Why your website might be doing nothing for you

I run a workplace compliance company. First aid, food safety, and lead generation for freelancers up and down the country. That means I spend a lot of my week on the phone to trainers and sole traders, and the same thing comes up again and again.

Nearly all of them have a website. Almost none of them get any work from it.

When I ask what their site actually brings in, the answer is usually a version of "nothing really" or "I'm not sure, to be honest". They're still paying for it every month. It's been three years. Nobody has ever mentioned finding them through it.

Here's what I've noticed is usually going on. None of it is about the site being ugly.

1. Nobody can find it

This is the big one. A website isn't a shop on a high street, it's a shop in a field. People don't walk past it. They have to be sent there, or they have to find it in a search.

If your site has never been submitted to Google, has no links pointing at it from anywhere, and isn't mentioned in your email signature, your social profiles, or the directories you're listed in, then realistically the only people visiting are the ones you personally sent the link to. That's not a website doing work. That's a PDF with extra steps.

The fix isn't glamorous: get it indexed, get it linked from the places people already see you, and mention the thing you actually do in the words your customers would type.

2. It doesn't say what you do, where you do it

A lot of sites open with something like "Welcome to our website" or "Passionate about quality since 2014". Lovely, but it tells me nothing.

If you're a first aid trainer in Derby, the words "first aid training in Derby" need to be near the top of the page, in plain English, because that's what somebody types when they need you. Not as keyword stuffing — just because it's true and it's the clearest possible thing to say.

I'd say a third of the sites I look at fail purely on this. The information is on the site somewhere, buried on page four, written in a way that avoids saying the obvious thing.

3. There's no clear next step

Somebody lands on your site, reads it, decides you seem alright. Then what?

If the answer is "scroll to the bottom, find a contact page, fill in six fields, hope it sends", you'll lose a good chunk of them. People enquire when it's easy and they lose interest when it isn't. A phone number that's tappable on a mobile, a short form, and a clear button on every page covers most of it.

4. It's slow, or it's broken on a phone

Most of your visitors are on a phone, probably on mobile data, probably in a hurry. If your site takes six seconds to load, or the menu doesn't open, or the text is tiny and you have to pinch to read it, a lot of people simply go back and click the next result.

They don't email you to tell you your site is slow. They just leave, and you never know it happened. That's what makes this one so easy to ignore for years.

5. It hasn't been touched since it went live

Sites go stale. Prices change, services change, you stop offering one thing and start offering another, and none of it makes it onto the site. Then a potential customer reads a page listing a course you dropped last year and gets in touch about the wrong thing, or doesn't get in touch at all.

Search engines notice too. A site that never changes and never gains a new link tends to drift quietly down the results.

What I'd actually do about it

If your site is doing nothing, the honest first step isn't a redesign. It's working out which of the above is true for you. Some of it you can sort yourself in an afternoon: add your location to your homepage, put your number at the top, get the site into Google Search Console, add the link to your email signature.

Sometimes it's more fundamental — the site is slow because of how it was built, or it's stuck on a platform you can't easily change. That's when replacing it makes sense, and I've written about the signs it's time to do that.

The uncomfortable version: if your website has brought in nothing for two years, it isn't an investment that hasn't paid off yet. It's a subscription.

I'm not a website designer by trade, and I say that on the front page of this site for a reason. What I do offer is a straight look at what's actually wrong, and a site built to do the basics properly, for what you're already paying or less.

Want me to look at yours?

Tell me what you're paying each month and send me your link. I'll tell you honestly whether I could do better for the same money, or whether you're fine as you are.