How to tell if your website is doing its job

There is a sculpture collective I work with in Yorkshire. They sell stone sculpture and they run hands-on carving workshops here every six months. When I first looked at their website, it was getting around 350 visits a month. Decent traffic for a specialist business. The workshops were getting two or three bookings each.

Three hundred and fifty people arriving. Two or three acting. The website was not broken. It looked fine. It was just not doing its job.

I see a version of this most weeks. A business owner shows me a site they are not happy with, but they cannot always say why. It cost decent money. It looks the part. It is just not bringing in work, and they are wondering whether to spend more money on a redesign.

Before you do that, it is worth checking whether your site is actually failing, and if so, how. The answer changes what you should do next. This post gives you a way to check for yourself, without paying anyone a penny.

Looking good is not the same as working

A website has one job. It turns visitors into enquiries. Everything else, the colours, the animations, the clever layout, is in service of that. A site can be beautiful and useless at the same time. It can also be plain and quietly effective.

The pretty ones are harder to diagnose, because nobody wants to believe there is a problem with a site that looks the part.

So put the design to one side for a minute and ask a colder question. Is this site earning its keep?

The most common problem I see

When a struggling website lands on my desk, there is a pattern I spot within the first minute. The site was built for the owner, not the customer.

You can usually tell because it is too wordy. Paragraphs about the history of the business. A long welcome message. Everything the owner wanted to say, and very little the customer came to find.

Your customer arrives with a question. What do you do, can you help me, and how do I book or get in touch. If the answer to those three is not obvious in the first few seconds, they leave and try the next site on Google. They do not scroll through your story to find it.

The sculpture collective had this exact problem. Plenty of lovely material about the work, and no clear route to the thing visitors actually wanted, which was booking a workshop. There was padding to cut and there was no booking path at all. People were interested enough to visit. The site just never asked them to do anything.

That is not a design problem. It is a content problem wearing a design problem’s clothes. Worth knowing, because a redesign that keeps the same wordy content will not fix it. The same sausage in a new skin.

Your inbox is the real metric

Before you open any analytics tool, look at the thing that matters. How many enquiries or bookings did the website bring you last month? Count them. Emails, calls, contact form messages.

If you are getting steady enquiries, your website is doing its job. You can stop reading here if you like.

If the inbox is quiet, analytics tells you why. And there are only two things you need to check.

Two things to check in Google Analytics

Do not get lost in the dashboard. Google Analytics is full of numbers that do not matter to you. These two do.

1. Contact page visits. Find your pages report and look at how many people reached your contact or booking page. This tells you whether the site moves people towards acting. If hundreds of people visit each month and almost none reach that page, the site is not persuading anyone. That is a conversion problem. That was the sculpture collective. The visitors were there. The path was not.
2. Where your visitors come from. The traffic report shows whether people arrive from Google, social media, or by typing your address in directly. If hardly anyone is arriving at all, the site itself might be fine. The problem is that nobody can find it. That is a visibility problem.

These two checks split every quiet website into one of two camps. Either people are not arriving, or people arrive and leave without acting. The fix for each is completely different, which is why it is worth knowing before you spend anything.

What fixing it looked like

For the sculpture collective, the fix was not a rebuild. We cut the padding, made the calls to action clearer, and built a proper booking route so a visitor could go from interested to booked without hunting for it.

Same business. Same traffic. The last workshop sold out with 20 people. Before the changes, they were getting two or three.

I am not sharing that to show off. I am sharing it because the fix was cheap compared to a redesign, and none of it was clever. It was just the site finally asking visitors to do the thing they came to do.

Three signs your website is working

1. You get enquiries from people you have never met, and they mention the website.
2. New customers arrive already half sold. They have read your prices or seen your work and they get in touch ready to talk.
3. When you search for what you do in your area, you show up.

Three signs it is not

1. Every enquiry comes from word of mouth, and the website never gets a mention.
2. People visit but nobody reaches the contact page.
3. You feel the need to apologise for the site when you give someone the address.

That last one sounds soft, but I hear it a lot. If you are embarrassed to send people there, something is wrong, and you probably already know what.

Questions to ask before paying for a redesign

If the checks above worry you, sit with these four questions before you commission anything.

1. Is the problem traffic or conversion? Nobody arriving needs different work to people arriving and leaving.
2. Does the homepage answer the customer’s three questions in seconds? What you do, who you help, how to act on it.
3. Is the site about you or about them? Read it back as if you were a customer in a hurry.
4. Do you actually need a redesign, or do you need fewer words and a clearer path to contact?

Sometimes the honest answer is that the site needs a rewrite, not a rebuild. That costs a lot less. The sculpture collective is proof.

What to do this week

Count last month’s enquiries. Then open Google Analytics and check the two numbers. Contact page visits, and where your visitors come from. It takes twenty minutes.

If the numbers worry you, or you cannot make sense of what you are looking at, book a website audit with me. I will go through it with you, tell you plainly what is working and what is not, and give you a fix list you can act on. Whether you do the work with me or someone else is up to you.

Your website should be your best salesperson. If it is sat in the corner saying nothing, better to find out now than after you have paid for a redesign it did not need.