01 / The usual diagnosis is wrong
It is rarely the design
When enquiries are flat, the instinct is to redesign. Occasionally that is right. Far more often the site looks fine and fails at one specific point, and a redesign moves that point without removing it.
Work through these five before spending anything.
02 / One
The traffic is the wrong traffic
Check which pages people land on and what they searched for. If your visitors arrive on a blog post about a general topic and you sell a specialist service, they were never going to enquire. Volume is not interest.
This is the most common cause by a distance, and the most commonly misread: the numbers look healthy, so the site gets blamed.
03 / Two
The page does not answer the question they arrived with
Somebody searching for a price wants a price. A page that offers a “bespoke consultative approach” instead has answered a different question, and they leave to find someone who answered theirs.
Take your three most visited pages and write down the question each visitor arrived with. Then check whether the first screen answers it. Usually it does not: it introduces the company instead.
04 / Three
There is no obvious next step
Six things to do is the same as none. Most pages offer a phone number, a form, a brochure, a newsletter, a chat widget and a social link, and hope the visitor picks. They do not pick; they leave.
Decide the one action that page exists to produce, make it the loudest element, and demote everything else. A page with one clear action outperforms a page with six, every time.
05 / Four
The form is asking too much, too early
Every field is a reason to stop. If a first enquiry needs name, company, phone, budget, timeline and how they heard about you, most people will decide it can wait. It cannot wait. They go to the next result.
Ask for what you need to reply. Everything else can be asked in the reply. And test it. Broken forms are more common than anyone believes, and there is no error message on the business’s side, just silence.
06 / Five
Nothing on the page makes you credible
A visitor about to contact a stranger is looking for evidence they are real. Named clients, actual work, a physical address, a person’s face, specifics only someone who does this would know.
Generic reassurance (“trusted by many”, “years of experience”) does nothing, because anyone can write it. One named example does more than a page of adjectives.
07 / Honestly
Sometimes the enquiries arrive and nobody answers them
Before concluding the site is broken, check the inbox, the spam folder, and how long replies actually take. We have investigated “the site is not working” more than once and found enquiries sitting unread, or answered four days later when the customer had already booked someone else.
It is worth ruling out first, because it is free.
Send us the URL and what you sell, and we will tell you which of the five is costing you the most.