10 signs your website is quietly costing you customers

The websites that lose the most business rarely look broken. They load, the logo's in the right place, nothing's on fire. They just leak — a visitor here, an enquiry there, day after day. Here's the 10-point check we run on every site we inherit. Run it on yours; it takes about 15 minutes.

The checklist

1. It takes more than 3 seconds to load on your phone. Test it on mobile data, not office wifi. Over half of visitors abandon slow pages — and Google ranks slow sites lower, so you lose twice.
2. Your phone number isn't visible without scrolling. On mobile, your number and a tap-to-call link should be one thumb-reach away on every page.
3. It doesn't say what you do within five seconds. "Innovative solutions for a changing world" is not what you do. "Hydraulic repairs, Auckland-wide, same week" is.
4. There's no proof of quality anywhere. No photos of real work, no reviews, no client names. Visitors don't take your word for it — they take other customers' word for it.
5. The photos are stock — and look it. One honest photo of your actual team, premises or work beats ten polished strangers shaking hands.
6. You can't find yourself on Google. Search what your customers would search ("electrician + your suburb"), in a private browsing window. Not on page one? Your competitors are taking those calls.
7. The last update was years ago. A 2022 copyright line or a "news" page that stops in 2023 tells visitors nobody's home.
8. Forms go nowhere — slowly. Submit your own contact form. If the confirmation is ugly, the reply is slow, or it lands in spam, that's exactly what customers experience.
9. It looks broken on a phone. Most NZ web traffic is mobile. Pinch-to-zoom text, buttons too small to tap, sideways scrolling — every one of those is a customer gone.
10. It looks cheaper than your work is. The quiet one. If you do premium work and your website looks like a $500 template, visitors price your work off your website — and call someone who looks the part.

Scored more than three? Here's the order to fix things

Don't rebuild everything at once. The highest-return fixes, in order: speed first (it lifts rankings and conversions), then your five-second message, then proof — photos and reviews. Design polish comes after, because polish on a slow, vague site is lipstick.

And if the honest answer is "it's all of them" — that's usually the point where a rebuild costs less than the customers the old site is losing. We've written an honest guide to what a website should cost in NZ so you know what you're walking into.