Your website is not getting leads. It is usually one of five things

“We get visitors but nobody contacts us.” That sentence comes with a specific kind of frustration, because the hard part, being found, has already happened. The good news is the causes are few and they are all fixable. We check them in this order.

1. The form does not work

Start here, seriously. A surprising share of “no leads” sites have a contact form that fails silently. The visitor sees “Thank you”, the message never arrives, because the site’s email is being rejected as spam, the form plugin broke in an update, or the notification goes to an address nobody reads. Send yourself a test from your phone, not from the office. If nothing arrives within a minute, this was the whole problem.

2. Visitors cannot tell what you do

Open your homepage and cover the logo. In five seconds, could a stranger say what you offer, for whom, and what to do next? Most sites fail this. The headline is a slogan, the first screen is a photo, the services are somewhere below. People who cannot answer those three questions leave, and they leave fast. The fix is words, not design: a headline that says what you do, a line that says who it is for, and one clear next step.

3. There is no obvious next step

A site can explain itself well and still not ask for anything. No button above the fold, a contact page buried in a menu, a phone number in a footer image nobody can tap. Every page should have one thing you want the visitor to do, visible without scrolling, repeated at the end. On a phone, the number should be tappable and the form should be short: name, email, what they need. Every extra field costs you enquiries.

4. The wrong people are arriving

Look at which search terms bring visitors in Search Console. If a page about “kitchen design” ranks for “kitchen design software” you will get a lot of visitors and no leads, because they wanted software. This is common after years of blog posts written for traffic rather than customers. The fix is to make the pages that sell rank for the terms buyers use, and stop worrying about the rest.

5. Nothing makes them trust you

Someone ready to enquire looks for reasons not to. No real photos, no names, no address, no reviews, no examples of work, a copyright year from three years ago, a “Not secure” label in the browser. Each one is a small no. Real photos of real people and real work, a physical address, a handful of genuine reviews, and a site that looks looked-after, remove most of them.

How to find your one

Analytics answers it. If people leave the homepage in under ten seconds, it is number two. If they read the services pages and leave, it is three or five. If the traffic is large and the pages they land on are blog posts, it is four. If you cannot see any of this, the fix starts with installing analytics, which is an hour.

We rebuild sites for exactly this reason more than any other, and in most cases the design changes less than the owner expects. The words, the next step, and the form are the job. Run the scanner first if you like: it will at least tell you whether the “Not secure” label and the old copyright date are part of the problem.