A website has one job for most businesses: turn a stranger who is already interested into someone who contacts you. Most sites we are asked to look at are losing a large share of those people, and almost always for the same four reasons.
You can check all four yourself today.
1. It is too slow on a phone
Four in five visitors to a typical South African business site are on a phone, often on mobile data, often not on a new one.
Open PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab), put your address in, and read the mobile score. Under 50 means you are losing people before they see anything. Every additional second of load time costs roughly seven percent of your conversions, and the effect is worst on exactly the visitors you paid to acquire.
The usual culprits are enormous uncompressed images, a page builder loading things nothing on the page uses, and a slider nobody scrolls past.
2. It does not say what you do, in the first sentence
Open your home page on a phone. Without scrolling, can a stranger tell what you sell, who you sell it to, and where you are?
"Welcome to our website" and "Excellence through innovation" answer none of those. The businesses winning your enquiries have a sentence like "Dental practice in Rustenburg, open Saturday mornings" and that is genuinely all it takes.
3. There is no obvious next step
Count the clicks from your home page to actually contacting you. If the answer is more than one, that is your problem.
A phone number in the header that dials when tapped. A form that asks for four fields, not eleven. A WhatsApp button, because a meaningful share of people will message but never phone or fill in a form. Booking, if you take appointments — people book at nine at night, and if they cannot, they book the practice that lets them.
4. Nobody can find it
Search your own business the way a customer would — not your name, the thing you sell plus your town. "Plumber Rustenburg". "Accountant Brits". If you are not on the first page, your site is doing nothing for new business.
Google Business Profile matters more than most people realise here, is free, and takes an afternoon. Do that before you spend anything on ads.
What to do with this
Score yourself honestly out of four. If you failed three or more, the site is not underperforming — it is not working, and no amount of advertising spend will fix that. Advertising into a broken site just means paying to lose people faster.
If you failed one, fix that one. It is rarely a rebuild.
We will run through all four with you and tell you what we would fix and roughly what it would cost, whether or not you use us. It is a twenty-minute conversation and it is free — we would rather be useful than sell you something you do not need.