Analytics shows five thousand visits a month, Google finds you for what you do, and the phone rings exactly as often as it did before the website existed. This is the most common and most frustrating place a company with a website ends up in: money spent, traffic arriving, enquiries nowhere.
The good news is that traffic is not the problem. Traffic is proof that the problem is somewhere else and that it can be found. People found your site, opened it and left. That narrows the search down to the few dozen seconds in between.
This article is about the five reasons those seconds end in someone leaving. Each comes with a test you can run on your own site this afternoon without a single tool, plus the numbers it follows from.
One number first, because it explains the rest
Before we get to the website, it helps to understand when a customer actually visits it. Research into B2B buying journeys, based on nearly four thousand buyer responses, says a buyer contacts a supplier only 61 per cent of the way through the journey. Until then the supplier has no idea they exist.
When a buyer first becomes visible to you
Composition in per cent
- Deciding alone, on whatever they can find61%
- Talking to a supplier39%
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Deciding alone, on whatever they can find | 61% |
| Talking to a supplier | 39% |
Those numbers have a practical consequence that fits in one sentence: in that first and longer part of the journey, your website represents you and nothing else does. There is no salesperson in the room, no chance to clarify what you meant, no way to ask what the customer actually needs. The site plays the whole scene alone.
And one more figure from the same research, because it is where the urgency comes from: four out of five deals go to the supplier the buyer had already picked as their favourite before the first contact, and 95 per cent of the time the winner was on the shortlist the buyer drew up on day one. An enquiry is rarely the start of a competition. It is usually the announcement of its result.
An enquiry is not the beginning of a decision. It is the confirmation of one made while you were not there
Reason 1: the site talks about the company instead of the customer
This is the most common and most expensive mistake, because it can be fixed in a day and it decides everything else.
Open your home page and read the first two sentences the way somebody who has never heard of you reads them. If they say you are a dynamic company with a long tradition and a focus on quality, you have told the customer exactly one thing: that you are the same as the three sites they had open before yours.
Ten seconds is two sentences and one heading. Company history does not fit in there, and neither does the word synergy. Exactly one thing fits: what you do, who for, and what is different about it compared to the competition.
We are a dynamic company with a long tradition in the market. Our goal is maximum customer satisfaction and an individual approach to every order. We have modern technological equipment at our disposal.
We build steel structures up to 20 tonnes for industrial buildings. Survey and quote within 48 hours, production in Kyjov, installation anywhere in the country. Three years without a single complaint about a missed deadline.
The difference between those two paragraphs is not better words. It is a different subject of the sentence. The left one talks about the company, the right one about the job the customer needs doing.
A five minute test: go through the headings on your site and count how many start with we or our. Then count how many contain what the customer is looking for: a specific product, service, material, capacity, lead time. If the first number wins, you have reason number one.
Reason 2: there is no path to action
The second most common fault is the opposite of what you would expect. It is not that a button is missing. There usually is one, once, in the header. It is that at the end of every page the visitor has no idea what to do next.
A company website tends to have this structure: home, about us, services, contact. A visitor arrives from search on a single service page, reads it, and the page ends. The last paragraph is about technology, then comes the footer. Anyone who wants to continue has to find their own way into the menu and pick contact. Most people will not, because nobody asked them to.
| Where the customer is | What they need | What the site offers |
|---|---|---|
| Still comparing | Evidence you have done this before | A link to two case studies about this exact service |
| Wondering whether they can afford it | A ballpark price or scope | A from price, or at least a range to start from |
| Decided to find out more | To ask something specific, fast | An enquiry in two clicks and a phone somebody answers |
A five minute test: close the menu and walk the site using only links inside the text, as if the menu did not exist. If the end of each page leaves you nowhere, the path to action is missing.
Reason 3: the form as a crutch
An enquiry form tends to be the last emergency brake: the site explained nothing and led nowhere, so let the form save it. Except a form saves nothing. It only subtracts.
The hardest data on what a needlessly long form does to people comes from ecommerce checkouts, not from enquiry forms. The mechanism is the same, so here it is along with that caveat.
Translate that to an enquiry. The customer is 61 per cent of the way through the journey, wants one answer, and you are asking for a company registration number, an address, their job title, a budget and how they heard about you. Every one of those fields is a question they have no reason to answer at that moment.
| Keep | Why | Drop |
|---|---|---|
| A name | So you can reply to a person, not to a company | Title, job role, department |
| Email or phone, their choice | Get back to them where it suits them | Both email and phone as required fields |
| What they need, as free text | The single most valuable field in the whole form | Budget, registration number, address, how they heard about you |
| An optional attachment | On a technical enquiry it saves three emails | A mandatory tickbox that looks like consent to marketing |
And one more thing related to forms, often worse than the form itself: there is no human being visible on the site. The phone number is in the footer only, nobody has a name or a face, and the address is info@. A customer with a technical question who wants to check it on a call has just lost the reason to make it.
A five minute test: count the fields in your form that are not needed for a first reply. Then find a phone number on the site without scrolling to the footer. If there are more than four and you did not find the number, you have reason number three.
Reason 4: there is no evidence you can do it
Back to the number from the beginning. A buyer has around five suppliers on the list, three of them were there on day one, and the winner is the one they took a liking to before the first call. At that stage they cannot ring you and ask. They can only look at what you can prove.
