Website getting visitors but no enquiries? Start here
People are landing on your site and the phone is still not ringing. Before you authorise a rebuild, work through these eleven checks in cost order. Five are free. The seventh section will tell a good number of readers that the website is fine and the problem sits elsewhere.
- Traffic problem or conversion problem
- The five free fixes to do this week
- Where enquiries leak: form, number and mobile
- Can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds
- Are you visible for the searches that actually buy
- When the honest answer is a rebuild
- When the honest answer is that your website is fine
- How to measure whether the fix worked
First work out whether you have a traffic problem or a conversion problem
Almost every wasted website budget starts here. People rebuild sites that converted fine and simply had nobody visiting them. Open your analytics, take the last 90 days, and divide enquiries by sessions. Count calls and emails, not only forms.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Under 200 sessions a month | Any conversion rate is noise at this volume. Fix traffic first. |
| Under 1 in 100 | Conversion problem. Start with the free fixes below. |
| 1 to 3 in 100 | Normal for a small UK service business. More enquiries needs more traffic. |
| Over 3 in 100 | The site works. Anyone selling you a redesign now is selling, not diagnosing. |
Then check the sources. Direct visits and searches for your own name are people who already knew you. What a site should win is non branded search and Google Maps. Near zero there, and design work will not help.
The five free fixes to do this week
Cheapest first. None of these needs a designer or a budget.
Your phone number and email are live text, not part of an image
Try to select the number on your homepage with the cursor. If you cannot highlight it, it sits inside a graphic, so nobody can tap to call and search engines cannot read it.
Fix: retype it as text inside a tel: link. Ten minutes.
FreeYour Google Business Profile is claimed, complete and correctly categorised
For most local service businesses this profile pulls more enquiries than the website. Its primary category is the most powerful field on it and is frequently wrong. Check category, service area, hours and link.
Fix: half an hour of admin. Add real photographs while you are there.
FreeSend yourself a test enquiry from a phone, on mobile data
Not from your laptop on the office wifi. The commonest failure is a form delivering into a mailbox nobody has opened for two years. Wait an hour, then check spam too.
Fix: correct the destination, add a second recipient, repeat monthly.
FreeYour page titles say something useful
Search site:yourdomain.co.uk in Google. If the results say Home or Welcome To Our Website, you are wasting the line that decides whether anybody clicks. Use what you do, where, then the business name.
Fix: rewrite the title on your five most important pages.
FreeThe site loads over HTTPS with no warning in the address bar
A Not Secure label costs enquiries before a word is read, and browsers flag it hard on pages with forms. Certificates are free from every host worth using.
Fix: enable it, then force all traffic to the https version.
FreeWhere enquiries leak: the form, the phone number and the mobile view
These cost money, but not much, and this is where most of it leaks.
Your form asks for more than it needs
Every extra field costs completed enquiries. A name, one contact route and one text box is enough. Budget dropdowns and required postcodes filter out people you would happily have talked to. Qualify on the call.
Fix: delete fields. An hour if you are paying someone.
Free to £120There is no way to make contact from a phone without scrolling
Most local service traffic arrives on a mobile. If the only contact route is a form at the foot of a long page, you are asking a stressed person to work for it.
Fix: a sticky mobile contact bar, plus a route in the header.
£100 to £250The mobile view is slow or broken in a way you have never seen
Run the homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights, free, and read the mobile score. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds is the target and over 4 seconds is officially poor. The usual culprit is a 4MB phone photograph dropped into a page.
Fix: compress and resize images, strip unused plugins and sliders.
£150 to £400Can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds
The most uncomfortable test here, and it is free. Show your homepage to somebody who does not know the business, count to five, cover the screen, then ask what the company does, where, and what they should do next.
The top of the page says what you do, for whom, and where
Welcome to our website, Quality you can trust and Excellence since 1998 all fail, as does a photograph of a building with the name over it. What works is dull and specific: the service, who it is for, the towns you cover, one action.
Fix: rewrite the hero and the first two hundred words.
Free to £300There is no price, no range and no scope anywhere
British buyers filter on price whether you give them one or not, and silence reads as expensive or evasive. A starting figure, a range and one line on what falls outside removes the enquiries you did not want and reassures the ones you did.
Fix: add a from figure and an exclusions line.
Free to £250Are you visible for the searches that actually buy
Open Google Search Console, free, and read the performance report for the last three months. Two things matter.
Are you appearing for anything besides your own business name? If every query is a variation of it, you have no commercial visibility, and your enquiries come from people who already knew you.
Then look for queries in average position 8 to 20. Those are terms you nearly rank for, and one well written page usually beats a whole new site. The queries that convert are service plus town, near me, emergency and cost variants.
The fix is one page per service and one per main town, written properly rather than spun. Expect £150 to £400 a page. Worth vetting whoever fixes it first, because this is where the least honest work gets sold.
When the honest answer is a rebuild
The site is structurally wrong for the way people buy from you
The only check here where replacing the site beats repairing it. A rebuild is justified when one of these is true.
- The site cannot be indexed and the platform cannot be made to fix it.
- Nobody can edit it. Whoever built it has gone, the logins with them, and every change is a negotiation.
- The domain, hosting or copyright sit with someone else. Under UK law copyright in custom code stays with the agency unless the contract assigns it, so on many pay monthly deals the site comes down when payment stops.
- The structure does not match how people buy from you. A brochure site is the wrong shape for an appointment business, which is why clinics and salons end up with bookings leaking to direct messages.
- The mobile layout is fundamentally broken rather than fiddly, and fixing costs more than starting again.
Fix: a rebuild, not a repair.
From £470+VATSee what a rebuild costs, fixed and in writing, budgeting for a rebuild, and what we do about each of these.
When the honest answer is that your website is fine
This is the part an agency blog leaves out. A fair share of readers do not need a new website.
- Under roughly 200 sessions a month. The site is not the constraint. Put the money into your Google Business Profile and local listings.
- Already converting above 3 in 100. The site works. You want more of the right visitors, not a different site.
- No budget and a genuinely simple business. One service, one town, no bookings, no shop. A Squarespace or Wix site you build yourself is a fair answer and we will say so on the phone. One caveat: the price is never yours to control. Squarespace raised UK plan prices by up to 26% in July 2026 with no announcement, applied at renewal.
- Enquiries dropped suddenly rather than never arriving. Something broke, or something changed at Google. Check the form and Search Console first.
- You sell to a few large clients through relationships. The site is a credibility check, not a lead source.
How to measure whether the fix worked
Take a baseline first: sessions, enquiries, calls and quotes sent, for the last 90 days. Write them somewhere that is not a dashboard.
- Change one thing at a time, so you know what moved.
- Give conversion changes four to six weeks and search changes three to six months. Anyone promising faster on search is guessing.
- Count calls, not only forms, or you will undercount badly.
- Ask every enquiry how they found you and log it. Thirty rows beat any analytics tool.
- Watch quality as well as volume. Ten enquiries where eight are wrong fit is worse than four you can serve.
Not sure which of the eleven applies to you?
Send us your web address and we will look at it properly, then a designer calls you back within 48 hours and tells you what we would actually do. If the answer is that five free fixes would sort it, that is what you will be told.
No obligation, no sales script, no chatbot. We turn work away when it is not right for us.