Why your website isn't getting customers: 10 mistakes that drive them away

Before you start: look at it like a stranger

Owners are the worst judges of their own websites: they know where everything is, they know the prices and they understand the jargon. Your customers don't. They arrive in a hurry, on a phone, comparing you with two or three other open tabs.

So review it the way they would: on your phone, on mobile data instead of the office Wi-Fi, in a private window. Better yet, ask someone who doesn't know your business to use it while you watch without helping. Whatever that person struggles to find is exactly what your customers struggle with.

1. Nobody can tell what you sell in five seconds

People decide fast whether to stay. A study from Carleton University found that we form an opinion about how appealing a web page is in as little as 50 milliseconds. And Nielsen Norman Group, one of the leading authorities on usability, explains that the first 10 seconds of a visit are what decide it: if your offer isn't clear by then, the visitor leaves.

If your headline could sit on any competitor's website, it isn't saying anything.

How to check: show someone the top of your homepage for five seconds, then hide it. Ask what you sell, who it's for and what they should do next. If they hesitate on any of the three, that's your first fix.

How to fix it: replace vague slogans ("quality integrated solutions") with a line that says what you do, for whom and where: "24/7 emergency plumbing in Miami." Below it, one line on what makes you different and a single, highly visible main button.

2. It takes too long to load on a phone

Speed isn't a technical detail; it's the front door. According to Google data, as mobile load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving without doing anything rises by 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds, it rises by 90%.

How to check: open your site on mobile data and count. If you're staring at a blank screen for more than two or three seconds, you have a problem. To measure it properly, paste your address into PageSpeed Insights, Google's free tool, and look at the mobile tab: Google considers a main-content load (what it calls LCP) of 2.5 seconds or less to be good.

How to fix it: the culprits are almost always the same. Huge images uploaded straight from the camera, autoplay videos, too many plugins or third-party scripts (chat widgets, ad pixels, embeds) and cheap, slow hosting. Compressing images and removing what you don't use is usually the fastest win.

3. Visitors have to zoom in or fight the buttons

Google judges your site by its mobile version: that's the one it crawls, indexes and uses to decide where you show up. So do your customers. If they have to pinch the screen to read, or tapping one button opens another, they give up quickly.

There's one mistake almost nobody notices: light gray text on a white background. It looks elegant on the designer's monitor and is unreadable on a phone in the sun. It isn't rare, either: WebAIM's annual analysis found low-contrast text on 83.9% of the home pages of the top million websites (2026).

How to check: use your site with one hand. Can you read without zooming? Does the page slide sideways? Do you hit every button on the first try? Does the menu open and close properly?

How to fix it: body text around 16 pixels, solid contrast and large, well-spaced buttons. The WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard requires targets of at least 24 × 24 pixels, and its strictest level asks for 44 × 44, which is what's actually comfortable for a finger.

4. Getting in touch takes work

This is the most expensive mistake, because it happens after the customer has already decided they want to talk to you. If they have to dig for your phone number in the footer, copy it by hand or fill out a ten-field form, some of them give up along the way.

In a market like Miami, many people would rather text than call. According to Pew Research Center, 56% of Hispanic adults in the U.S. use WhatsApp, compared with about a third of all adults. If your customers are Hispanic and your site has no WhatsApp button, you're asking them to change their habits in order to buy from you.

How to check: from your homepage, count how many taps it takes to reach you. Tap your phone number: does it start a call, or is it just text? Tap the WhatsApp button: does it open a chat with the right number?

How to fix it: a contact button visible at the top of every page, your phone number as a tap-to-call link, and a WhatsApp button using a wa.me link that opens the chat with a message already typed ("Hi, I saw your website and I'd like information about…"). It's free, and WhatsApp's own help center explains how to set it up.

5. The form asks too much (or messages never reach you)

Every extra field is one more reason to quit. For a first contact, three are almost always enough: name, phone or WhatsApp, and what they need. Address, budget or how they heard about you can wait until you're actually talking.

Worse than a long form is one that doesn't work, and it happens more than you'd think: you changed email addresses and the form still sends to the old one, messages land in spam, or a plugin broke after an update.

A broken form is worse than no form: the customer thinks they reached you, and you never find out.

How to check: fill out your own form today as if you were a customer and confirm the message arrives, to which inbox and how fast. Repeat once a month.

How to fix it: few fields, the right keyboard on mobile (numeric for phone numbers), a clear "received" message and an instant alert to your email or WhatsApp so you can reply quickly.

