10 Website Mistakes That Cost You Leads

1. Hiding your phone number

For any local service business, the phone number should be in the top right of every page, clickable on mobile, and repeated in the footer. Hiding it on a contact page costs you 20–40% of your lead volume.

2. A homepage that doesn't say what you do

A visitor should know within 3 seconds who you help, what you do, and where you do it. "Welcome to our website" is a wasted headline. "Affordable plumbing repair in Austin, TX" is a working headline.

3. No pricing information anywhere

You don't have to publish exact prices, but "starts at $299" or "most projects $2,000–$5,000" filters out unqualified leads and doubles the quality of the ones that reach you. Hiding pricing loses more good leads than it gains cautious ones.

4. Stock photos of fake happy people

Every visitor recognizes generic stock photography. Real photos of your actual team, actual location, and actual work convert 2–3x better. Even mediocre iPhone photos of real work beat perfect stock.

5. Slow mobile load times

Over 60% of traffic is now mobile. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mid-range phone on 4G, you're losing half your visitors before they see anything. Run PageSpeed Insights today.

6. Contact forms that don't work

At least a third of small business contact forms silently fail — emails go to spam, forward to a defunct inbox, or never send at all. Test yours today by submitting from a phone you don't own. Fix or replace the form if the email doesn't arrive within 60 seconds.

7. No Google Business Profile (or an unclaimed one)

For local businesses, GBP drives more traffic than the website itself in the first year. If you don't have one, or you haven't posted in 6 months, you're leaving free leads on the table.

8. Auto-playing video or intro animations

Any experience that gets between the visitor and the answer they came for costs conversions. Skip the hero video with music. Skip the loading animation. Skip the pop-up 'Join our newsletter' before they've read a word.

9. No reviews or testimonials on the homepage

Social proof is the single highest-impact conversion element. Three real reviews on the homepage — with photos and names — outperform three paragraphs of self-description every time.

10. Never updating the site after launch

Google's algorithm rewards freshness for local businesses. A site that hasn't been updated since 2022 slowly loses rankings to competitors who publish quarterly. Even one new page or blog post a month is enough to hold ground.

If you want this done for you at a small-business price, our cheap website design service ships a launch-ready site in 5–7 days from $299.