How to tell if your website is costing you enquiries

The gap between visitors and enquiries

A website can look smart and still cost you work. The problem is rarely that nobody visits. More often people arrive, something puts them off or gets in their way, and they leave again without calling, filling in the form or sending an email. Because that happens quietly, most owners never see it. You just notice the phone is a bit quieter than it should be for a business your size, or that enquiries tailed off after a redesign, and you are left guessing why.

The useful question is not whether your website looks good. It is whether your website turns the people who find it into enquiries. Those are two different things. A tidy site with a slow load, a broken form or an unclear message will lose work that a plainer, faster, clearer site would have won. The encouraging part is that most of these leaks are things you can check for yourself in an afternoon, without any technical knowledge.

Below are the checks we run at the studio when a business asks us to look at why a site is underperforming, set out in roughly the order we work through them. You can follow the same order yourself.

Start with the numbers you already have

You do not need special tools to begin. You almost certainly already hold three sources of evidence, and putting them side by side tells you a lot.

A pattern usually appears quickly. If plenty of people find you but very few ever reach the contact page, the site is not guiding them towards getting in touch. If people do reach the contact page but still do not make contact, the contact step itself is where things break. If almost nobody finds you in the first place, the issue is visibility rather than the design of the pages. Working out which of these is happening stops you spending time and money fixing the wrong thing.

• Your website analytics, whether that is Google Analytics or the basic stats your host provides: how many people visit, how long they stay, and how many reach your contact page.
• Your Google Business Profile, the free listing that shows on Google Maps and in local search: it reports how many people found you and how many then clicked to the site, tapped to call or asked for directions.
• Your own record of enquiries: the emails, form messages and phone calls you actually receive, and roughly where each one came from.

A quick sense check

For one week, note every genuine enquiry and where it came from. Owners are often surprised to find most of their work arrives by a route they had been ignoring, while a page they were particularly proud of sends almost nobody anywhere useful. That single week of watching tells you more than any amount of guessing.

Speed and mobile, the way your customers really see it

Most people who look you up in Cornwall will open your site on a phone, and often on a mobile signal rather than home broadband. Signal gets patchy once you are away from the main towns and out along the coast, so pages have to load on less than perfect connections. A site that feels instant on the office computer can be slow and awkward on a phone at the harbour. That phone version is what most of your customers actually experience, so that is the version worth testing.

Google measures this with a set of standards called Core Web Vitals, which you can check for free using its PageSpeed Insights tool. Three things matter: how quickly the main content appears (the target is under about 2.5 seconds), how quickly the page responds when someone taps or types (under about 200 milliseconds), and whether the layout jumps around while it loads (it should barely move). A page that fails these feels sluggish to use, and Google is also more likely to show a faster competitor above you in the results.

You do not have to memorise any of those numbers. Do the human version of the test instead. Pick up your own phone, turn wifi off so you are on mobile data, and open your site as a stranger would. Count the seconds before you can read and tap something. If you find yourself waiting, pinching to zoom, or hitting the wrong button because everything is cramped together, your customers are doing exactly the same, and a fair number of them are giving up.

The usual culprits we find are large unoptimised images, a heavy page builder loading things the page never needs, video set to play automatically, and cheap shared hosting that struggles under load. Hosting in particular can show its limits during the summer season, when traffic to Cornwall businesses climbs and the slowest sites feel it most.

Whether people can actually get in touch

This is the check owners skip most often, because they assume it simply works. Test it as though you were a customer. Fill in your own enquiry form and send it, then confirm that a message actually arrives, and where it lands. We regularly find forms that fail quietly, send to an inbox nobody has opened in months, or drop straight into a spam folder. Every one of those is a lost enquiry that never shows up as a complaint, because the customer believes they contacted you and you never knew they existed.

Then check the basics on a phone, since that is where most enquiries start:

Cutting down the effort between someone thinking I am interested and them actually making contact is often the single biggest improvement a small business website can make. If a visitor has to hunt around for how to reach you, a good share of them will simply not bother, and you will never know they were there.

• Is your phone number tap to call, so a visitor can ring you with one thumb rather than copying the digits out by hand.
• Is there an obvious way to get in touch on every page, not just buried on a contact page that takes three clicks to reach.
• Are your opening hours and location clear, and do they match what your Google Business Profile says.
• If you take enquiries by email, is the address a proper link that opens the visitor's mail app rather than plain text they have to retype.

Whether the site earns trust in the first few seconds

When someone lands on your site they are quietly asking three questions: is this the right sort of business, does it cover my area, and can I trust it. If your homepage does not answer those within a few seconds, people leave. A visitor should be able to tell almost at a glance what you do and where you do it. Something as plain as roofing across Truro and mid Cornwall beats a clever slogan that could belong to any company anywhere in the country.

A handful of things quietly erode that trust, often without the owner noticing:

None of this is about being flashy. A calm, current, clearly local site tends to convert better than a busy one, because it removes doubt rather than adding noise. People in Cornwall are wary of businesses that look as though they could be based anywhere, so anything that grounds you in a real place and real work helps.

• Out of date content, such as a news post from three years ago, an offer that has long expired, or a copyright date in the footer stuck in the past. All of it suggests the business may have moved on or closed.
• Stock photos of places that clearly are not Cornwall, where genuine photos of your work, your premises or your team would reassure a nervous visitor far more.
• No reviews or other social proof, when even a few real Google reviews shown on the page would settle a first time visitor who has never dealt with you.
• Broken links, missing images, or a layout that falls apart on a phone, all of which hint that the business might be just as careless with the actual job.

Being found in the first place

If your checks point to people simply not arriving, then the issue is visibility rather than the design of the pages, and the fixes are different. For a Cornwall business the biggest single lever here is usually your Google Business Profile. It is free, it is what appears in the map results when someone searches for something like cafe in Truro or sign maker near me, and a complete, active profile is one of the strongest factors in whether you show up at all.

Make sure the profile is claimed, and that your name, address and phone number match exactly what is on your website, right down to the punctuation and how the street is written. Inconsistent details scattered across the web make Google less confident about showing you. Add real photos, keep your opening hours right (including bank holidays and any seasonal changes if you close over winter or extend hours in summer), choose accurate categories, and reply to the reviews you receive.

On the website itself, each service you offer and each area you cover deserves its own clear page, rather than being crammed onto the homepage. A joiner working across Truro, Falmouth and Newquay is far more likely to be found for each place if each has a genuine, useful page, instead of one long list of town names. Being found and converting the people who find you are two separate jobs, and it is worth knowing which one is holding you back before you spend a penny on either.

A short checklist to run this week

You can work through most of this yourself in an afternoon. If any step makes you wince, that is usually exactly where the enquiries are leaking.

If you would rather not do this yourself, or you have run the checks and want a second opinion on what to tackle first, that is precisely the sort of thing the studio can help with.

• Open your site on your phone using mobile data, with wifi turned off, and time how long it takes before you can comfortably use it.
• Send yourself a message through your own enquiry form and confirm it arrives in an inbox you check every day.
• Tap your phone number and email address on a phone to check they are both clickable.
• Look at your homepage for five seconds and ask whether a stranger would know what you do and where you do it.
• Check that your Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and matches your website exactly.
• Skim the footer and any news or offers pages for dates and prices that have quietly gone stale.