6. There's no proof you're real

Before contacting you, customers ask themselves whether you can be trusted. They look for signals: an address or service area, real photos, names, years in business, licenses and, above all, what other customers say.

Reviews carry enormous weight. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of U.S. consumers found that 97% read reviews for local businesses, 74% look for reviews from the last three months, and almost half (47%) wouldn't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

Stanford's web credibility guidelines put it simply: show that there's a real organization behind your site (a physical address is the easiest way), and make it easy to contact you.

How to check: visit your site as a skeptical customer. Is there anything that proves you exist, that you do good work and that someone was happy with you recently?

How to fix it: show your Google reviews with a link to see them all, photos of real jobs, an "about us" section with faces and names, and your license number if your trade requires one.

7. Stock photos and copy that could belong to anyone

Photos of people smiling in a perfect office convince no one. In its eyetracking studies, Nielsen Norman Group found that users ignore generic stock photos of people but look closely at real photos of the team: on one page studied, visitors spent 10% more time on the portraits than on the biographies, even though the bios took up 316% more space.

Copy works the same way. "We are leaders committed to excellence" is what everybody says, so it says nothing.

How to check: cover your logo and ask yourself whether your homepage could belong to a competitor. If the answer is yes, you have an identity problem, not a design problem.

How to fix it: photos of your team, your space and your work (a modern phone is enough) and concrete copy: the neighborhoods you serve, real timelines, examples and numbers.

8. It looks abandoned

A "© 2019" in the footer, a Christmas promotion in March, a blog whose last post is three years old, or an Instagram link that doesn't work. Each one seems minor, but together they tell customers that nobody is minding the store.

The most serious signal comes from the browser itself: since 2018, Chrome labels any page that doesn't use HTTPS as "Not secure." Few things scare off someone who's about to give you their details faster.

How to check: look at the year in your footer, the date of your latest post, any running promotions, and whether a padlock or a "Not secure" warning appears next to your address. Tap every link in the menu and footer.

How to fix it: remove anything that expires if you won't keep it current, fix or delete broken links and turn on HTTPS; most hosting plans include the certificate for free.

9. Pop-ups that cover everything

You open a website on your phone and, before you read a single line, up pops a newsletter window, then a cookie banner, a chat bubble and an offer bar. By the time you've closed everything, you've lost interest.

Google explicitly advises against it: its documentation for site owners explains that intrusive interstitials that cover content can hurt search performance and frustrate visitors, and it recommends small banners instead.

How to check: open your site on your phone and count how many things you have to close before you see the content. Also check whether the chat or WhatsApp bubble covers an important button.

How to fix it: nothing full-screen on arrival, small and easy-to-dismiss banners and, if you use pop-ups at all, show them only after the visitor has read something.

10. You speak one language and your customers speak another

In Miami, this is not a detail. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 70.6% of Miami-Dade residents are Hispanic and 75.3% speak a language other than English at home. An English-only website leaves out a huge number of people who would buy from you, and machine translation is obvious right away and signals little care.

The reverse is also true: if you sell to customers who don't speak Spanish, or to companies in other states, a Spanish-only website holds you back.

How to check: think about your last ten customers. What language did they write to you in? Does your website speak to them in that language, naturally and without mistakes?

How to fix it: two versions written by people (not an auto-translate button), a visible language switcher and each version at its own address, so Google can show each person the right one.

What to fix first

If you found several of these mistakes, don't try to fix everything at once. This is the order that usually gets the most results for the least effort.

First, make sure people can reach you (mistakes 4 and 5): if the form doesn't arrive or the WhatsApp button doesn't work, nothing else matters. Second, make it clear what you sell (mistake 1), which is often just a headline and a button. Third, speed and readability on mobile (mistakes 2 and 3). Then trust (mistakes 6, 7 and 8) and, finally, the rest.

Often you don't need a new website. You need to fix five specific things on the one you have.

Rather have someone else look at it?

Reviewing your own site is hard because you know it by heart. That's why we built Hayes Projects' free visual audit: you leave us your website link and your WhatsApp, a person on our team reviews it by hand on mobile and desktop, and sends you on WhatsApp the problems they see and what they'd change in each one. It takes 2 to 4 hours during business hours, it's free, and we won't flood you with ads.

If you also want to check the technical side (speed, tags and indexing in Google), there's our free SEO audit: it's automatic and takes a few seconds.