Your website is live. It looks decent enough. Maybe you even paid good money for it. But here's the uncomfortable truth: if your site has any of the problems below, it's not just “not helping” your business — it's actively costing you customers every single day. And the worst part? You probably don't even know it's happening.
We've audited hundreds of small business websites across the UK. These are the seven most common problems we see — and each one comes with a real, measurable cost. Let's go through them.
1. Your Website Takes More Than 3 Seconds to Load
This is the silent killer. Every additional second your website takes to load costs you roughly 20% of your conversions. That's not a guess — it's backed by data from Google and Akamai. If your site loads in 5 seconds instead of 2, you've already lost nearly half your potential customers before they've even seen what you offer.
Let's put that into pounds. Say you get 500 visitors a month (modest for any business with a basic online presence), and your average customer is worth £500. At a healthy 5% conversion rate, that's 25 enquiries and roughly £12,500 in potential revenue. But if slow loading drops your conversion rate to 2%, you're getting 10 enquiries instead. That's £7,500 lost every month — £90,000 a year.
The average WordPress site loads in 4.5 seconds. The average Wix site is even slower. A properly built custom site? Under 1.5 seconds. Speed isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation everything else sits on.
2. You Can't Find Yourself on Google
Go and search for your business right now. Not your business name — search for what you actually do, in the area you serve. Something like “plumber Swindon” or “wedding photographer Wiltshire”. If you're not on page one, you effectively don't exist. 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google results. The other 25% rarely go past position five.
The cost here is straightforward: every customer who searches for your service and finds your competitor instead is a customer you've lost. And they didn't even know you were an option. If 200 people per month search for your core service in your area, and you're not visible, that's 200 potential customers going straight to someone whois visible.
For context: we built bbqpods.uk from a 15-page supplier PDF. Within 8 weeks, it was ranking #1 on Google for “bbq pods uk” — with 905 clicks and 7,024 impressions from organic search alone. No paid ads. No ongoing SEO retainer. Just a well-built website with SEO baked into the code from day one. If you're curious about what proper SEO looks like, our pricing guide explains what should be included as standard.
3. Your Site Looks Like Every Other Template Site
You know the look. Generic stock photo of people shaking hands. A headline that says something like “Welcome to Our Company”. Three columns with icons. A contact form at the bottom. It's the default Wix layout. Or the default WordPress theme. Or one of a thousand Squarespace templates being used by fifty thousand other businesses right now.
Here's why this costs you money: when a potential customer is comparing three or four businesses, they're making snap judgements. Research from Stanford shows that 75% of people judge a company's credibility based on its website design. If your site looks identical to fifteen others, you're not memorable. You're not building trust. And you're certainly not standing out.
The real cost isn't just lost first impressions. It's the referrals that don't convert. Someone recommends you. The prospect Googles your name, lands on a generic template site, and thinks: “Hmm, they looked more impressive when Dave was talking about them.” You've lost the referral before you even had a conversation.
4. Nobody Fills In Your Contact Form
The industry average for contact form completion is between 2% and 5%. That means for every 100 people who visit your site, 95 to 98 of them leave without making contact. Think about that for a moment. You're paying for hosting, maybe running ads, putting your URL on business cards — and 95%+ of the people who actually arrive simply... leave.
The reasons are well-documented: too many fields, it feels like a chore, there's no sense of what happens next, and on mobile it's usually a miserable experience. We've written a full breakdown of why contact forms fail and what to replace them with.
The cost: if you get 500 visitors per month and your form converts at 2%, that's 10 enquiries. Replace it with a quiz funnel that converts at 15–20%, and you're looking at 75–100 enquiries. That's 65–90 enquiries you're losing every single month. At even a modest close rate, that's thousands of pounds.
5. Your Website Doesn't Work Properly on Mobile
61% of all web traffic in the UK now comes from mobile devices. That number has been climbing every year and shows no signs of slowing down. If your website is difficult to use on a phone — tiny text, buttons too close together, images that don't resize, horizontal scrolling — you're immediately alienating more than half your visitors.
