5 Signs Your Website Is Costing You Customers Right Now

By Kevin Jordan

Your Website Is a First Impression You Are Not There to Control

When someone finds your business on Google, your website is often the next thing they check.

In the first three seconds, they form an opinion. If that opinion is negative, they leave — and call your competitor.

Here are the five signs your website is working against you.

Sign 1: It Takes More Than 3 Seconds to Load

Page speed is the single most important technical factor in both search rankings and user experience.

If your site takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile phone, you are losing a significant portion of your visitors before they see anything.

Test your site at pagespeed.web.dev. If your mobile score is below 50, you have a serious problem worth fixing immediately.

Sign 2: It Is Not Designed for Mobile

More than 60 percent of local searches happen on mobile devices.

If your website was built more than five years ago without a mobile-first redesign, it almost certainly has this problem.

Signs of a mobile problem: text that is too small to read without zooming, buttons that are too close together to tap accurately, content that extends beyond the screen width.

Sign 3: Your Phone Number Is Hard to Find

A local business website has one primary job: get the visitor to contact you.

If your phone number is not visible on the first screen — without scrolling — on a mobile device, you are making it harder than it needs to be.

Your phone number should be in your header, tappable as a click-to-call link, and repeated in the footer.

Sign 4: There Is No Clear Next Step

What do you want visitors to do when they land on your site?

If the answer is not immediately obvious from the page layout, you have a conversion problem.

Every page should have one clear call to action: "Call us," "Get a free quote," "Book an appointment." Not three options. One.

Sign 5: Google Cannot Find It

A website that Google cannot index is functionally invisible.

Common causes: a "noindex" tag accidentally left from development, missing or incorrect sitemap, or slow load times that prevent Googlebot from fully crawling the site.

Check your site at search.google.com/search-console. If you have coverage errors or your pages are not indexed, this is the first thing to fix.

What to Do Next

If your website has one or more of these problems, the good news is they are all fixable.

The even better news: a fast, mobile-ready, conversion-optimized website for a South Bay small business does not have to cost thousands of dollars.

The GetFound Launch Site is built specifically to fix all five of these problems — for a one-time cost of $350.