quote."

Quick check: Ask a friend who has never seen your site to book, order or contact you, using only their phone. Don't help. Watch where they tap first and how long it takes. If they hesitate or scroll looking for something, that's where customers are dropping off.

3. The information is out of date

Old holiday hours, a price list from two years ago, a staff member who left, a menu item you stopped making. Each one is small, but together they tell visitors that nobody is looking after the site, and they start to wonder whether the business is still open.

Wrong hours are the worst: someone who finds the door locked is unlikely to try again.

Quick check: Open your site next to your Google Business Profile and compare hours, address, phone number and prices. Then read every page as if you were a new customer. If updating it means calling someone, that's worth fixing too: you should be able to change your own hours.

4. People can't find you on Google

You don't need to rank first for "best bakery in Toronto." But when someone types your business name, or your type of business plus your neighbourhood, your site should show up with a sensible title and description.

Sometimes it doesn't, for reasons that are easy to miss. A setting left on from when the site was built can tell search engines to stay away. Every page might share the same title. The site might be missing a sitemap, which is a simple list of your pages that helps search engines find them.

Quick check: Search Google for your exact business name, then for your type of business plus your area. Then search site:yourdomain.com (with your real address) to see which of your pages Google knows about. If you get few or no results, or the titles look odd, something is blocking you.

5. The forms don't work

This one hurts the most, because it looks fine from the outside. The contact form, order form or quote form appears normal, the customer fills it in, and the message never arrives. Sometimes they see an error and give up. Sometimes they see "thank you" and wait for a reply that never comes.

Forms break quietly for ordinary reasons: a hosting change, an expired setting, an email service that started rejecting messages. Unless you test them, you won't know.

Quick check: Fill in every form on your site yourself, from your phone, using a personal email address. Make sure the message arrives, that it's not in spam, and that it contains everything the customer typed. Put a reminder in your calendar to do this once a month.

What to do if you found something

If one or two of these checks turned something up, don't panic, and don't assume you need a whole new website. Most of these problems are fixed on the site you already have, in days rather than weeks.

If you'd rather have someone look at it for you, that's exactly the kind of work I do on fixing and improving existing websites. You can also see a full example in the bakery site rescue, where a slow WordPress site with a broken order form was fixed without a rebuild. Either way, I'm happy to take a look and tell you honestly what's worth fixing first.