Website Putting Customers Off? A Ten-Minute Check

If you are worried about your website putting customers off, there is a quick way to find out. You can spend good money getting found on Google, but none of it matters if people leave the moment they land on your site. A page that loads slowly or hides the phone number can lose you the enquiry before you even know someone was looking.

This is a ten-minute checklist you can run yourself, right now, on your own phone. No marketing jargon, no tools to buy. Just five things to look at and what to do if any of them need fixing.

1. Does it load fast enough on a phone?

Pull your phone out, open your website in the browser, and count. If you are waiting noticeably before anything useful appears on screen, some of your potential customers will be doing the same and giving up.

For a clearer picture, open Google PageSpeed Insights on a laptop, type in your web address and hit Analyse. It gives you a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop. According to Lighthouse performance scoring, a green score (90 to 100) means good performance, orange (50 to 89) means there is room to improve, and red (0 to 49) means poor performance. You want green on mobile.

Google uses page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, as part of its ranking systems (Google Search Central). That does not mean a better score guarantees you a higher position, but a poor score is not helping you either.

Common culprits for a slow site are oversized photos straight from a phone camera and outdated website software. A web developer should be able to diagnose the main problems and tell you what is worth fixing.

2. Does it actually work on a mobile screen?

According to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, most time spent online in the UK is on a smartphone. It is risky to judge your site only on desktop. If your site does not work properly on a small screen, a large share of the people finding you will have a poor experience.

Google uses the mobile version of your site's content for indexing and ranking (Google Search Central, 2025). So what your site looks like on a phone matters for search as well as for the person using it.

Open your site on your phone and look for these problems: text so small you have to pinch and zoom, buttons crammed too close together, a menu that will not open, or content spilling off the edge of the screen. If any of those apply, your site needs updating.

3. Can someone actually contact you?

This sounds obvious, but test it. Tap the phone number on your site from your mobile. Does it ring? Is it the right number? Now try the contact form. Fill it in, send it, and see whether the email actually arrives. Broken forms and dead phone links do happen, and you may not spot them until you test them.

If your contact form collects names, phone numbers or email addresses, your privacy information should be easy to find on the site. The ICO sets out what people should be told about how their data is used.

While you are at it, check that your address is on the site and that it matches what is on your Google Business Profile. If a customer sees one address on your website and a different one on Google, that does not inspire confidence.

4. Does your site look trustworthy?

Put yourself in a customer's shoes. They have just searched for a service, clicked through, and now they are deciding in a few seconds whether your business looks legitimate.

The padlock. Look at the address bar in your browser. If there is no padlock or your browser shows a "Not secure" warning, some visitors may be put off. According to Google Chrome Help, the browser flags sites without a secure connection. An SSL certificate is standard now, and many hosting providers include one for free.

Real photos. Stock images of smiling people in headsets do not build confidence. A photo of your actual workplace or your team is more convincing than any amount of polish.

Some proof you exist. Genuine Google reviews embedded or linked from your site help. If you run a limited company, you may be required to display certain details on your website, including your registered company name and number (GOV.UK). Where applicable, accreditation or trade body membership numbers are worth showing too.

Website putting customers off? What to fix first

If your site passed all five checks, that is good. If it failed a couple, those are worth fixing before spending money on advertising or SEO. Sending more traffic to a site that does not work well just means more people having the same poor experience.

Some of these fixes are straightforward enough to do yourself or ask your current web person to handle. Others, like improving page speed or restructuring a site for mobile, may need a developer.

5. Does it tell people what you do and where?

Read your homepage as though you have never heard of your business. Within five seconds, can you tell what service is offered and which area is covered? Many local business websites bury this in a paragraph halfway down the page, or assume everyone already knows.

Your homepage should state, in plain language near the top, what you do and where you do it. "Boiler installation and repairs in Northampton" is far more useful than "Welcome to our website." A visitor who lands on your page and cannot quickly see what you offer is likely to leave. The Google SEO Starter Guide recommends using descriptive page titles and headings that reflect the content of the page, which supports this approach.

If you have run through all five checks and want a hand with the fixes, get in touch with us. We are a new agency, so we will not pretend to have a long track record. What we will do is look at your site honestly and tell you what is worth spending money on and what is not.