Signs your website is quietly costing you enquiries

Websites rarely break in an obvious way. They just gradually stop earning their keep, and
because nothing is visibly wrong, nobody looks. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

It’s slow on a phone, on mobile data

The most common cause we see is images uploaded straight from a camera or phone — a
single photo can be several megabytes when it needs to be a couple of hundred kilobytes.
Test your own site on a phone away from the office wifi. If you’re waiting, so is everyone
else, and most of them won’t.

The contact form goes nowhere

Form notifications silently stopping is one of the most expensive faults on the web,
because there’s no error — enquiries simply arrive nowhere and you assume it’s a quiet
month. Send yourself a test enquiry today, and check the spam folder as well as the inbox.
Then set a reminder to do it every few months.

Nothing has changed since launch

If the newest thing on the site is three years old, visitors notice, and so do search
engines. It doesn’t require a blog nobody reads — updating your services, prices and photos
when they change is enough to signal the business is active.

You can’t update it yourself

If changing a phone number means emailing whoever built it and waiting a week, the site
will stop reflecting reality quite quickly. That’s not a small inconvenience — it’s the
mechanism by which sites go stale.

It doesn’t say what happens next

Plenty of sites describe the business well and then leave the visitor with nothing to do.
Every page should make the next step obvious, and the step should be the one you actually
want: call, book, or send an enquiry.

Repair or rebuild?

Most of the above is repairable, and repairing is usually the right call. Rebuilding is
worth considering when the platform is genuinely unsupported, when the design can’t work on
a phone without fighting it, or when nobody can safely update the site without breaking
something. Those are structural problems, and patching them costs more over time than
starting again.

If you get to that point, Sites Crafted builds and looks after small business sites and will give
you a straight answer about which of the two you’re facing. If your site is fine and it’s
the computers, network or email behind the business that keep getting in the way, that’s
what we do — Geeks IT Perth, on 08 6385 7940.