Your website has one main job: turning the right visitors into enquiries. Plenty of sites look great and still fail at it, quietly, every day. People land, scroll, hesitate and leave, and you never hear about it.
The good news is that the most common problems are easy to spot once you know where to look. Grab your phone, open your own website, and work through these ten checks. Most take a minute or two each.
1. Can a visitor tell what you do in five seconds?
Read your homepage headline as if you’d never heard of the business. Does it say what you do, who it’s for and where? “Excellence in every detail” says nothing. “Family dental care in Parramatta, open six days” says everything a visitor needs to keep reading.
2. Is the next step obvious?
Every page should have one clear call to action: book, call, or get a quote. Use the same wording throughout, put it near the top, and repeat it after the main content. If a visitor has to think about how to contact you, some won’t.
3. Does it load fast on a phone?
Most local searches happen on mobile, often on patchy 4G. Run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. As a rule of thumb, the main content should appear in under two and a half seconds. Oversized images and too many plugins are the usual culprits.
4. Does it actually work on a phone?
Fast isn’t enough. Check that text is readable without zooming, buttons are easy to tap with a thumb, nothing spills off the side of the screen, and pop-ups don’t cover the content you came for.
5. Is your phone number tap-to-call?
Tap your phone number on your phone. If it doesn’t start a call, you’re asking customers to memorise or copy it. Put it in the header on mobile, and make sure it matches the number on your Google Business Profile.
6. Are your forms short?
Every field you add costs you enquiries. For a first contact, name, phone or email and a short message is usually enough. You can ask for the details later. Test the form yourself: does the confirmation look right, and does the enquiry actually arrive?
7. Is there proof that you’re good?
Visitors want reassurance before they reach out. Show real reviews with names, photos of your actual work and team, accreditations and licences, and how long you’ve been in business. Stock photos of smiling strangers do the opposite.
8. Can people find you on Google?
Search for your main service and suburb, for example “electrician Geelong”. Do you appear in the map results and the organic listings? Each core service should have its own page with a clear title, and your business name, address and phone number should match everywhere they appear online.
9. Is it accessible to everyone?
Around one in five Australians lives with disability. Good accessibility, such as readable contrast, descriptive image text, forms that work with a keyboard and clear headings, makes the site easier for every visitor and is increasingly expected. The international WCAG 2.2 guidelines are the standard to aim for.
10. Do you know what’s working?
If you can’t see how many people visit, where they come from and how many enquire, you’re guessing. Set up analytics and track form submissions and phone clicks as goals. Then you can tell which pages, ads and channels actually bring in customers.
How did you go?
If you ticked all ten, your website is in better shape than most. If a few failed, start with the ones closest to the enquiry: the call to action, the phone number, the form and mobile speed. Those fixes tend to pay off the quickest.
And remember that the website is only half the journey. Once someone does enquire, a fast reply matters just as much. We covered that in Speed to Lead.
If you’d rather have a team look at it for you, VCPility designs and builds websites engineered for speed, search and enquiries, then measures the results after launch. Explore our web services or ask us for a review of your site.