Google also uses mobile-first indexing, which means it ranks your site based on its mobile version, not the desktop version. A site that looks great on a 27-inch monitor but falls apart on a phone will struggle to rank at all. You're being penalised twice: once by users who leave, and once by Google who pushes you down the rankings.
The cost: 61% of 500 monthly visitors is 305 mobile users. If even half of them bounce because the experience is poor, that's 152 potential customers gone. Every month.
6. You're Embarrassed to Share Your Website Link
This one's a gut check. When someone asks for your website at a networking event, do you confidently hand over the URL? Or do you say something like “Oh, it's a bit outdated, we're getting a new one done soon”?
If you're hesitating, your website isn't working for you. Your website should be your best salesperson — available 24/7, never having a bad day, always making the right first impression. If you wouldn't hire a salesperson who makes you cringe when they open their mouth, why would you keep a website that does the same?
The cost here is harder to quantify but very real. Every networking event, every LinkedIn message, every email signature — these are all opportunities where your website either reinforces your credibility or undermines it. If you're actively avoiding sending people there, you're leaving referrals and connections on the table every week.
7. Your Competitors' Websites Look Better Than Yours
Go and look at your top three competitors' websites. Right now. If they look more professional, load faster, and make it easier to get in touch — you're losing business to them. Not because they're necessarily better at what they do, but because they look better at what they do.
Customers compare. They open three or four tabs, scan each website for 10–15 seconds, and make a decision. If your competitor's site loads instantly, looks polished, and has a clear path to getting a quote — while yours takes 4 seconds to load and has a wall of text with a generic form — the decision makes itself.
The cost: this is cumulative. Every customer who chooses a competitor because their website gave a better impression isn't just one lost sale — it's the lifetime value of that customer, plus every referral they might have sent your way.
Adding Up the Real Cost
Let's run a conservative calculation. Take a typical local service business:
| Problem | Monthly Impact | Annual Cost (at £500/customer) |
|---|---|---|
| Slow loading (20% drop per second) | ~10 lost conversions | £60,000 |
| Poor mobile experience | ~15 lost visitors | £90,000 |
| Contact form instead of quiz funnel | ~65 lost enquiries | £390,000 |
| Not ranking on Google | Invisible to new customers | Incalculable |
Now, these numbers overlap — a single visitor can be affected by multiple problems at once. And not every lost enquiry becomes a lost sale. But even if you take a fraction of these figures, the cost of a bad website dwarfs the cost of a good one. A properly built website costs £2,995. A bad website costs you that every week in lost opportunities.
What Good Looks Like
A website that's actually working for your business should tick every one of these boxes:
- Loads in under 2 seconds — ideally under 1.5.
- Ranks on page one of Google for your core services and location.
- Looks unique to your brand — not a template with your logo pasted on.
- Converts visitors into enquiries at 10%+ (quiz funnels make this realistic).
- Works beautifully on mobile — because that's where most of your traffic is.
- Makes you proud to share it at events, on social media, in email signatures.
- Stands out from competitors in a 10-second side-by-side comparison.
Real example: bbqpods.uk was built in 12 hours from a supplier PDF. No existing website, no content brief. It hit #1 on Google for its target keywords within 8 weeks, attracted visitors from 114 countries, and delivered 905 clicks and 7,024 impressions from organic search. That's what a properly built website does.
What to Do Next
If your website has even two or three of the problems above, it's not just “underperforming”. It's actively pushing customers to your competitors. The longer you leave it, the more it costs you.
You've got two options. You can try to fix your existing site — patch the speed, improve the mobile experience, maybe swap the form for something better. That works if the foundations are solid. But if you're building on a template or a bloated WordPress install, you're polishing a rusty car. Sometimes the smarter move is to start fresh with something built properly from the ground up.
Either way, the first step is understanding where you stand. Take our 60-second quiz and we'll give you an honest assessment — even if the answer is that your current site just needs a few tweaks. No obligation, no pressure.
And if you're wondering what a new site actually costs, here's our complete UK pricing guide. Spoiler: it's less than what a bad website is costing you right now.
