A business comes to us with the same sentence surprisingly often: “We get traffic, it just does not turn into anything.” The instinct is to buy more traffic. Almost always the cheaper move is to fix what the existing visitors meet.
Doubling a conversion rate from 1% to 2% is the same result as doubling your ad spend, and it does not recur monthly. Here is what we look at, in order.
More traffic is the most expensive way to fix a conversion problem. You pay for it again every month, and it does nothing about the reason people were leaving.
1. The page does not say what you do in the first screen
A visitor decides whether they are in the right place in a few seconds. If your opening headline is a slogan — “Empowering ambition”, “Your partner in growth” — they have learned nothing and have to work out what you sell from context.
Say the thing. “Seattle web design for businesses that need the site to earn” tells someone what you do, where, and for whom, before they scroll. It is less exciting to write and considerably more effective.
2. There is no obvious next step
Count the calls to action on your homepage. If the answer is more than three distinct ones — book a call, download a guide, subscribe, request a quote, chat — you have asked the visitor to make a decision about how to decide, which is harder than the decision itself.
- One primary action per page, repeated, in the same words.
- One secondary action for people not ready yet.
- Nothing else competing visually with either.
3. The form asks for too much
Every field you add costs you submissions. We have never seen the reverse. The question to ask of each one is not “would this be useful?” but “would I rather have this field or the enquiries it will cost me?”
Number of required fields · lower is better
| Name, email, message | 3what we recommend |
|---|---|
| + phone (required) | 4noticeably fewer |
| + company, budget | 6a qualification form |
| + how did you hear, timeline | 8an application form |
Budget and timeline fields are worth adding only if you would genuinely decline the enquiries that refuse to answer them. Most businesses would not, so they are paying for qualification they do not act on.
4. Nothing on the page is believable
“Trusted by hundreds of happy clients” is a sentence anyone can type. A named review from a real company, dated, with the project it refers to, is evidence. The second is harder to collect and worth more than any amount of the first.
- Use names and companies, not “J.S., CEO”.
- Publish the number you actually have. Seven real reviews beats “hundreds”.
- Show work. A case study with the brief, the constraint and the outcome does more than a logo wall.
5. The price is a mystery
Hiding pricing does not qualify leads — it filters out the ones who were not willing to spend a phone call finding out whether you are in their range, which includes plenty of people who would have bought.
You do not have to publish a fixed price. A range, a starting figure, or a worked example of what a typical project costs removes the main reason people leave a services site. We publish ours on the pricing page and wrote about what actually moves a quote in what moves a website quote.
6. It is slow, and slow reads as untrustworthy
Speed affects conversion in two ways. The obvious one is abandonment — people leave before the page renders. The less obvious one is that a slow, janky site reads as amateur, and visitors transfer that judgement to the business.
If your Largest Contentful Paint is over 2.5 seconds on a phone, fix that before you touch anything else on this list. Core Web Vitals: what actually moves them covers how.
7. It does not work on a phone
Not “it is responsive” — it almost certainly is. Does it work? Open your own contact form on your phone, on mobile data, and complete it. Count the taps. Notice whether the keyboard covers the submit button, whether the email field brings up the email keyboard, whether you can read the privacy checkbox label.
How to work through this without guessing
In order, because each step makes the next one measurable:
- Instrument the form. You cannot improve a number you are not recording. Track successful submissions as a conversion event, not clicks on the button — those count failures too.
- Watch ten sessions. Any session recording tool. Ten real visits tell you more than a week of theorising.
- Fix the worst thing. One change at a time, so you know which change did it.
- Give it enough traffic to mean something. A change that moves 3 enquiries to 4 is noise. Wait for a few hundred sessions before concluding anything.
Conversion work is not a redesign. It is a sequence of small, specific changes, each one measured, most of which turn out to be about clarity rather than design.
If the list above describes your site and you would rather not work through it alone, that is what our conversion rate optimisation work is. We start by measuring, not redesigning.
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