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1. Your phone number is playing hide and seek

Picture a customer with a burst pipe, standing in water, searching on their phone. They land on your site — and the number is on the Contact page, three taps away, in small grey text. They won’t make those three taps. They’ll hit back and call the competitor whose number was in a big button at the top of the page.

The fix: a click-to-call button in your header on every page, plus the number in the footer. On mobile, tapping it should open the phone dialler immediately. This one change alone can transform enquiry volume for trades and services.

2. Nobody can tell what you actually do

“Welcome to our website. We pride ourselves on excellence, quality and customer satisfaction.” That sentence could describe a plumber, a law firm or a cupcake shop. Visitors decide in seconds whether you do the thing they need — and vague hero copy makes them leave.

The fix: say what you do, for whom, and where — in the first headline. “Emergency plumber in Riverside. Upfront pricing, same-day callouts.” Boring? Maybe. Effective? Enormously.

3. Your menu is a PDF

Restaurant owners, this one’s for you. A PDF menu on a phone is a pinch-zoom nightmare: tiny text, slow download, impossible to search. Hungry people don’t pinch and zoom. They leave.

The fix: put the menu on a real web page with readable text. It’s better for customers, and — bonus — search engines can actually read it too, which helps you show up when someone searches for what you serve.

4. No clear next step

A visitor reads your services page, nods along, reaches the bottom… and there’s nothing. No button, no form, no “here’s what to do next.” You’ve done the hard part — earning their interest — and then let them wander off.

The fix: every page ends with one clear action: call, book, request a quote. Match the action to the visitor’s intent — someone reading about emergency repairs wants a phone number, not a newsletter signup.

5. Stock photos of people who’ve never been near your business

Customers can smell a stock photo. The too-perfect team in matching polos, the handshake in front of a glass building — it signals “generic” at exactly the moment you need “trustworthy and real.”

The fix: use real photos: your actual premises, your actual work, your actual team. They don’t need to be studio quality — honest phone photos of real work outperform glossy fakes. If you genuinely have nothing yet, clean typography and honest copy beat fake imagery every time.

6. It falls apart on a phone

Most local searches happen on mobile, yet plenty of business sites are still designed desktop-first and “adapted” later — which usually means text you can’t read without zooming, buttons too small to tap, and forms that fight you.

The fix: design mobile-first. Test every page on a real phone: can you read it, tap everything, and complete the contact form with one thumb? If not, it’s broken — regardless of how it looks on a laptop.

7. Outdated information

Christmas opening hours from two years ago. A “new” service launched in 2021. A blog whose latest post is from 2019. Stale content quietly tells visitors the business might be stale too — and wrong hours actively send people to competitors.

The fix: audit your site twice a year: hours, services, prices, team, contact details. Better yet, build the site so updates take minutes, not a support ticket.

Your website’s job isn’t to impress visitors. It’s to remove every reason a ready-to-buy customer might leave.

Where to start

You don’t need to fix everything today. Open your website on your phone right now and try to do the thing a customer does: find the phone number, check the hours, understand the services. Every point of friction you feel is a customer you’ve been losing. Fix those first — they’re usually the cheapest changes with the biggest payoff.

And if the list feels overwhelming, that’s exactly what a website redesign is for: an honest audit of what’s costing you customers, then a rebuild around what your customers actually need.