Your Website Looks Good. So Why Isn't It Working?

Most of the websites I look at aren’t bad. They’re pretty. They’re on brand. They just aren’t doing much. Here’s what I usually find when I go looking for why, and what we do differently.

Nobody ever agreed what the page is supposed to do

I ask a version of the same question in every audit. What is this page for? What is the one thing you want someone to do here? And more often than not, the room goes quiet, or three people answer three different things.

That silence shows up on the page. You can see it. There are five calls to action competing for the same click, or there is one buried at the bottom past four scrolls, or there is a contact form and a newsletter signup and a book a call button all asking for attention at the same moment. So the visitor does the easiest available thing, which is nothing.

We give every page one job. One. Everything else on that page either helps that job along or earns its place some other way, and if it cannot do either, it comes off. That single decision fixes more websites than any redesign I have ever been part of.

The homepage is talking about you

Here is a pattern I cannot unsee now. The hero says something like a legacy of excellence since 2009. The next section is about our values. Then there is a story about the founding. Somewhere near the bottom, finally, there is a hint of what the company actually does for the person reading.

I understand why this happens. You are proud of the thing you built, and you should be. But the person landing on your site is not there to admire you yet. They are there with a problem and about eight seconds of patience, and they are looking for evidence that you understand it.

So we put the thing first: what you do, who it is for, and what changes for them. The story of how you got here is genuinely worth telling, and it will land much harder three sections down, once they have a reason to care.

Speed and mobile are treated like the developer’s problem

They get filed under technical. Somebody will look at it. And in the meantime the site takes six seconds to load on a phone on a normal connection, the sticky header eats a third of the screen, and the form fields are too small to tap without zooming.

This is not a technical issue. It is a revenue issue wearing a technical costume. Most of your traffic is on a phone, in line somewhere, half paying attention, and every second of load time is people quietly leaving before they have seen a word you wrote.

We do this in the first week of every engagement. Open the site on a phone, on data, not office wifi, and try to complete the one thing you most want a customer to complete. It is an uncomfortable ten minutes and it is the most useful ten minutes on the whole project.

Reaching for a redesign when a few changes would do

The site feels tired, so the answer becomes a full rebuild. Six months, a real budget, a lot of meetings. And at the end of it there is a beautiful new website, and no one can say whether it performs better than the old one, because nobody wrote down how the old one performed.

Worse, the rebuild usually throws away the handful of pages that were quietly working. I have watched a brand delete the single best converting page it had because it did not match the new look.

We start with what the numbers already know. Which pages bring people in, where they leave, which ones turn into inquiries. Fix the headline, the offer, the form, one at a time, and see what moves. Sometimes that adds up to a redesign, and by then you know exactly what to keep. Often it does not, and you have saved yourself two quarters.

Buying traffic to a page that leaks

This is the expensive one, and I see it constantly. The ads are live, the budget is real, the click-through is respectable, and the landing page has a hero image, a paragraph of atmosphere, and a form that asks for nine fields including how did you hear about us.

Paid traffic does not fix a page that cannot convert. It just makes the leak cost money, and it makes it cost money faster every week you leave it alone.

Before a campaign goes live, we get the page ready for it. The offer matches the ad word for word, so nobody arrives confused. The form asks for the least you can get away with. And the tracking is confirmed to be firing before the first dollar goes out, not after someone asks why the numbers look strange.

So, fewer changes. Better ones.

A website does not need to be reinvented nearly as often as people think. It needs to be clear about what it is for, generous about what it offers, quick on a phone, and honest with you about what is working.

Most of the sites I see are one afternoon of hard decisions away from performing noticeably better.

If yours looks good and somehow isn’t pulling its weight, that is almost always what is going on. I would love to take a look and tell you which of these five it is.

with love, Christa