Guide
How to tell if your website is costing you work
A website rarely fails loudly. It does not go down, nobody rings to complain, and the work still comes in from word of mouth. It just quietly stops being the reason anybody calls. Here is how to find out, without taking anybody's word for it.
1. Time it on your own phone, on mobile data
Turn the wi-fi off first. That is the whole test, and it is the one most people skip. Open your site and count. Under two seconds is fine. Four or five seconds and you are losing people who never knew they were on your site. Somebody with a leak does not wait.
2. Try to ring yourself from it, one-handed
Hold the phone the way you would if you were driving or up a ladder. Can you get to the phone number with one thumb, without pinching, zooming or scrolling? If the number is only in the footer, or it is a picture rather than a link you can tap, that is work walking away from a decision that took four seconds.
3. Search the way a customer would
Not your business name — anyone who knows your name will find you. Search your trade and your town: "emergency plumber Willenhall", "electrician Sedgley". Look at where you actually appear, and look at what the ones above you are doing that you are not. Usually it is nothing clever. Usually it is that they have a page about that exact thing and you have a homepage that mentions it in a list.
4. Send yourself an enquiry
Fill your own form in and send it. Then wait. Did anything arrive? Did it go to an address you still check? Did the customer — you, in this case — get any acknowledgement at all, or did the message simply vanish into a silence that feels, from the other end, exactly like being ignored?
Broken contact forms are extraordinarily common and nobody ever tells you. The customer assumes you could not be bothered and rings the next firm.
5. Check what it says about your registration
Your Gas Safe, NICEIC or NAPIT number should be on the page, in text, where somebody can read it and check it on the register. If it is missing, you are asking a stranger to take a grand's worth of gas work on trust. If it is wrong or out of date, that is considerably worse than missing.
6. Look at it next to your Google listing
For most trade businesses the Google Business Profile brings more calls than the website does. Check the opening hours are right, the phone number matches, and the photographs are of your work rather than a stock van. A tidy listing and a slow website is a better position than the reverse — but the two are supposed to work together.
What the results usually mean
If it failed on speed and on the phone number, the site is actively costing you work and has been for a while. If it only failed on the search test, the site is fine and what you are missing is pages for the things people actually search for. Those are different problems with different price tags, and it is worth knowing which one you have before anybody sells you anything.
If any of that landed uncomfortably close to home, a fifteen-minute call costs nothing and there is no pitch deck. If a new site won't make you money, you'll get told that on the call.