Most of the sites I get asked to look at are not broken in any dramatic way. They load, the pages are there, the phone number works. What is usually wrong is a handful of small design decisions that quietly cost the business leads every single day. I wanted to write out the ten I run into most often, and what I do about each one.
1. Ignoring Mobile
Websites stopped being desktop-first a long time ago, but plenty of sites are still built that way. I had a client whose sales had flatlined despite solid traffic, and the cause was simple — the site was a mess on a phone. After a responsive rebuild their conversion rate went up, and stayed up.
The fix: build mobile-first, so the layout is designed for the smallest screen and grows into larger ones, rather than the other way around.
2. Overloading the Page
It is tempting to put everything on the homepage. A cluttered page overwhelms people and they leave. Think of the site as a boutique, not a flea market — whitespace, short sections, lists, and a supporting image here and there keep people reading.
The fix: strip each page down to what it needs to say, with the value proposition and the call to action clearly ahead of everything else.
3. Reinventing Navigation
Creativity is great, but not in the menu. People expect a horizontal nav at the top or a vertical one down the left, and anything else costs them a second of confusion they will not give you. I once reworked a site that had a circular "creative" navigation. It looked cool and nobody could use it. We switched to a standard layout and usability went up immediately.
The fix: familiar navigation patterns, labeled the way your customers would say it.
4. Weak Call-to-Action Buttons
Buttons are the point of the page. They need to stand out and say exactly what happens when you click. On one project, changing the primary button from grey to a color that actually contrasted with the page produced a clear lift in clicks with no other changes. Size, color, and placement all matter, and they should follow the hierarchy of the page rather than fight it.
The fix: one clear, high-contrast primary action per page, worded as the thing the user gets ("Request a quote," not "Submit").
5. Slow Load Times
A slow site is a turn-off before anyone has read a word. Google's own Core Web Vitals benchmark for a good experience is the main content loading within 2.5 seconds, and it uses those measurements as a ranking signal. The fastest win, almost every time, is images — file size and actual pixel dimensions both. I worked with an ecommerce site that went from a six-second load to under two mostly by compressing and resizing images, and their bounce rate dropped and page views climbed as a direct result.
The fix: run the site through Google PageSpeed Insights and start with whatever it flags first, which is usually images.
6. Poor Color and Contrast
Color guides behavior, and contrast decides whether people can read the page at all. I have fixed a number of sites where the only change was increasing text contrast, and people stayed on the page longer afterward.
The fix: a palette that matches the brand, with enough contrast to be legible on a phone in daylight, and no colors that read as disabled or "greyed out" on interactive elements.
7. No Trust Signals
People want a reason to believe you before they contact you. Real reviews (from Google, Yelp, or Facebook, where they can be verified), certifications, and guarantees do that work. Adding verifiable testimonials to one client's homepage improved conversions on its own.
The fix: put reviews and any credentials near the call to action, not buried on an About page.
8. Complicated Forms
Long forms scare people off. Cutting a client's signup form from ten fields to four increased conversions noticeably.
The fix: ask only for what you need to follow up (usually name, email, and one question). Everything else you can gather after they have converted.
9. Designing Without SEO in Mind
A beautiful site nobody can find is a billboard in the desert. Proper heading structure, fast load times, and a mobile-friendly layout are design decisions as much as they are SEO decisions, and they need to be made at the start, not retrofitted.
The fix: bring SEO into the wireframe stage — page structure, URL slugs, and heading hierarchy — before any visual design happens.
10. Never Testing or Updating
What works today may not work next year. Regular A/B testing of headlines, buttons, and forms tells you what your users actually respond to instead of what you assume they do.
The fix: pick one thing to test a month. Small, consistent changes beat a full redesign every three years.
The Bottom Line
None of these are hard to fix on their own, they just tend to pile up. Your website is the first impression most customers get of you, and these are the places where that impression falls apart.
If you think your site might have a few of these, me and my team can take a look. The contact form at the bottom of this page is the quickest way to reach us — send your site URL and I will run through this list against it and tell you where I would start.
