7 signs your website is scaring people off

Most business owners assume people leave their site because the price was wrong or the timing was off. Sometimes that's true. But a lot of the time, visitors bounce in the first 8 seconds because something on the page made the business feel not quite real, or not quite right for them. They don't email to explain why. They just go.

Here are the seven things I see most often. If your site does more than two of these, it's costing you inquiries.

1. The text is unreadable on a phone

Pull up your site on your actual phone right now. Not desktop. If you have to pinch to zoom to read a paragraph, so does every customer finding you through Google. And most of your visitors are on a phone. They won't pinch. They'll leave.

Body text needs to be at least 16px. Buttons need to be big enough to tap without swearing.

2. Nobody can figure out how to reach you

I've seen sites where the phone number is buried on a page called "About," halfway down, in gray text on a light gray background. A potential customer who already wants to hire you should not have to dig for your number. That friction has a cost.

Put a phone number or contact link in the top navigation and repeat it at the bottom of every page. Make it a real tap-to-call link on mobile. That's it.

3. Stock photos of people who don't work there

You know the ones. A woman in a headset laughing at nothing. A handshake in front of a blurred skyline. Visitors recognize these instantly, and the moment they do, they stop trusting the rest of the page. It signals that nobody bothered to show you the real business.

Even a slightly blurry photo of your actual workspace or your actual face beats any stock image at building trust. You can look polished without looking fake.

4. The site loads slowly

Google's own research found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Your customers aren't more patient than that. A slow site also ranks lower in search, so you end up paying twice: fewer visitors arrive, and fewer of those stay.

A bloated homepage image, an old theme loading 40 scripts nobody uses, or a cheap shared server can all do this. A slow website is quietly working against you even on days when you feel like everything is going fine. The fix isn't complicated, but it does require someone to actually look.

5. No prices, no range, nothing

Some owners keep pricing off the site to stay flexible on quotes. I understand that. But if a visitor can't find even a ballpark or a line explaining how your pricing works, a meaningful share of them assume they can't afford you and disappear without ever asking.

You don't have to post a rate card. "Projects typically start around $1,800" or "most clients spend between $400 and $900 a month" filters tire-kickers and reassures real buyers at the same time. One sentence does a lot of work.

6. The last update was years ago

A copyright notice that says 2019. A blog with one post from three years back. A "coming soon" section that has been coming soon for a very long time. All of these tell a visitor that nobody is minding the store. Even if your business is thriving right now, the site suggests otherwise.

Update the copyright year automatically (one line of code). If you have a news or blog section, either post occasionally or remove it entirely. A smaller, maintained site looks better than a bigger neglected one every single time.

7. No social proof anywhere on the page

Reviews, testimonials, a recognizable client name, a before-and-after photo, the number of jobs completed. Something that tells a stranger that real people have hired you and were glad they did. Without it, you're asking every visitor to just take your word for everything.

You don't need 47 five-star reviews in a spinning carousel. Two or three specific, believable quotes from named customers (first name, city, type of project) will do more work than any generic "trusted by hundreds" badge. "Jane from Columbus" who says you finished two days early is concrete. Concrete is what converts.

Worth noting: these same friction points show up whether someone finds you through search or through a referral. If you want to go deeper on why good-looking sites still underperform, the real cost of a good-enough website gets into the numbers.

None of these fixes are complicated. They just require someone who's looking at the site as a visitor would, not as the owner who already knows where everything lives. Tell me what you have and I'll take a look.