Your website gets visitors, a few hundred of them last month, and it produced four enquiries. Traffic but no leads is the most common complaint we hear. The instinct at this point is to redesign, because the site is the thing you can see and change, and it is almost always the wrong first move.
Traffic without enquiries has about six possible causes, they are cheap to check, and they are not equally likely. Work through them in order and you will usually find the real one in an afternoon. Redesign first and you have a fifty-fifty chance of rebuilding the wrong thing and getting the same silence back with better typography.
Before anything else, check you have enough traffic to conclude anything
This one is unglamorous and it saves people a great deal of money, so it goes first. If two hundred people visited last month and none enquired, that is not evidence your site is broken. At most realistic rates a site like that produces a handful of enquiries a month, and a month with zero is well inside normal variation.
So before diagnosing the site, ask whether the numbers can carry a conclusion at all. If they cannot, your problem is not conversion, it is that not enough of the right people know you exist, and the money belongs in getting found rather than in redesigning a page four people saw. Keep reading the checks below anyway, because they are worth fixing regardless, but do not let anyone sell you a rebuild on a sample of two hundred.
Why your website gets visitors but no leads: six checks in order
| Check | How to test it | If this is the problem |
|---|---|---|
| Is it the right traffic? | Look at which pages people land on and what they searched for. Are those buying questions, or are they people looking to do it themselves, students, or job seekers? | You do not have a conversion problem, you have an audience problem. Traffic to a page about how to do something yourself will never enquire, no matter what the button says. Fix what you publish and what you rank for, not the page. |
| Can they tell in five seconds? | Show your home page to someone outside your industry for five seconds, take it away, and ask what you do, who for, and where you are based. | The most common single fault. If they cannot answer, nothing further down the page matters, because they already left. Say plainly what you do and who for, above the fold, in words a stranger uses. |
| Is there a reason to act now? | Read your page as a sceptic. Why you rather than the four other tabs open behind you? What happens if they wait a month? | You have a site that describes and does not persuade. Specifics do this work: what you actually deliver, what it costs, what happens next, what you will not do. Vagueness reads as risk. |
| Does the form work? | Fill it in yourself, from your phone, on mobile data, as a stranger with a fresh browser. Then check the message actually arrived, including the spam folder. | Alarmingly common and completely invisible from the inside. Broken forms, submissions going to an inbox nobody reads, or an address that stopped working when someone left. Test it monthly, forever. |
| Is there any evidence you are real? | Count the proof on the page. Named work, results, a real address, real faces, anything a nervous buyer could verify. | For anything above a small spend, the absence of proof is disqualifying on its own. This is usually the second most expensive gap after clarity, and it is the hardest to fake, which is exactly why it works. |
| How is it on a phone, on a bad connection? | Open it on your own phone away from the office wifi. Time how long until you can read something. Try to tap the phone number. | Most of your visitors are on a phone. If it takes six seconds to show anything, a good share of them left before they saw your offer at all, and no amount of copywriting reaches someone who is already gone. |
In our experience the first three account for most cases, and the fourth accounts for the most painful ones, because the enquiries existed and simply never arrived.
The five second test, done properly
It is worth doing this one carefully because it is both the most common fault and the one owners are least able to see in their own site. You know what you do. You cannot un-know it, which makes you the worst possible judge of whether your home page says it.
- Find someone outside your industry. A relative, a neighbour, anyone who does not already know what you sell.
- Show them the home page for five seconds, on a phone, then cover it up.
- Ask three questions. What does this company do? Who is it for? What would you do next if you needed it?
- Do not explain, defend or hint. The silence is the result. Write down exactly what they said.
- Repeat with two more people. Three is enough to see a pattern, and the pattern is usually unanimous.
If all three struggle, you have found your answer, and it is a copy problem sitting in the top screen of the page rather than a design problem spread across the whole site. That is a much smaller and cheaper fix than the one you were dreading.
If the answer turns out to be the site itself rather than the traffic, rebuild or refresh works through which of those you actually need, and our company websites page shows the shape a rebuilt one usually takes.
What to do about it, cheapest first
- Say what you do, plainly, at the top. In the words your customers use rather than the words your industry uses. One sentence. This is free and it moves the needle more than anything else on this list.
- Put the proof high. Real work, real names, real numbers where you have them. If you genuinely have none yet, say what you commit to instead, in specifics.
- Give one obvious next step, repeated, and make it small. Ask for a conversation rather than a signed brief. Fewer fields, and no field you will not actually use.
- Publish your prices, or at least your ranges. The single most common reason a good visitor leaves without asking is that they cannot tell whether you are for them, and asking feels like a commitment.
- Fix the phone experience before the desktop one, because that is where most of your visitors are.
- Then, and only then, consider a redesign. If the copy, proof and route are right and it is still silent, the structure genuinely might be the problem, and that is what our redesign work is for.
Not for you if
The reason to do this in order rather than all at once is not thoroughness for its own sake. It is that each check costs you an hour and the redesign costs you thousands, and roughly half the time one of the first four hours is the whole answer.