5 signs your website is hurting your business
most business owners assume that if their site is up and looks reasonable, it's doing its job. but there's a meaningful difference between a website that exists and one that actually works for your business.
the frustrating thing is that a poorly performing site often doesn't announce itself. there's no error message, no obvious breakage — just a quiet, steady loss of potential customers who never reached out. here are five specific signs that your site is working against you, and what to do about each.
1. your bounce rate is over 70%
what this means: bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your site and leave without clicking anything or visiting a second page. a high bounce rate almost always means one of three things: the wrong people are arriving (a traffic problem), the page loads too slowly (a performance problem), or visitors arrive and immediately can't find what they need (a design and messaging problem).
for most small business sites, a bounce rate between 40–60% is normal. above 70%, something is genuinely wrong.
how to check: google analytics (the free version) shows this under audience overview. if you don't have analytics installed, that's also a problem — you're flying blind.
the fix: start by checking your load time at pagespeed insights. if you're loading in more than 3 seconds on mobile, that alone could explain your bounce rate. if speed is fine, look at your homepage with fresh eyes: does the headline clearly say what you do and who you serve? is it obvious within 5 seconds what someone is supposed to do next?
2. your phone number or contact form is hard to find
what this means: this one sounds obvious, but walk through your own site right now on a phone. how many taps does it take to get to a phone number? how long does the contact form take to load? can you find your address without scrolling three screens?
we see this constantly on professional services sites — law firms, clinics, contractors — where the contact information is buried in the footer in 10px grey text. this is money left on the table.
the fix: your phone number should be in the header on mobile and clickable (a tel: link so tapping it dials automatically). if a customer is ready to call, don't make them copy-paste a number. your contact form should be short — name, email or phone, message. every additional field reduces submissions.
as a general rule: the most important action you want visitors to take should require the fewest steps.
3. it doesn't look right on mobile
what this means: over 60% of web traffic is now on mobile devices. if your site was designed primarily for desktop and responsiveness was an afterthought, a large portion of your visitors are seeing something broken — text that overflows its container, buttons too small to tap, images cropped wrong, forms that can't be filled out properly.
how to check: open your site on your phone and actually navigate it. better yet, ask someone who doesn't use it regularly to try to find something specific. watch where they get stuck.
google also has a free mobile-friendly test tool that will flag specific problems.
the fix: if your site was built in the last few years on a modern platform, there may be specific issues to fix rather than a full rebuild. if it's older than 2018 and was never designed responsively, a rebuild is probably the right call. a site that's genuinely frustrating to use on mobile is not competitive.
4. your content hasn't been updated in years
what this means: stale content signals to both visitors and google that your business may not be active. awards from 2019, a blog with no posts since 2021, team bios with photos from a decade ago, or service pages that still list prices that haven't been accurate for two years — all of this erodes trust, often without the visitor consciously noticing.
google also uses content freshness as a minor ranking signal. a site that never changes is harder to rank than one that's regularly updated.
the fix: do a content audit. set aside two hours, go through every page on your site, and flag anything that's outdated or inaccurate. fix the factual stuff immediately. for the rest, build a habit: update your homepage copy annually at minimum, refresh team photos every couple of years, and if you have a blog, either maintain it or remove it — a blog with a last post from 2020 does more harm than no blog at all.
5. you have no idea if it's generating leads
what this means: if you can't answer the question "how many potential customers reached out through my website last month," then you don't actually know whether your site is working. you're guessing.
this is more common than you'd think. many business owners have a site, receive the occasional inquiry, but have no systematic way to know if that rate is good, bad, or getting worse.
the fix: at minimum, install google analytics 4 (free) and set up goal tracking for contact form submissions. if you're on wordpress, most form plugins support this natively. this gives you a baseline. once you have data, you can start asking better questions: are people finding my site? are they reaching the contact page? are they filling out the form? each step in that funnel can be measured and improved.
a site that generates zero measurable leads isn't a website — it's a digital brochure collecting dust.
none of these problems are unfixable. some of them take an afternoon to address; others warrant a larger conversation about whether your site needs a refresh. the important thing is knowing they exist.
if you'd like a second set of eyes on your site, nanushi is happy to take a look. we work with ottawa-based businesses and clients across canada.