Why is my website not getting enquiries?

First: is your contact form actually working?

Start here, because it is the cheapest thing to rule out and because when it is the problem it is the whole problem. A form that has silently stopped delivering looks identical, from the outside, to a website nobody wants to contact.

Do not test it from your office computer. Fill it in from your phone, on mobile data rather than your wifi, using a personal email address rather than a work one. Then wait a full day and check your spam folder before you conclude anything.

Forms break quietly. A hosting change, a plugin update, a new spam filter, or an email address that stopped existing when somebody left. Nobody notices, because the person filling it in sees a thank-you message and assumes you will call. They wait, then they call somebody else.

Second: is anybody actually visiting?

Open Google Analytics. If it is not installed, that is your first fix, because until then every decision about the site is a guess and you cannot tell whether a change helped.

As a rough guide, and it is only a guide:

• Under about fifty visitors a month. Your problem is visibility. The website is not the issue, because almost nobody is seeing it.
• A few hundred a month and no enquiries. People are arriving and leaving. That is a website problem, and the rest of this page is about it.
• Good traffic and it used to produce enquiries. Something changed. Check the form first, then check whether you still rank for what you used to.

Third: can people find you when they search?

Search for your business name. You should be first. If you are not, something is badly wrong and it is worth fixing before anything else.

Then search the way a customer would, without your name in it. A plumber in Boksburg searches “plumber Boksburg”, not “Acme Plumbing”. Do it on your phone, and look at what fills the screen: usually a map with three businesses in it. If you are not one of those three, that is where most of the local enquiries are going, and the fix is your Google Business Profile rather than your website.

Fourth: how quickly does the page load on a phone?

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data. A page that takes six seconds on your fibre connection at the office can take considerably longer for them, and people leave while it is still loading. They do not tell you. They just go back and click the next result.

This is worth measuring rather than guessing, because what feels fast to you on a laptop is not what a customer experiences. There are free tools for it, including the one on this site.

Fifth: is it obvious what you do, in the first five seconds?

Open your homepage on your phone and look at only what fits on the screen before you scroll. Can a stranger tell what you do, where you do it, and what to do next?

A surprising number of small business sites open with a large photograph and a slogan. Slogans do not answer any of those three questions. If the first screen says “Excellence, delivered” over a stock image, a visitor who arrived from a search has to work out whether they are in the right place, and many will not bother.

Sixth: how many ways are there to contact you?

Count them from the homepage on a phone. A tappable phone number, a WhatsApp link, an email address, a form. If there is only one, everybody who does not like that one route is lost at the last step.

People reach for different things. Some will only phone. Some will not phone under any circumstances. Some will not fill in a form that asks for their email address before telling them a price. In South Africa specifically, a WhatsApp link converts people who would never compose an email.

Seventh: is there any reason to trust you?

A buyer who has never used you is looking for reasons to believe you are real. Reviews, real photographs of real work rather than stock images, a physical address, a named human being. An About page matters more than most people think, because it is where somebody checks there is a person behind the website.

Prices matter here too. A site that will not indicate what anything costs makes people assume the worst and go and get a number from somebody who will.

So which one is it?

Work down that list and you will usually find it. In my experience the most common single cause is the least glamorous one: the enquiry route is broken or there is only one of them, and nobody has tested it in two years.

If you have been through all seven and everything looks fine but the phone still is not ringing, that is when an outside look is worth paying for. The things left over at that point are the ones that are genuinely hard to see from the inside.

What does it cost to have somebody check properly?

The check on this site is free and runs ten of these automatically in about a minute, including how fast the page loads on a phone and how many ways there are to contact you. No sign up, and the findings are shown in full.

The paid audit is R2,800 and includes the thing you cannot easily do for yourself: I submit a real test enquiry through your form and confirm whether it arrives. Every check in every package is listed here, and every finding in the report comes with a fixed price to fix it.