Your website gets visitors and no enquiries. Here is where they go.

A small business site that takes traffic and returns nothing is not a mystery. It is one of six things, and you can usually find out which in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

What follows is the order to check them in, which is not the order most people check them in. Almost everybody starts with how the site looks. Nobody has ever chosen a plumber on the strength of a colour scheme.

1. The page takes too long to become useful

Not "load" — become useful. A visitor on a phone, on mobile data, standing outside a job, gives your site about three seconds before deciding it is broken. If the first thing that appears is a blank screen, a spinner, or a giant image that has not arrived yet, they are gone before your copy has had a turn.

This is measurable rather than arguable: how long the server took to answer, and how much has to be downloaded before anything readable appears.

2. The first screen does not answer the only two questions

What do you do, and who is it for. A stranger decides in about five seconds whether they are in the right place, and "Welcome to our website" answers neither question. Nor does a slogan.

The test is brutal and useful: show the top of your homepage to somebody who does not know your business, for five seconds, then ask them what you sell and whether it is for them. Most owners are surprised.

3. The contact route asks for too much, or looks unsafe

Every extra field on a form costs you enquiries. A form asking for a company name, a budget range and how they heard about you, from somebody who wanted to ask whether you cover their postcode, is a form that gets abandoned.

And a site without HTTPS now shows a browser warning. However good the rest of it is, a warning about safety appearing above your contact form is not something the copy can recover from.

4. Your phone number is a picture

More sites than you would think put the phone number inside an image or a graphic header, which means it is not a link on a phone, cannot be copied, and does not exist as far as any search engine is concerned. The same goes for an address that only appears in a footer graphic.

5. There is no evidence anybody has ever used you

Not testimonials you wrote. Reviews with names, work with photographs, a number of years, a named town. Trust is the whole transaction for a local business, and a site with no evidence asks a stranger to go first.

6. Search engines cannot read the page

If the title tag is missing or says "Home", if the page renders entirely in JavaScript, if there is no structured data describing what the business is and where — then the page can be beautiful and still be invisible. That is a different problem from the five above, and it is covered properly in why your business does not show up on Google.

Which one is yours

The honest answer is that guessing is expensive. Five of the six are measurable directly from the page: the speed, the title, the HTTPS, whether the phone number is text, whether the structured data exists.

We built a free audit that reads your actual page and tells you which of these it can see, in about fifteen seconds, with no account. It is the same engine our paying customers use; it is on the outside of the login because arguing that we could help you is worth less than showing you three true things about your own site.

Then what

Fix one thing. Measure. Fix the next. That is unglamorous and it is how it actually goes.

If you want to know what the free tools check versus what a proper audit sees, that is in here. If the problem turns out to be that nobody is arriving in the first place, start with why your business does not show up on Google and, increasingly, how AI assistants decide which business to name.

And if the honest constraint is that there is no money for any of this, that is a solvable problem too — and worth reading before what an agency would charge you.