Almost every business that comes to us opens the same way: "the site looks fine, but nothing comes through it." They are usually right on both counts, and the gap between those two facts is where the money goes.

It is almost never the design

When a site brings in nothing, the cause is nearly always one of three things, and design is rarely on the list.

Nobody can find it. If you are not on the first page for the phrase your customers actually type, the site may as well not exist. Search visibility has to be built into the structure of the site from day one. It is not a service you buy afterwards to rescue a site that was built without it.

It loads too slowly. Half your visitors leave before a slow page finishes loading, and none of them appear in any report you read. They are invisible losses. On ordinary mobile data — which is how most of your customers arrive — a heavy site quietly turns away more people than a bad one does.

It never asks for the sale. This is the most common problem we are called in to fix. Beautiful pages, clear photography, well-written copy, and no obvious next step anywhere on the screen.

How to tell which one is yours

Open your analytics and answer three questions in order.

1. How many people arrive from search each month? If the answer is single digits, your problem is visibility and nothing else matters until it is fixed.
2. What is your bounce rate on mobile? Above 70% and you are almost certainly losing people to load time.
3. Of the people who reach your contact page, how many submit? Below 5% and the page is not asking properly.

Fix them in that order. There is no point improving a conversion rate on a page that forty people a month ever see.