Your Website Gets Visits but No Calls? Five Things to Check

You can see people are landing on your website. Maybe your web person told you, or your analytics show it. But the phone isn't ringing any more than it did before, and the contact form is quiet.

That gap between "people visit" and "people get in touch" is one of the most common problems I see with small-business websites, and it's rarely about the design. It's usually one of five things. Here's how to check each one yourself.

1. Can someone tell what you do, and where, in five seconds?

Open your homepage on your phone and look only at what's on the screen before you scroll. Ask yourself: does it say what you do, in plain words, and where you do it?

A lot of sites open with a slogan, a stock photo, or "Welcome to our website." None of those tell a stranger they're in the right place. If someone has to scroll or guess, many won't bother.

The fix: put a plain sentence at the top, something like "Plumbing repairs and water heater installs in Tulsa and the surrounding towns." Not clever, just clear.

2. Is there one obvious next step?

Count the buttons and links on your homepage before you scroll. If there are six different things to click, such as "Learn more," "Our story," "Services," "Gallery," "Contact" and "Get a quote," the visitor has to decide, and deciding is where people leave.

The fix: pick the one thing you most want a visitor to do, like call, book or ask for a quote. Make it the biggest button on the page and repeat that same button further down. Everything else can live in the menu.

3. Can someone call you with one tap?

On a phone, your number should be a link: tap it, and the phone offers to call. You'd be surprised how often it's just text, or an image of a number, or hidden at the bottom of a contact page.

Test it: open your site on your phone and try to call yourself. If it takes more than one tap from the top of the homepage, that's a problem worth fixing today.

4. Does your contact form actually reach you?

This is the one that costs the most, because nobody notices. A form can look perfect and send its messages to an old email address, a spam folder, or nowhere at all. The visitor thinks they've contacted you, and you never hear about it.

Test it: fill in your own form with a real message, as if you were a customer. Then check:

• Did the message arrive?
• How long did it take?
• Did it land in your inbox or in spam?
• Did the person filling it in get any reply or confirmation?

Do this once a month. Forms break quietly when an email password changes or a plugin updates.

5. Does it load quickly on a phone, on mobile data?

Your site probably loads fine on your office Wi-Fi. Your customers might be in a parking lot on one bar of signal. If the page takes a long time to show anything, some of them give up before they ever see your number.

Test it: turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and load your site on mobile data. If you're staring at a blank screen for more than a few seconds, ask your web person about image sizes and anything that loads before the page does.

What to do with what you find

Go through all five with your phone in your hand. Most businesses find at least one. Often it's number 4, and it's been going on for months.

None of these fixes need a new website. They need someone to look at the site the way a customer does, then make a few specific changes.

If you'd rather have someone go through it with you, that's part of what we look at in a free growth assessment: your website, your Google listing, and what happens after someone gets in touch.