Ten website mistakes that cause SMEs to lose customers

1. The first screen does not say what you do, for whom, or why you — it says “Welcome” or “Solutions for a changing world”. 2. Every service is on one “services” page, so a visitor looking for the one thing you do that they need cannot find it, and neither can Google. 3. No proof where the decision is made: stock photographs instead of the real place, “trusted by 500 clients” instead of three names, no reviews, no case example. 4. The phone number is in the footer, not tappable, and there is no WhatsApp — on a site where most visitors are on a phone and most enquiries are calls. 5. The page is slow on a mobile connection: uncompressed images, a video in the header, a slider, three tracking scripts, so the visitor has left before the headline loads. 6. The form asks nine questions and says nothing about what happens after — who calls, how soon — so the visitor ready to enquire decides it is not worth it.

Mistakes one to four are copy and layout; five and six are an afternoon of technical work. Together they account for most of the gap between a site that produces enquiries and one that produces compliments.

7. Tracking is broken or absent: the analytics were set up once and never checked, the form submissions are not counted, calls from the site are not tracked, so nobody knows whether last month’s change helped. 8. The site is not found for the searches that matter, because each page is titled with the company name, the service pages are thin, and the Google Business Profile points at the home page. 9. Old URLs are dead: a redesign changed the addresses, the redirects were never set, and links from directories, emails and Google now land on a 404. 10. Nobody owns the site: the developer left, the hosting renewal is in someone’s personal email, the SSL certificate expired last month and the browser now warns visitors away.

These four do not show in a design review. They show in the analytics, the search console, and the day the site goes down.

Fix now — this week, by whoever maintains the site: the phone number tappable at the top of every page, a WhatsApp link, the form cut to three fields with a “what happens next” line, images compressed and the header video removed, the SSL certificate and hosting renewals in the company’s name, and the analytics and call tracking confirmed to be recording. None of this needs design.

Fix next — over the following month: the first screen of the home page and each service page rewritten to say what, for whom, why; a page per service where there was one; proof gathered and placed beside the decision — the real photographs, three named customers, reviews, a case example; the page titles rewritten for the searches, and the old URLs redirected. Monitor — from then on, monthly: enquiries per hundred visitors by page, speed on a phone, search console for pages Google cannot read, and one person named as the site’s owner with the renewal dates in the company calendar.

Do not redesign in response to this list; nine of the ten are fixable on the existing site, and a redesign done before the fixes usually rebuilds the mistakes in a new template. Do not add a chatbot or a pop-up to compensate for a page that does not say what you do. Do not judge the fixes on how the site looks; judge them on the enquiry count. A safeguard: keep the “before” numbers, and compare at thirty and ninety days.

It worked if enquiries per hundred visitors rose, calls from the site are being counted, the site loads in under three seconds on a phone, and the renewal dates are in a calendar someone reads. This is the website and user-experience audit we run: the ten checks against your site and your analytics, a ranked fix list with the time each takes, and — because most of the list is an afternoon of work — the honest note that your existing developer can do most of it.