A website rarely fails all at once. It fails a little at a time, in ways that never show up as a single dramatic incident, which is exactly why these seven keep showing up in sites that otherwise look fine.
1. It takes longer than three seconds to load on mobile
Google's own research found that 53 percent of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Most small-brand sites are not failing by a wide margin, they are failing by one unoptimised hero image or one extra tracking script, which is an afternoon of work once someone looks for it.
2. The price is hidden until the third click
Hiding price to "start a conversation" works for a handful of categories and quietly loses the rest. If a visitor has to request a quote to learn a number that could have been shown upfront, most of them leave rather than ask. Even a range, "projects typically start at," does more work than silence, because it lets someone self-select before spending their time on a form.
3. The contact form has never been tested by the person who owns the business
Forms break silently: a plugin update, a changed email address, a spam filter eating real enquiries. Test the actual form, from an actual phone, every month. A broken form produces zero evidence that anything is wrong, which is what makes it dangerous.
4. The homepage does not say what the business does in one sentence
A visitor who cannot answer "what is this, and is it for me" in the first few seconds does not keep scrolling to find out. Positioning above the fold is the cheapest fix on this entire list and the one most sites skip.
5. The product or service page reads like a brochure, not a decision aid
Price, availability, what happens after someone buys or books, and why this over the alternative: a page missing two of those four is asking a visitor to go find the answer elsewhere, usually on a competitor's site.
6. Nothing on the site has changed in over a year
A journal with no recent post, a team page with someone who left, a case study from two years ago presented as recent work: all of it quietly tells a visitor the business might not be as active as it claims.
7. Analytics are not installed, or nobody has opened them
A site with no analytics cannot tell you which of the six signs above applies to it. This is the one to fix first, because every other diagnosis depends on it, and it typically takes under an hour to set up properly.
Fix in the order that pays back fastest
Analytics first, because it tells you which of the other six is actually costing sales on this particular site rather than in general. Then the contact form and the homepage sentence, both cheap to fix and both capable of losing a visitor who was already sold. Load time and the product page come next, genuinely valuable but slower to execute properly. A full redesign, if one is even needed, comes last, after the cheap fixes have already recovered some of the sales a slow process would have kept losing in the meantime.
The pattern underneath all seven
None of these are dramatic on their own. Together, quietly, they are the difference between a site that supports the sales a business is already capable of making and one that adds friction to every single one of them. Worth an afternoon with the actual analytics before committing to a redesign that may fix none of the real seven.