Home/Guides/Six most common mistakes
Six mistakes
almost every older site has.
What they share: none raises an error, none stops the site loading. So they sit there for years unnoticed while quietly turning customers away. The good news is that all six can be checked without any technical background.
One: the phone number cannot be tapped
On a phone, seeing a number makes people tap to call. If those digits are only text and do nothing, the customer has to memorise them, switch to the dialler and type them in — most people will not do all three.
How to check: open your site on a phone and tap the number. Nothing happens? That is this problem.
Why it happens: whoever built it tested on a desktop, where numbers are not tappable anyway, so nothing looked wrong. It is a quick fix, and the customers lost to it are real.
Two: the home page does not say what you do
Plenty of home pages lead with "Professional · Dedicated · Trusted", or a company vision statement. The visitor still does not know what you do or where you are.
How to check: show the home page to someone who does not know your business for three seconds, then ask what the company does and where. If they cannot answer, that is this problem.
Why it happens: you know your own business so well that stating it feels unnecessary. But every visitor is arriving for the first time. The headline should be "Family dentistry in Flushing, open weekends" — not adjectives.
Three: contact details buried too deep
Two or three taps to find a phone number or address. Or a single "Contact us" page with no number anywhere else.
How to check: open any inner page and see whether contact details are visible without scrolling. If not, they are buried.
Why it happens: a desire for clean design pushed contact details onto their own page. But customers decide to contact you from whichever page they are on, and will not go back to the home page to hunt for a route. The number belongs in the header or footer on every page.
Four: the photos are stock images
Obviously library photos — unfamiliar faces, a setting nothing like your actual premises.
How to check: ask yourself whether this photograph was taken in your own shop. If not, customers can probably tell too.
Why it happens: no photos were ready at build time, stock images went in as a placeholder, everyone agreed to replace them later, and later never came. A real storefront photo from a phone outperforms any stock image — customers want to know what this place looks like, not what the industry looks like.
Five: every page has the same title
The text on the browser tab is your company name on every single page.
How to check: open several inner pages in turn and read the browser tab. All identical? That is the problem.
Why it happens: this field is invisible on the page itself, appearing only in tabs and search results, so it is the easiest to overlook. But it is Google’s primary signal for what a page is about — identical across the site tells Google the pages are interchangeable. This is the most common and most easily fixed ranking mistake there is.
Six: form submissions never arrive
The page says "thank you" while not a single email goes out.
How to check: submit the form yourself using a real address, then confirm the email actually arrived. Repeat every six months.
Why it happens: mail settings quietly break when hosting changes, an email address changes, or a provider changes policy — and the failure is silent, with the page still showing success. Owners typically notice months later, wondering why nobody has been in touch, and the customers lost in between cannot be recovered.
The sixth is the expensive one. The first five make the experience worse; the sixth means a customer already decided to contact you, typed out a message, and had it vanish. That is a mistake whose cost can be calculated directly.
Why these are so widespread
Because they share one property: they raise no error.
A site that will not load, you learn about the same day. A number that will not dial, duplicate titles, a silently failing form — none of these trigger any alarm, and the site looks entirely normal. The people who discover them are usually not you, but customers who failed to reach you and went elsewhere. They do not come back to tell you.
So problems like this can only be caught by deliberate periodic checks. Run these six every six months, and after any significant change to the site.
Questions this article gets
How many is serious?
The sixth alone warrants immediate action, because it is losing customers directly. Two or three of the first five is common — fix them one at a time. But all six together usually means nobody has genuinely looked after the site since it launched, and it is worth reassessing repair versus rebuild: see rebuild the old site or improve it.
Are these expensive to fix?
The first five are mostly small changes, usually resolvable on an hourly basis. The sixth depends on where the mail chain broke, but diagnosing it is not complex. What is genuinely expensive is leaving them, because the loss is continuous and invisible.
Why did the builder not spot them?
Usually a process problem: built on a desktop, signed off on a desktop, with no complete walk-through of the customer journey on a real phone before launch.
Which is why it is worth asking, when hiring: which devices do you actually test on before launch? Anyone naming specific models has usually tested.
Anything else worth checking?
Yes. Mobile loading speed and layout are a whole other category — see your site is slow and awkward on a phone. For not being found at all, see six months live and still not found.
Free marketing review
Not sure how much growth your website is leaving on the table?
Send us your website and industry. We will review your site, search visibility, Google Maps presence and social footprint, and tell you the three things worth fixing first.