If visitors are arriving and nothing is coming back, the problem usually isn’t traffic and it isn’t your design. It’s that someone decided to contact you and physically couldn’t. Here are the six places that happens, starting with the one that costs the most.
Scan your site free → Or book a callEvery one of these is something we have found on a real site, including our own. They are listed by what they cost, not by how hard they are to fix — most take minutes.
The most expensive bug there is, because it only catches people at the exact moment they were ready to call you. Template sites ship with placeholder phone links, and the number on screen can be completely correct while the link underneath it is not.
On one Long Island site the header displayed the real number and dialled a template placeholder on every page. On the same site, the main button on the Contact page dialled a nine-digit number — one short — while every other page was fine.
Test: on your own phone, tap it. Read the dialler, not the page.
Site builders let you hide elements on phones. A contact form can render perfectly on a laptop and be entirely missing on a phone, and you will never see it because you check your own site on a computer.
Most local customers are on a phone. If the form is desktop-only, it is effectively not there.
This is the quietest one, and we are the cautionary tale. Every contact form on our own website was silently failing and we didn’t know. The form submitted. It showed a thank-you. The message reached nobody.
Uptime tools don’t catch this, because the page is up — they check the door, not the mailbox. The only reliable test is to fill in your own form like a stranger and confirm the email actually lands.
Do it now, then put a reminder in your phone for a month from today. Forms break silently when a plan lapses, a quota fills, or an address changes.
If someone has to hunt for how to reach you, a percentage of them simply won’t. The number belongs in the header, on every page, tappable.
Not on your office wifi on a laptop — on cellular, on an ordinary phone. A few seconds of blank screen and a meaningful share of visitors are gone before your site has drawn anything.
Worth adding: slow is not always the culprit people assume. We nearly published a claim that a client’s remaining problems were caused by a slow platform, then measured it properly at 1.65 seconds and had to rewrite the claim. Measure before you blame.
A site can be fast, working and clear and still give nobody a reason to act now. Availability, a season, a date that fills up, what happens next after they call — a sentence of that does more than another page of services.
One Long Island business, scored on the same rubric before and after. The site looked good at the start and looks much the same now — almost every point came from the plumbing, not the design.
The single biggest item in the entire audit was a link that displayed one number and dialled another.
Measured identically before and after, so the difference is real rather than a number that felt about right.
We told the owner plainly not to buy a rebuild. The site was never the problem.
Paying to send more people to a site that leaks is the most expensive mistake a local business makes. Fix the bucket, then turn on the tap.
Usually because someone decided to contact you and could not. The common causes are a phone link that displays one number and dials another, a contact form that is hidden on mobile, and a form that submits successfully but delivers to nobody. All three are invisible to the owner, because owners check their own site on a computer and already know their own phone number.
Fill it in yourself like a stranger and confirm the email arrives. Uptime monitors will not catch a broken form, because the page is still up — they check the door, not the mailbox. Every contact form on our own website was silently failing and we did not know until we tested it.
Website templates ship with placeholder phone links, and the displayed number and the dialled number are two different things. Test it by tapping the number on a real phone and reading what appears on the dialler rather than looking at the page.
Fix the leaks first. Paying to send more people to a site where the phone link does not dial and the mobile form is missing is the most expensive mistake a local business can make.
It can, but it is blamed more often than it deserves. Measure before you act — we nearly published a claim that a client's problems came from a slow platform, then measured it at 1.65 seconds and had to rewrite it.
On one Long Island business, scored on the same rubric before and after, fixing the plumbing moved the site from 46 to 88 out of 100 in about three weeks, with no pages redesigned. The single largest item was the phone link.
The free scan checks the things on this page the way a customer’s phone would. No signup, and the first problem shows immediately.
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