Your traffic report looks busy. Your inbox doesn't.
People are finding your site, having a look around, and leaving without a word. Nobody emails to explain why. They just go.
Your problem has a name, and the name is UX. Sounds pricey, doesn't it?
It's short for user experience. Which is a long way of saying "what your website is actually like to use", so no, we're not impressed either!
Here's what really drives people off. Then a check you can run on your own site this afternoon, for nothing.
The 6 things that quietly send your visitors away
None of these look like problems from where you're sitting. That's exactly why they survive for years.
Your site is slow on a phone
Not slow on your laptop, on office fibre, with half your site already saved on the machine from the last 40 times you looked at it. Slow on a 3-year-old Android, on mobile data, in a queue at the shops.
Google publishes a target for this and it's worth knowing. They call it Largest Contentful Paint, which only means the moment the biggest thing on your screen finally turns up. Their "good" mark is 2.5 seconds or less.
Odds are you've never once loaded your own site cold, on a phone, on data.
You've hidden your prices
"Contact us for a quote" feels safe. It reads as expensive.
A service page with no numbers on it anywhere is a restaurant with no menu. You have to ask the waiter what everything costs, out loud, in front of your date, before you've even sat down!
Why does this one matter more than the rest of the list? Because price is the question most visitors arrive with, and the one almost none of them will email you to ask.
You don't need to publish a rate card. A range, a starting-from figure, or an honest "most projects land between this and that" is enough to keep someone on the page.
Nobody can tell what you do in 5 seconds
Read your own first line as though you'd never heard of your business. "Solutions that grow with you" tells a stranger absolutely nothing.
Say what you do, who you do it for, and where you are. "We service and repair 4x4s in Pinetown" beats every clever tagline ever written.
Your phone number isn't where a thumb expects it
On a phone your number belongs at the top, and it needs to dial when somebody taps it. A number sitting inside an image can't be tapped, and nobody is copying it out by hand.
Same goes for WhatsApp. Your customers live on it, so give them a button that opens a chat instead of an address they have to save first.
Your contact form asks 11 questions
Every extra box is another reason to give up. A name, one way to reach your visitor, and a message. That's a form.
Company size, budget bracket, how they heard about you, and one of those puzzles asking you to find all 9 bicycles... that's a survey. You're asking a stranger to sit an exam before you've given them anything.
Your menu doesn't open on a phone
The 3 little lines in the corner that are meant to open your menu. Tap them on an older phone and sometimes nothing happens at all.
Same fault as a table running off the side of the screen, or a popup with its close button just past the edge. Your site got signed off on 1 machine, at 1 screen size, by people who already knew where everything lived.
A car that only starts on your own driveway isn't a working car. Same rule here!
On mobile data, your heavy home page is a cost your visitor pays
Most of your customers arrive on a phone and plenty of them are on prepaid data. Every oversized photo on your home page spends a bit of their airtime for them.
A picture that looks small on your phone isn't necessarily a small file. Plenty of sites hand the phone the full-size version and let it shrink on arrival. Your visitor still pays for every megabyte of it.
Size your pictures properly and most people won't spot the difference. The check below tells you whether this is your problem or somebody else's.
And if you're buying ads while any of this is true, you're paying full price to send people to a page that turns them away. More budget won't fix that for you. That's flogging a dead horse!
Check your own site this afternoon, for free
You don't need us for this bit, and you don't need a single thing you have to pay for. You need your phone, 20 minutes, and one other person for about 10 seconds of it.
- Switch your wifi off and open your site in a private tab, on mobile data. That's the only way to see what a stranger sees.
- Count the seconds out loud while it loads. Google's mark is 2.5, so if you reach 3 you've found something.
- Tap your menu open, then open every link in it. Close any popup that jumps up at you.
- Hand your phone to a neighbour, your teenager, whoever's nearest. Give them 5 seconds, then ask them what you sell.
- Start on your home page and count the taps until a real price appears. More than 2 and your price is hidden.
- Tap your phone number. If it doesn't dial, it isn't linked up.
- Fill in your own contact form and send it. Then go and check your inbox, and your spam folder!
- Paste your home page address into pagespeed.web.dev, choose Mobile, and ignore the score. Scroll to the line that says "Improve image delivery" and read what it found.
Do that once and you'll have your own list, in your own words. It'll be shorter than you fear!
We're the people who get genuinely excited about a phone number that dials when you tap it. That is not a personality, and we know exactly how it sounds!
You probably don't need a redesign. You need 4 things fixed.
This is the bit where we talk ourselves out of the bigger invoice, so read it slowly.
Most of the sites we're called about don't need rebuilding. They need 4 things sorted properly, and then they need leaving alone.
- Make it work on a phone. Size your images, check the menu actually opens, then load the whole thing again on mobile data.
- Say what you do in the first line. Plain words, your real service, your real town. Clever can wait its turn.
- Put a number on the page. A price, a range, a starting-from. Any of them beats "contact us for a quote".
- Make reaching you a single tap. A number that dials, a WhatsApp button, and a form with 3 fields on it.
That's your list. Genuinely, that's it.
Then look at the shape of what's wrong. If it's spread across every page and every device, rather than sitting in 4 places you can point at, that's where having someone go through the whole thing earns its keep. Not a minute before!
If that's genuinely you, read what a website costs in South Africa first. Walk in knowing the numbers.
Design and layout come after all of this, not instead of it. Your beautiful home page, if it crawls on a phone and hides the price, is still a shut door. Just a nicer looking one!
What to do with what you find
Fix the free ones yourself, today. The picture sizes, the menu, the tappable number, the 8 fields you can delete off your form.
Then price up what's left over. If it's a short list of specific things, you've got a job for somebody, not a rebuild.
None of this costs you an arm and a leg to discover. It costs 20 minutes and a bit of honesty about your own home page.
So go and run the phone test tonight, before you spend another cent on traffic. Then WhatsApp us what you found, or have a chat with us if the list came out long.
Bring the ugly screenshots. We've seen worse!
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