How to tell whether your website is losing you money
Four checks you can run in twenty minutes, without analytics training, that will tell you whether the site is earning its keep or quietly turning people away.
Most small business owners suspect their website is underperforming and have no way to confirm it. Agencies are not much help here, because the honest answer sometimes is that the site is fine and the problem is somewhere else. So here are four checks you can run yourself this afternoon.
Check one: open it on your own phone, on mobile data
Not on the office wifi. Turn wifi off, load the site, and count. If the first meaningful thing on screen takes longer than three seconds, you are losing roughly half the people who tapped through from a search result. Then try to call yourself from the site with one thumb. If the phone number is not tappable, or it sits below three screens of scrolling, that is a real, countable loss every single day.
Check two: read your own homepage as a stranger
Cover the logo and read the first two sentences. Can you tell what the business does, where it operates, and who it is for? A surprising number of homepages open with a sentence about passion and commitment that would suit a law firm, a bakery or a scaffolding company equally well. If yours does, you are asking a visitor to do work that they will not do.
Check three: count the paths to a conversation
How many distinct ways can a visitor start a conversation with you? A phone link, a form, an email address, a booking link, a chat. Now count how many of those you would actually answer within a day. Anything on that list you do not monitor is worse than not having it, and any page with none of them on it is a dead end.
Check four: look at your top five pages
Open your analytics, sort by page views, and look at the top five. In a healthy service business site, at least two of the top five are pages about the specific things you sell, not the homepage, the about page and a blog post from 2019. If the pages that describe your services are not being read, either nobody can find them or they are not written well enough to hold attention.
What the results mean
If check one fails, you have a technical and hosting problem, and it is usually the cheapest one to fix. If check two fails, you have a copy problem, which costs nothing but an afternoon of honest writing. If check three fails, you have a structural problem. If check four fails, you have a search problem, and the site needs pages that match what people search for.
Only one of those four is really a design problem. It is worth knowing which one you have before anyone quotes you for a rebuild.
Priya Raman
Design Director
Priya leads website and brand design at Arri. She came from a print and packaging background, which is why Arri identity systems ship with a signage spec and not just a logo file.
