How Can I Tell If My Website Is Losing Me Customers?
Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights (free), check if you see "Not Secure" in the browser bar, and try filling in your own contact form on your phone. If any of these fail, you're losing leads right now.
The frustrating thing about a bad website is that you never see the customers you lose. Nobody calls to tell you they visited your site and left because it was slow or they couldn't find your phone number. They just quietly go to your competitor instead. But these problems are easy to spot once you know where to look.
Here are five free checks you can do in the next ten minutes.
How Do I Test My Website Speed?
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, type in your website address, and hit analyse. Google will score your site out of 100 for both mobile and desktop performance.
If your mobile score is below 50, your site is slow enough to be losing you a significant number of visitors. Google's own research shows that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. For a trade business where every visitor could be a paying job, that's a lot of lost work.
Common reasons for poor speed scores:
- Uncompressed images — photos from your phone can be 3-5MB each. They should be under 200KB
- Cheap shared hosting — your site shares a server with hundreds of others and everything crawls
- Too many plugins — if you're on WordPress, each plugin adds loading time. Deactivate anything you don't need
- No caching — without it, your site rebuilds every page from scratch for every single visitor
- Heavy themes — some WordPress themes load dozens of scripts and stylesheets you'll never use
Focus on the recommendations marked as having the highest impact.
How Do I Check If My Site Has SSL?
Open your website in Chrome or Safari and look at the address bar. If you see a padlock icon, you have SSL. If you see "Not Secure," you don't — and visitors see that warning too.
Without SSL, browsers warn people your site isn't safe. For a trade business where trust is everything, that's a deal breaker.
The fix is straightforward. Most hosting providers include free SSL through Let's Encrypt. Log into your hosting dashboard and look for SSL or HTTPS settings. If your web address starts with "http://" instead of "https://," SSL isn't active.
Is My Contact Form Actually Working?
Pull out your phone, go to your website, and try to submit your own contact form. Did the submission go through smoothly? Did you receive the enquiry in your inbox?
You'd be amazed how many trade websites have broken contact forms. Submissions land in spam folders, go to old email addresses, or simply vanish. Every day the form is broken is a day of missed leads.
Things to check:
- Can you fill it in easily on a phone? If the fields are tiny, the keyboard covers the form, or you have to pinch and zoom, mobile users will give up
- Are there too many fields? Name, phone number, and a message box. That's all you need. Every extra field (address, postcode, dropdown menus, budget range) reduces the number of people who complete it
- Did you receive the submission? Check your inbox AND your spam folder. If it went to spam, your form's email configuration needs adjusting
- Is there a confirmation message? After someone submits, they should see a clear "Thanks, we'll be in touch shortly" message. If nothing happens, they don't know if it worked
Send yourself a test enquiry right now. If you don't receive it within a few minutes, your form is broken and you need to fix it today.
Does My Website Work on Mobile?
Open your site on your phone and try to use it as a customer would. Can you read everything without zooming? Can you tap the phone number? Can you find and complete the contact form?
Over 70% of local searches happen on phones. If your site doesn't work on mobile, you're invisible to most potential customers.
Quick checks:
- Text size — can you read everything comfortably without zooming in?
- Phone number — is it visible at the top of the page, and does tapping it start a call?
- Buttons — are they big enough to tap accurately with your thumb?
- Navigation — can you find your services page, areas covered, and contact form within a few taps?
- Images — do they load quickly and display at the right size, or do they overflow off the screen?
Google prioritises mobile-friendly sites in search results, so a poor mobile experience hurts your rankings too.
What Does My Google Maps Listing Look Like?
Search for your business name on Google and look at what appears. Is your Google Business Profile complete? Are your opening hours correct? Do you have recent reviews?
Your Google Maps listing is often the first thing a potential customer sees. If it has wrong hours, no photos, or an incorrect phone number, people will skip past you. Check: is your phone number correct, are opening hours right, do you have recent reviews, are there photos of your work, and is your service area listed? If the listing is sparse, it's costing you jobs.
What Should I Do With These Results?
Most trade websites fail on at least two of these points. The good news is that fixes are straightforward:
- Speed — compress images, switch to better hosting, remove unused plugins
- SSL — enable the free certificate from your host
- Contact form — fix the email routing, simplify the fields
- Mobile — if your site is very old, it may need a rebuild (see how much a trade website costs), but often a few CSS tweaks sort it out
- Google Maps — log in and update your profile (completely free)
Prioritise anything that's completely broken (like a non-working contact form or missing SSL) first. Then tackle speed and mobile improvements.
The Bottom Line
Your website might be losing you customers right now and you'd never know it. The five checks in this article take less than ten minutes and will show you exactly where the problems are. No technical knowledge required — just your phone and a few minutes.
If you'd rather get a full picture in one go, SwiftLead runs a free website audit that covers everything above plus SEO, accessibility, and your Google Maps presence. It takes the guesswork out of what to fix first.
Either way, don't leave these problems unfixed. Every day your site is slow, broken, or showing "Not Secure" is a day you're handing leads to your competitors. For a deeper dive into why websites lose customers, read Why Your Website Is Losing You Customers.
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