Why your website gets no enquiries
A website that looks fine and produces nothing is usually failing at one of nine specific points. They are listed here in the order worth checking — cheapest and most common first, because the first two are free and fix a surprising number of cases.
1. The enquiries are arriving and going to spam
Check this before anything else. It is the single most common cause we find, it costs nothing to check, and businesses have gone months without realising.
Send yourself a test enquiry from your phone, on mobile data, using an address that is not your own domain. Then look in your junk folder. Form notifications sent from a web server frequently fail authentication checks and get filtered silently. While you are there, check the address the form sends to still exists — when someone leaves a business, their mailbox often goes with them, and the form nobody reconfigured keeps posting into the void.
2. Nobody can see your phone number quickly enough
Open your site on your phone. Time how long it takes from tapping the link to being able to tap your phone number. If it is more than about three seconds, or if the number is not in the header, you are losing people who were ready to call.
A tappable tel: link in the header of every page is perhaps twenty minutes of work and it is the highest-return change most small business sites can make.
3. You are not getting any visitors in the first place
Everything below assumes people are arriving. Check that they are: verify the site in Google Search Console (free), and look at the impressions figure. If it is near zero, you do not have a conversion problem, you have a visibility problem, and our guide to getting found on Google is the more useful page.
Quick check: search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk. If your pages do not appear, Google has not indexed them and nothing else matters yet.
4. The site is too slow on a phone
Over half of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds. They do not complain, they go back and tap the next result — which is your competitor. Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score, not the desktop one. Under 50 is costing you real work. Our speed guide covers what to fix and in what order.
5. The homepage does not say what you do, or where
Show your homepage to someone who does not know your business, for five seconds, then take it away and ask what you sell and whether you cover their area. If they cannot answer both, the headline is the problem.
“Quality solutions since 1998” tells a stranger nothing. “Emergency plumbing in Reading, seven days a week” tells them everything. The second one feels blunter than businesses usually want to be about themselves, and it works considerably better.
6. There is no obvious next step
Every page needs one clear action, repeated: call, or fill in the form. Not a navigation bar with eleven equal options and a “Learn more” buried at the bottom. If you gave someone the page and said “do the thing”, they should not have to look for it.
Repeat the action at the end of every page. People decide at different points and the ones who decide at the bottom should not have to scroll back up.
7. The form asks for too much
Every field costs you completions. A contact form needs a name, an email or phone number, and a message. That is it. Company size, budget range, how they heard about you, a required phone number when they would rather email — each one loses a percentage of the people who had already decided to contact you.
Also: make sure the form works. Test it after every change to the site. Broken forms are silent by definition.
8. Nothing on the site makes you look trustworthy
Especially for anything happening in someone’s home or costing more than a few hundred pounds. Stock photographs of people in headsets actively hurt. What helps is specific and unglamorous:
- Photographs of the actual team and actual work.
- Three or four real reviews with real names, not a carousel of anonymous praise.
- Your address, or at least the town you operate from.
- Certifications, insurance, trade body memberships — whatever your industry cares about.
- Prices, or a starting figure. Hiding them reads as expensive.
9. You are attracting the wrong visitors
The rarest cause, and the one that looks most like success. Plenty of traffic, no enquiries, because the traffic is people looking for something you do not sell — often DIY advice, when the business does the job for money.
Check in Search Console which queries bring people in. If they are informational (“how to fix a dripping tap”) and you sell the service, you need commercial pages targeting commercial searches (“emergency plumber Reading”), not more articles.
Do these four, in this order: send yourself a test enquiry and check junk; time how long until you can tap your own phone number on a phone; run PageSpeed Insights on mobile; show your homepage to someone for five seconds and ask what you do. Most sites fail at least one, and the fixes are usually small.
Common questions
How many enquiries should a small business website get?
There is no universal number, because it depends entirely on how many people find you and what you sell. A more useful measure is the conversion rate: of the people who land on your site, somewhere between 1% and 5% making contact is normal for a local service business. If you have 500 visitors a month and zero enquiries, something on this page is broken. If you have 20 visitors a month, the problem is visibility, not the site.
Should I remove my prices to get more enquiries?
Usually the opposite. Hiding prices does generate more enquiries, but a large share of them are from people who were never going to afford you, and you spend real time on those. Publishing a starting figure filters them out before they cost you an hour. The exception is genuinely bespoke work where any number would be misleading — there, publish a worked example instead.
Is a redesign the answer?
Rarely, and it is the most expensive thing to try first. Work through the nine causes above before spending anything: most of them are fixable on the site you already have. A redesign is the right answer when the site is genuinely slow, cannot be edited, or is built on something unmaintainable — not because it looks dated.
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