7 website mistakes that kill conversions
None of these look like problems in a design review. All of them show up in the analytics as visitors who arrived, looked, and left without contacting anyone.
A site can be beautiful, fast, and technically flawless while quietly failing at the only job it has. These are the seven issues we find most often, roughly in order of how much they cost.
1. The homepage does not say what you do
Visitors decide in seconds whether they are in the right place. If your hero says "Innovative solutions for the modern enterprise", they cannot tell — and they leave.
Say the plain thing: what you do, who for, what happens next. Specific beats clever every time.
2. One call to action, at the very end
People arrive ready to act at wildly different points. If the only contact route is a form at the bottom of a long page, you are filtering for patience rather than intent.
Give people a way to act at every scroll depth, and vary the commitment: "book a call" for the ready, "see pricing" for the researching, "read a case study" for the curious.
3. Asking for everything up front
Every extra field costs completions. Phone number, company size, budget range, "how did you hear about us" — each one is a reason to close the tab.
Ask for the minimum that lets you reply. You can qualify in the conversation; you cannot qualify someone who never wrote.
4. No pricing signal at all
"Contact us for pricing" makes serious buyers assume you are expensive and casual browsers assume it is a sales trap. Both leave.
You do not need a price list. A range, a starting point, or a worked example is enough — we publish ours for people to self-select — which saves your sales time as much as it saves theirs.
5. Proof that proves nothing
Six client logos with no context are wallpaper. "Great to work with" attributed to "J.S." is worse than nothing — it reads as invented.
Real proof has a name, a company, a specific problem, and ideally a number. One concrete case study outperforms a wall of logos.
6. Mobile treated as the smaller version
Most traffic is mobile, and if you are weighing a dedicated app instead, start here. Yet the mobile experience is routinely the desktop design squeezed down: tap targets too small, forms that fight the keyboard, a sticky header eating a third of the screen, a cookie banner covering the CTA.
Open your own site on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to contact yourself. Most teams find something in the first thirty seconds.
7. Speed nobody measured
A slow site loses visitors before it can convince them. Not "slow on a 3-year-old Android over 4G" slow — your slow, measured on real visitors.
Field data is in Search Console, and the fixes that actually work are usually four changes, not forty. If your Largest Contentful Paint is over 2.5 seconds for most users, you are paying for traffic that never sees the page.
How to find yours
Do not guess. In one afternoon:
- Watch five session recordings of visitors who did not convert.
- Open your site on your phone and complete your own contact form.
- Check field Core Web Vitals in Search Console.
- Ask someone outside your industry what your homepage says you do.
That last one is free and consistently the most uncomfortable.
If you would rather have someone else do it, we run conversion audits that come back with a prioritised list and an estimate of what each fix is worth.
