The good news is it’s rarely a mystery. When a site gets visits but no enquiries, it’s nearly always one of a handful of things. Here’s what they are and how to spot them.
1. The call button isn’t there on a phone
Most people looking for a tradesperson are on their phone. If your number is tucked in the footer, or your call button only shows on a laptop, you’re losing them.
We’ve measured a call button that was a perfectly normal size on a laptop and literally zero by zero pixels on a phone. The owner had no idea. From their desk the site looked fine. From a customer’s phone in a driveway it had no way to ring them.
Check it: open your site on your own phone. Can you tap to call within a second of the page loading, without scrolling?
2. The page doesn’t say what you do and where
Someone searching "fencer in Leicester" lands on a page that says "Quality you can trust" in big letters. Nice line, but it doesn’t tell them they’re in the right place. If a visitor has to work out what you do, which areas you cover and whether you do their kind of job, a lot of them just hit back and try the next one.
Check it: read the top of your homepage as if you’re a stranger. Does it say the service and the town straight away?
3. It’s slow, so people give up
A heavy page with huge photos and a load of scripts can take ages to show anything on mobile data. People don’t wait. They’re gone before your best photos even load.
Check it: load your site on 4G, not your home WiFi, and see how long you’re staring at a blank screen.
4. There’s nothing to make them trust you
People are about to let you onto their property and hand over a fair bit of money. They want proof. Real reviews, photos of real jobs, how long you’ve been going, any accreditations. If the site is a stock photo and a contact form, they’ll look for someone who feels safer.
One thing we’ll never tell you to do is make any of this up. Fake reviews get found out and they kill trust faster than having none.
5. The form asks for too much
A contact form with ten boxes, a dropdown and a captcha that never works is a brilliant way to get zero enquiries. Name, phone, a short message and a postcode is usually plenty to get the conversation going.
6. Google and AI assistants can’t read it properly
This one’s sneaky. Sometimes a site looks fine to a person but a firewall or a setting blocks search engines and AI assistants from reading it. We’ve seen a landscaping site that showed over 3,000 words to someone in Chrome and 15 words to AI assistants. If they can’t read your page, they won’t send people to it, and the visits you do get might not be the right people.
7. You’re getting the wrong visits
Not all traffic is good traffic. If most of your visits are for a blog post from years ago, or from a town you don’t cover, the numbers look healthy but none of those people were ever going to book you. That’s why it’s worth looking at the actual searches that bring people in, not just the total.
8. Nobody catches people while they’re deciding
Loads of visitors look at a service page, check the prices page, have a nose at your gallery, then leave. They were interested. Something just didn’t push them over the line. If you can see where people are on the site and catch them at that moment with the right nudge, like an offer of a callback, you turn more of those visits into conversations.
How to find out which one it is
You could go through all of this by hand, and it’s worth doing the phone checks above yourself. But the quickest way to see everything at once is to run your site through a free Website Breakdown.
Ospry loads your site in a real browser on both a phone and a laptop, reads every page it can reach, and tells you what’s wrong, why it matters and what to sort first. You also get a Technical Developer Fix Sheet you can hand straight to whoever built your site, so they know exactly what to change.
The free plan gives you 5 audits a month and no card is needed. You also get 14 days of Cue, which logs where visitors are on your site live and shows pop-ups based on how ready they look to buy, so you can see for yourself where people drop off.
Get your free Website Breakdown
Want me to have a look with you? Book a 15 minute call. No hard sell.
Greg, Ospry