The site is there, it looks good, people open it — and no enquiries come in. The situation is common enough that half the conversations about “the internet just isn’t working” are really about it. There are nine reasons, and nearly all of them can be found and closed without anyone’s help.
Below is not about how it should be done, but about how to check. The order runs from the quickest to the most expensive.
1. The site takes longer to open than a visitor will wait
How you notice. Open the site on a phone with Wi-Fi off. If the first seconds are an empty screen, the problem is not the copy.
How to check. Measure how long it takes for the main heading to appear. Anything over three or four seconds on a mobile connection is lost visitors: people do not wait, they leave.
What to do. The first thing to look at is the weight of the images. A common find: a gallery photo of 300–400 KB that loads immediately, although on a phone screen it takes up 360 pixels. Second, fonts and scripts that hold up the rendering of the page. Third, and the most underestimated, how many third-party widgets are attached.
2. The enquiry form gets in the way more than it helps
How you notice. There is a form, and there are few enquiries. Often the reason is the number of fields: ten required lines are ten reasons to leave.
How to check. Open the form on a phone and fill it in yourself. How long did it take? Where did your hand want to close the tab?
What to do. Keep the minimum: a name, a phone number (or a messenger) and a short message. Everything else is optional or goes away. A separate question is the messenger: in Turkmenistan WhatsApp is more familiar than a form, and someone who does not want to type will send a voice message instead.
3. It is unclear what it costs
How you notice. There is a services page, and not a single figure on it. Visitors leave because they have no idea what they are committing to.
How to check. Show the page to someone who has not seen your site and ask: “roughly what would this cost?” If the answer ranges from three times to ten times the real figure, the site is missing the price.
What to do. Publish at least an order of magnitude: “a landing page from X”, “a company site from Y”. A public price saves time for both sides: the client can decide whether to continue, and the studio does not spend a meeting on questions that were already answered.
4. It is unclear what you actually do
How you notice. The home page has a handsome headline, but it is not obvious what the company does and for whom.
How to check. Read only the first screen, as a stranger would. After five seconds you should know: what the service is, who it is for, and what happens next.
What to do. The first screen answers three questions: what you do, who it is for, how to start. The rest goes below. More text does not help here; specifics do.
5. There is no reason to trust you
How you notice. The site looks professional, but it has no reviews, no address, no portfolio. To a first-time visitor, such a site is indistinguishable from one that was built and abandoned.
How to check. Ask yourself: is there anything on the site a client could have brought here personally — a review, an office address, photographs of the work, names of people? If not, there is nothing to build trust on.
What to do. Start small: one review from a real client, with a name and, if possible, a company; a couple of photographs of actual work; an address, if you work from an office. This answers more questions than any advertising copy.
6. The contact details are hidden
How you notice. There is a phone number, but it is at the bottom of the page, and the messenger is behind a floating button that people dismiss. A visitor who arrives with a question finds no way to ask it.
How to check. How many seconds pass between opening the page and the phone number being visible without scrolling?
What to do. The number and the messenger should be visible immediately, on every page, and lead to a single tap. Second: a messenger link next to the phone number, not instead of it — a good part of people never call at all.
7. The text is written for you, not for the visitor
How you notice. The site explains how you work: which technologies you use, what your methodology is, how many years you have been in the market. The visitor gets nothing from that — they want to know whether they will get what they came for.
How to check. Find the word “we” in the text and count how often “you” stands next to it. If “we” clearly wins, the text is about the studio.
What to do. Rewrite it from the reader’s side: not “we build sites on Next.js” but “your site will load quickly on a phone — here is what that means in practice”. The technologies stay, in a section for those who care.
8. There is no version in your client’s language
How you notice. Some of your clients are foreigners or partners abroad, and the site is in Russian only.
How to check. Look at the visits broken down by language. If half the traffic comes from abroad and there are no pages in their language, they leave within a second.
What to do. Build at least an English version of the main pages. Usually that is not the whole site but four pages: home, services, work and contact.
9. The site exists, and nobody knows about it
How you notice. Everything above is in order, and there are still no enquiries. So the site is not the problem.
How to check. Check whether you are in three places: directories and maps, social profiles, and whether anyone links to you from the sites you actually use. Type your own domain into a search engine — how many pages does it find for the company name at all?
What to do. Start with the small things: add yourself to the city directories, tidy up the profiles, ask every client for a link. After that come articles, listings, and partnerships with whoever already works with your audience.
In short
If you go through the list honestly, half of it can be closed today without spending a single manat. And almost every item is not about design — it is about how quickly a person can get an answer to their question.
If time is short, work through items 2, 3 and 6 first: that is where the most enquiries are lost, and the changes take about an hour.