Guides

How to tell if your website is costing you work

By Ashton Foran, director. Published 29th July 2026. Updated 6th September 2026.

A website can look perfectly fine and still be losing you jobs every week. Five checks tell you: how long it takes to load on your phone, whether a search for your trade and your town finds you, whether the contact form sends, whether the phone number dials with one tap, and whether the year on it is this year. You can do all five without paying anyone.

All five take about ten minutes on your phone.

1. Time it

Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, not on the wifi. Count how long until you can read something.

Over three seconds and you are losing people. They are not waiting. They are going back to the search results and ringing whoever loads first.

2. Search for yourself

Type your trade and your town into Google. Not your business name, that always works.

If you are not on the first page, ask yourself what somebody who has never heard of you would find instead. That is your competition, and right now they are getting the call.

3. Send yourself a message

Fill in your own contact form and send it. Then go and check the inbox it is supposed to land in.

This one catches people out constantly. Forms break quietly. They keep saying thanks for your message and keep sending it nowhere, and every person who used it thinks you ignored them.

4. Try to ring yourself

On your phone, find your own number on your own website and tap it.

If it does not dial, or you had to scroll to find it, fix that before anything else. Most of the people on your site are trying to contact you, not read about you.

5. Check the year

Look at the footer, the last blog post, the newest photo.

If it says 2019, that is what a customer sees. It reads exactly like a dark shop window.

What to do with the answers

If everything passed, your site is doing its job and you do not need us. At least not for your current website. If you are thinking about a booking system, automations, or anything else that would take work off your plate, tell us what you have in mind and we will tell you how we can help.

If two or three failed, that is where the lost work is going. You can fix most of it yourself. Get the phone number visible, test the form, put up recent photos.

If it is slow and invisible, it needs a rebuild rather than a fix.

Or we'll do the checking

Send us your domain and we will run through all five and tell you what we find. It costs nothing, and you can do what you like with the answer.

Get your free site check