Why your website
isn't converting.

First, check it is a conversion problem

Three things produce the same symptom, and only one of them is the website.

1. The conversions are happening and not being recorded. This is more common than it should be. Forms that redirect without firing an event, phone calls that nobody tracks, enquiries arriving by direct message. If your tracking has not been tested since the site was built, test it before you redesign anything.
2. The traffic is the wrong traffic. Visitors arriving on a search that your page does not answer will leave, and no amount of page improvement will change that. Look at which pages the traffic lands on and what people searched to get there.
3. The page genuinely is not converting. Only once the first two are ruled out is this the thing to work on.

Running a redesign to fix a tracking fault is an expensive way to learn nothing.

The three questions every visitor asks

A first time visitor gives a page a few seconds before deciding whether to keep reading. In those seconds they are resolving three things, in this order.

What is this? Not your tagline. The actual thing you do. A surprising number of homepages describe a feeling rather than a service, and the visitor has to scroll to find out what is being sold.

Is it for me? People are looking for evidence that you work with businesses like theirs, in their place, at their size. Vagueness here reads as "not for me" by default, because specific is the thing that signals competence.

What happens if I get in touch? The reason people do not fill in forms is rarely the form. It is not knowing what follows it. Will you call? Will you email a quote? Will I be added to a mailing list and chased for a month? Saying plainly what happens next removes more friction than any design change.

The fold is a promise, not a slogan

The top of the page has one job: make the next scroll feel worth it. That requires a sentence that would be false if a competitor put it on their site. "Quality service you can trust" is true of everyone, which is why it persuades nobody.

A useful test: cover your logo and show the top of your homepage to someone outside your business. If they cannot tell you what you sell and who it is for, the page has not started yet.

The price question

Hiding prices is a choice with a cost. It filters out people who cannot afford you, which is the stated reason for doing it, but it also filters out people who can and simply refuse to begin a sales conversation to find out a number.

You do not have to publish a full price list. You do have to let someone work out whether they are in the right place: a starting figure, a typical range, or a worked example of what a project costs. Businesses that publish something are competing on a different basis than businesses that publish nothing, and in a market where almost nobody publishes, it is a genuine differentiator.

Friction in the form

Every field is a small tax. The question is whether each field earns its cost.

• Ask for what you need to reply, not what you would like to know eventually.
• A phone number field marked required will lose you people who do not want to be called. Decide whether that is a filter you want or a leak you did not notice.
• Dropdowns with twelve options are a decision you have handed to someone who does not have the context to make it.
• If the form is the only route in, add another: an email address, a phone number, a booking link. Different people convert differently.

Proof, and what counts as it

Proof is anything that makes the claim harder to doubt. A testimonial is the weakest form, because everyone has them and nobody believes them in isolation. Stronger proof is specific: the actual work, named, with what the situation was and what was done about it. Logos of real clients. A number you can stand behind.

If you genuinely do not have proof yet, do not manufacture it. Invented results are both the fastest way to lose a client who checks, and unnecessary, because showing your thinking is itself a form of proof. A clear explanation of how you would approach the problem demonstrates competence to someone evaluating you.

Speed and the phone

Most of your visitors are on a phone, on mobile data, possibly standing outside. A page that takes six seconds to become useful has lost a share of them before the content matters.

The usual culprits are large uncompressed images, a page builder loading scripts it does not need, and fonts that block rendering. These are unglamorous fixes and they often move the number more than a redesign does.

The order to fix things in

1. Confirm the tracking is telling the truth.
2. Make the top of the page say what you do and who it is for.
3. Say what happens after someone contacts you.
4. Give a sense of price.
5. Cut every form field that does not earn its place.
6. Fix load speed on mobile.
7. Add real proof as you earn it.
8. Only then consider a redesign.

The order matters. Most of this list is copy and clarity, not design, which is why so many redesigns change how a site looks and not what it does.