Your website looks lovely and brings in nothing. Here's why.

A visitor decides whether to stay before they finish your headline. If the first line is a mission statement rather than a plain description of what you sell and who for, they leave. Say the boring thing clearly, then be clever underneath it. "Premium bespoke solutions for forward-thinking organisations" tells nobody anything. "We fix blocked drains in Preston, same day" tells them exactly what they need to hear and whether they are in the right place. Your headline is not the place to be coy or clever; it is the place to be useful. Get the plain version right first, then layer the personality on top. The personality is the seasoning, not the meal.

One obvious action per page beats six competing buttons. If somebody has to hunt for how to contact you, they will find a competitor who made it easy instead. Every page should answer one question and offer one next move. On a service page, the move is "get a quote". On a blog post, it is "read another" or "talk to us about this". When you give people four equally weighted options, they choose none of them. This is not a theory; it is how attention actually works. Make the main action big, obvious and repeated. Put a smaller set of secondary choices in the footer for the people who want to wander.

Huge uncompressed images and a pile of tracking scripts add seconds. On a phone, on a normal connection, in a car park, that is where the sale is lost. Test it there, not on your fibre broadband. A hero image that is four megabytes might look crisp on your monitor, but it is costing you visitors who never see the second screen. Compress your images, lazy-load the ones below the fold and question every script you have pasted in. If a tool does not earn its weight in enquiries, cut it. Speed is a feature, not a technical detail, and Google treats it as one.

Reviews, real photographs, results and named clients do more work than another paragraph about your passion for quality. Put the proof next to the ask. A three-line testimonial with a real name and a real business outperforms a polished block of brand copy every time. People are sceptical by default, and rightly so; they have been burned before. Show them the work, show them the numbers, show them the faces. A photo of a finished job is worth more than a stock image of a smiling handshake. If you have a case study, link to it. If you have a review, quote it. Proof is the part that closes the gap between interest and trust.

If you cannot see which pages bring in enquiries, every change is a coin flip. Set up basic analytics, watch it for a month, then fix the worst page first. You do not need a dashboard with forty charts; you need to know where people arrive, where they leave and which page they were on when they got in touch. Once you know that, the next move is obvious. Most owners who tell me their website does not work have never looked at the numbers once, so they are guessing. Guessing is expensive. A free analytics setup and five minutes a week is enough to stop the waste.

A website is not a printed brochure; it is a living thing. The one that launched three years ago has slowly rotted. Links break, contact details drift, a plugin updates and quietly breaks a form, and nobody notices because nobody checks. Set a calendar reminder to open your own site on a phone every month and click through it like a customer would. Broken trust is built in tiny moments like that. If your own contact form has been throwing errors for a fortnight, you have been turning away work and blaming the market. A ten-minute monthly check catches it.

Read your homepage out loud and count how many sentences start with "we". Then rewrite them to start with "you". The visitor is not on your site to learn about your journey; they are there to solve their problem. Tell them how you solve it, in their words, and they will stay. This is the single cheapest rewrite you can do, and it is the one most owners skip because it feels too simple. Simple is the point.

Autoplaying background video is the clearest signal that a site was built for the owner and not the visitor. It eats bandwidth, it startles people on a quiet train and it rarely says anything a still image could not say better. If a video genuinely helps, make it a clear play button so the visitor chooses. Most hero videos are vanity; they look impressive in the boardroom and cost you customers in the wild. Replace the video with one strong photograph and a clear line of copy, and the page does more work for less effort.

More than half your visitors are on a phone, yet most sites are designed on a widescreen monitor and squeezed onto mobile as a courtesy. Buttons that are easy to tap on a laptop become tiny on a phone. Text that breathes on desktop gets cramped. Menus that show everything at once become an accordion nobody opens. Open your own site on a phone, in a car, with one thumb, and try to get in touch. If it is hard for you, it is impossible for your customers. Fix mobile first, then let desktop be the polished version. The order matters.