Five signs your website is quietly costing you customers

A website can lose you customers without you ever knowing. Here are five common signs it’s quietly costing you business, and what to do about each.

A bad website doesn’t announce itself. Nobody emails to say they gave up trying to contact you or bought from a competitor because your site felt dated. They just leave, and you never hear about it. That’s what makes website problems so easy to ignore. Here are five signs your site might be costing you business without you realising, and what to do about each.

1. It’s slow to load

People are impatient online. If your site takes more than a few seconds to appear, a good chunk of visitors give up before they’ve seen anything. Slow sites also rank lower on Google, so you lose people twice: some never arrive, and some who do won’t wait.

You can check your own site’s speed for free using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Common culprits are huge unoptimised images, a bloated theme, or cheap hosting that’s straining. Often the fixes are straightforward once you know what’s slowing things down.

2. It’s awkward on a phone

Most people will visit your website on their phone, not a computer. If they arrive and have to pinch and zoom, tap tiny buttons, or scroll sideways to read, they won’t stick around. A site that works properly on mobile isn’t a nice extra any more; it’s the main event.

The quickest test is to pull your own site up on your phone and try to do the main thing a customer would want, like finding your number or making an enquiry. If it’s fiddly for you, it’s fiddly for them.

3. The information is out of date

Nothing erodes trust faster than wrong information. Old opening hours, a phone number you’ve changed, prices that have moved, or a copyright date stuck three years in the past all send the same message: nobody’s minding this. Some visitors will assume you’ve closed down.

Have a read through your site as if you were a customer. Is everything still true? Is there anything about a service you no longer offer, or missing about one you do? A quick tidy-up costs nothing and matters more than people expect.

4. It’s hard to contact you

This one is remarkably common. A visitor decides they want to get in touch, and then can’t easily find how. The phone number is buried, there’s no obvious contact form, or the enquiry form is broken and nobody’s noticed. Every one of those is a customer who was ready to reach out and didn’t.

Make your phone number and a way to get in touch obvious on every page, not hidden away on a single contact page. And test your contact form now and then, because a broken form silently swallows enquiries for months.

5. There’s no padlock (HTTPS)

If your web address still starts with http rather than https, browsers now flag your site as “Not secure”, which is exactly the message you don’t want a customer seeing. It also hurts your Google ranking. The fix is an SSL certificate, which is usually free and included with decent hosting; it’s just a matter of getting it set up.

What to do about it

None of these problems are dramatic on their own, which is precisely why they get left. But together they can quietly cost you a steady trickle of business. The good news is that most are quick and inexpensive to fix once you know they’re there. Start by going through your own site as a customer would and noting anything that annoys you.

If you’d like a straightforward review of what’s working and what’s costing you, SeddCo can take a look and tell you plainly what’s worth fixing. Give us a ring on 01746 325326.