A website that doesn't convert is often a website that was built to look like a website, rather than built to do a job. The design might be perfectly nice. The content might all be there. But something about the experience isn't quite moving visitors to take action.

Here are the seven most common reasons — and what to do about each one.

01
It's not clear what you actually do

Within five seconds of landing on your site, a visitor should know exactly what you offer and whether it's relevant to them. Vague headlines like "Delivering excellence for our clients" tell visitors nothing. Be specific: who you help, what you do, and where.

Fix: Rewrite your hero headline to answer: what do you do, and for whom? Test it on someone who doesn't know your business and ask if they understand it in under 10 seconds.
02
There's no single clear next step

If your page has five different buttons all competing for attention, visitors tend to choose none of them. Decision paralysis is real. A page that wants a visitor to do one thing, and makes that one thing obvious, will almost always outperform a page with many competing options.

Fix: Identify the single most valuable action a visitor can take on each page. Make that button prominent, give it a clear label ("Get a free quote" not "Submit"), and reduce everything else in visual weight.
03
Your contact form has too many fields

Every extra field in a contact form reduces the number of people who complete it. Name and email is enough to start a conversation. Asking for phone number, company, budget, and a full description all at once is asking a lot of trust from someone who only just arrived.

Fix: Cut your contact form down to the minimum needed to start a conversation. You can ask other questions once they've responded. Fewer fields, more submissions.
04
The site is slow to load

If your site takes more than three seconds to load on mobile, a large portion of visitors will leave before they've seen a single word. Large uncompressed images are the most common culprit on small business sites.

Fix: Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights (free). Compress all images before uploading — Squoosh or TinyPNG are free and take seconds. Aim for images under 200kb where possible.
05
There's nothing to build trust

Visitors who don't know you are being asked to hand over money or personal details to a stranger. Trust signals — testimonials, real photos, specific results, your name and face — reduce that anxiety. Sites that feel anonymous convert poorly.

Fix: Add at least one real testimonial with a name. If you don't have one yet, ask your last satisfied client for a sentence or two. Then add a photo of yourself and make the About page feel human.
06
It doesn't work on mobile

More than half of web traffic is now on mobile. If your site looks broken, cramped, or hard to use on a phone — buttons too small to tap, text overflowing — a huge proportion of visitors are having a bad experience before they've read anything.

Fix: Open your site on your phone right now. Actually try to use it. Find and tap the contact button. Read the text. If anything is frustrating, it needs fixing.
07
The copy is written for you, not for them

Most small business websites talk about the business — its history, its values, its team. Visitors don't come to learn about you. They come because they have a problem and want to know if you can solve it. Copy that leads with the customer's problem consistently outperforms copy that starts with "We were founded in..."

Fix: Read through your homepage and count how many times you use "we" vs "you". If "we" wins, rewrite from the customer's perspective.

Quick wins first: You don't have to fix all of this at once. Start with the clearest call to action and the hero headline — those two changes alone often make a noticeable difference to enquiry rates within a few weeks.