The problem
Your work is better
than your website.
If your work is better than your website, the website is costing you jobs you never hear about.
What it looks like
Does this sound familiar?
You know it is dated. You have known for a while. It was fine when it was built and nothing has obviously broken since.
On a phone it is slow, the text is small, and the contact form is a chore. You have not looked at it on a phone in months.
Somewhere underneath there is a page you are quietly embarrassed to send to a serious prospect.
Why it happens
This is not a judgement on your work.
Two separate things are happening, and they are both invisible from where you are standing.
Speed. Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data. A site that takes several seconds to appear loses a meaningful share of them before it has said a single word. They do not complain — they go back and tap the next result.
Judgement. Visitors decide whether you look competent within a couple of seconds, and they do it on visual cues, not content. A site that looks like it was built a decade ago suggests a business that has not changed in a decade. That is rarely true and it is entirely the website's fault.
What it costs
Nobody sends you a bill for this.
This one quietly taxes everything else you do.
If you fix your ranking, more people arrive at a site that loses them. If you fix your ads, you pay for clicks that land somewhere that undermines you. Every other improvement is throttled by whatever the site does with the traffic.
That makes it the worst thing to leave until last, and the most common thing to leave until last, because unlike a missed call it never announces itself.
What we do about it
The work, in order.
Fix speed before appearance
Images are almost always the problem. Nobody notices a fast site; everybody leaves a slow one.
Build for the phone first
Most of your traffic is on one. Designing for a desktop and shrinking it is backwards.
One obvious action per page
Call, or fill in this form. A visitor who has to work out what to do next usually does nothing.
Make enquiries provable
Forms that are tested end to end, and tracked, so you can see what the site actually produces rather than hoping.
How long it takes
An honest timeline.
A related problem
Getting nothing at all, rather than losing people?
This page assumes visitors are arriving and leaving. If your site produces nothing in a normal week, the first job is telling apart whether nobody is arriving or whether they arrive and do not act — two different problems with two different fixes.
Not sure this is your problem?
Eight questions, about two minutes. You get the answer on screen — no email needed to see it.