Turning visitors into customers

Getting found is only half of it. Somebody arrives, spends a few seconds working out whether you look real, and then either finds the way to contact you or quietly gives up and tries the next business on the list.

Almost none of that is about how the site looks.

The visitor who reaches your website is already interested. They did not land there by accident. So the question is never whether the design is attractive, it is whether anything is standing between a person who wants to talk to you and the act of talking to you. Usually something is, and usually it is dull: a phone number that cannot be tapped, a form with ten fields, a menu that will not open on a thumb, a homepage that opens with a slogan instead of saying what you do.

These are the cheapest problems in business to fix and the most expensive to leave. Nobody complains about them. A customer who cannot work out how to contact you does not send you a message explaining that, they just go, and you never learn that they were there. The loss is invisible, which is exactly why it survives for years.

Most of it comes down to one habit: the site gets designed, reviewed and approved on a big screen by the two or three people who will never look at it any other way, while nearly everyone who matters sees it on a phone. The version everybody sees is the version nobody checks.

The posts here go through the specific failures, one at a time, with the fix for each. If you want a starting point, sit down with your own site on your own phone and try to contact yourself. Time it. Most business owners have never once done it, and it is the most useful ten minutes available to you.