# 5 Signs Your Website Is Costing You Leads

August 2026

Most contractors don't find out their website is losing them work — they just notice the phone isn't ringing as much as it used to. Here are the five issues we find most often, roughly in order of how much they cost.

## 1. It takes more than three seconds to load

Slow pages lose visitors before they even see what you offer. More than half of visitors leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load — and that number gets worse on the spotty cell signal a lot of your customers are searching from on a job site or in their driveway.

## 2. It doesn't actually work well on a phone

"Mobile-friendly" isn't the same as "not broken on mobile." Buttons that are too small to tap, text that requires zooming, or a phone number that isn't clickable are all still extremely common on contractor sites — and every one of them is a lead walking away.

## 3. There's no obvious way to call or request a quote

If a visitor has to hunt for your phone number or scroll past three sections before finding a contact form, most won't bother. Every page should make the next step obvious in one glance.

## 4. It hasn't been meaningfully updated in years

An outdated design signals an outdated business, fairly or not. Old photos, a copyright year that's years behind, or services you no longer offer all quietly undermine trust before a customer even picks up the phone.

## 5. There's no dedicated content for your services or service area

A single homepage trying to rank for every service and every town you serve almost never works. Search engines — and customers — respond much better to a dedicated page for "water heater installation in [city]" than a paragraph buried on a general services page.

See Website Design & Build: /services/website-design.md