Your website looks fine and gets no enquiries. Here's why.

The most common thing we get asked to fix is a website that everyone agrees looks fine and that nobody ever contacts through. The owner suspects the design. It is almost never the design.

In the order we usually find them, here is what is actually going on.

Before blaming the site, check whether anyone is on it. A page that converts at a perfectly respectable rate still produces nothing if forty people see it a month.

This is the most common cause by a distance, and it is the one people skip because it is less interesting than redesigning things. If your traffic is tiny, no amount of design work will fix the enquiry count — the problem is upstream.

Open your homepage and read only what is visible without scrolling. Would a stranger know what you sell, who you sell it to, and why you rather than someone else?

An enormous number of business sites open with something like "Welcome to our website" or a slogan that could belong to any company in any industry. Meanwhile the visitor is deciding, in about five seconds, whether they are in the right place.

The fix is rarely visual. It is usually replacing a slogan with a sentence that names what you actually do.

Not on your laptop, on a mid-range phone with an ordinary connection. Most business owners have only ever seen their own site load instantly from cache on fast broadband.

People leave slow pages, and they leave before seeing anything you wrote. Worse, they leave silently — you will never see this in an enquiry count, only in the absence of one.

This is usually the single highest-return fix available, and it is invisible, which is why it rarely gets prioritised.

Count the clicks from your homepage to actually sending a message. If the answer is more than two, that is a problem.

Then check the form itself. Every field you add costs you enquiries. Asking for a phone number when you intend to reply by email costs you enquiries. Asking for a budget before you have earned any trust costs you enquiries — and the ones it costs you are disproportionately the good ones, because serious buyers are the most cautious about being pitched at.

Also worth checking: that the form still works. We have found more than one business patiently waiting for enquiries that were silently failing to send.

In order: check whether anyone is arriving, load the site on a phone on mobile data, ask someone outside your industry what your homepage says you do, then send yourself a test enquiry.

That sequence costs nothing and takes about twenty minutes. It will usually tell you whether you need a new website or just a considerably cheaper afternoon of fixes.