Proof is not a strip of client logos on the home page. Those show that you once invoiced somebody. Proof is the description of one job: what the brief was, what was hard about it, what you did and how it ended. Ideally with a number and a date.
Case studies: twelve logos in a grey strip on the home page, no description, no link, no date. With half of them the work stopped three years ago.
Case studies: three write ups of two paragraphs each. Brief, solution, timeline and one result figure. Linked from the page of the service they belong to.
Three honest case studies work better than twenty logos and you can write them in an afternoon. The question they answer is not who you know, but whether you have done exactly this before and how it turned out.
A five minute test: find one specific number about the result of your work on the site. Not about the company, about the result. If there is none, the customer has nothing to base a decision on and will base it on whoever gave them something.
Reason 5: on a phone it is a different website
The last reason is technical and the easiest to measure. You open your own site on the computer you approved it on. Your customer does not.
What people browse from in the Czech Republic
Composition in per cent
- Desktop52.7%
- Mobile46%
- Tablet1.3%
Total 100%
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Desktop | 52.7% |
| Mobile | 46% |
| Tablet | 1.3% |
Just under half. In B2B it tends to be lower than in consumer sales, but it is still every second visit, and more importantly: first contact with your website now routinely happens on a phone, while somebody is looking for a supplier on the way back from a meeting. Checking it on a computer comes later.
On a phone three things add up at once. A slow connection, small type and buttons sitting on top of each other. Speed decides the most, because it decides how many people reach the content at all.
How much enquiries drop with every second of load time
| Label | 1 s | 2 s | 3 s | 4 s | 5 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiries from the same traffic | 100 | 86 | 72 | 54 | 34 |
The difference between one second and five is three times the enquiries from the same traffic. This is not about the impression of speed. It is about the number of people who ever reach the content.
That it also works the other way round, meaning that speeding a site up genuinely adds enquiries, has been measured on lead generation sites directly.
An honest note on both figures: the first is a correlation, not a proven cause. Fast sites tend to be better built in general, so part of the difference belongs to that. Only controlled tests where nothing but speed changed prove causation, and one exists: Vodafone Italy made content render 31 per cent faster and sales rose 8 per cent for the half of visitors who got the faster version.
A five minute test: take your phone, turn wifi off and open the site on mobile data. Time how long it takes before you can read the first heading. Then try to submit an enquiry one handed. Reason five needs no tools at all.
What those five reasons cost you
As long as this stays a list of faults, nobody fixes it, so let us translate it into money. The calculation below is a model, not a measurement: put your own numbers in and the shape stays the same.
Take a company with a thousand website visits a month. One visit in two hundred turns into an enquiry, so half a per cent, because three of the five reasons above apply. After the fixes the site reaches two and a half per cent, which is nothing exceptional for a site collecting enquiries.
Enquiries per month from a thousand visits, by conversion rate
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Site with all five reasons (0.5%) | 5 |
| After fixing copy and the path to action (1.5%) | 15 |
| After fixing speed and case studies too (2.5%) | 25 |
The difference is twenty enquiries a month from traffic you have already paid for. If you close two out of ten enquiries and the margin on one job is CZK 15,000, that difference is CZK 60,000 a month. The fixes in this article are a few days of work, not tens of thousands.
That is the whole reason conversion comes before any further spending on traffic. Doubling traffic takes months and costs money every month. Doubling conversion happens once and keeps paying.
How to find out where people actually leave
Five reasons are a hypothesis. Here is how to work out which one applies to you, without expensive tools and without tracking individual people.
- Look at the queries, not the counts. Google Search Console shows for free which queries you appear for and how many people clicked. If you appear for generic terms and few people click, the problem sits before the website, not on it.
- Track pages, not the whole site. What matters is how many visits a specific service page gets and how many of them continue to contact or to the form. A number for the whole site hides exactly that.
- Put one phone number on the site that appears nowhere else. Then you know which calls came from the website, and you do not have to track anybody to find out.
- Measure reads, not visits. If people leave in the first ten seconds, it is reason one or speed. If they read to the end and still send nothing, it is the path to action, the form or missing evidence.
- Call three customers who did send an enquiry. Ask what they looked for on the site, what they could not find, and what convinced them in the end. Five minutes on the phone beats a month of guessing.
None of this needs a consent banner, because you do not need to know who a particular visitor is. You need to know where the path breaks.
Which of the five is yours
Few sites have all five. This process shows which one is behind your silent phone, and in what order to deal with it.
- 1Measure mobile speed in PageSpeed Insights. Below 75, start here: there is no point in the other four reasons until people reach the content.
- 2Read the first two sentences of the home page out loud to somebody outside your industry and ask them what the company does and who for. If they cannot say, fix the copy before anything else.
- 3Walk the site without the menu, using only links in the text. Wherever the path ends in nothing, add the next step.
- 4Count the fields in your enquiry form and drop every one you do not need for a first reply. Put a phone number near the top of the page and the name of the person who answers it.
- 5Write three case studies of two paragraphs each and link them from the service pages they belong to. This is an afternoon of work with the biggest effect on who the customer takes a liking to.
The order is not arbitrary. The first two steps decide whether anybody reads the content at all. The other three decide whether a reader turns into an enquiry.
When the problem is not the website
So that this is not just a list of your own mistakes: there are cases where the site is fine and enquiries still do not come. Here is how to spot them.
- The wrong traffic is arriving. The site wins search for a generic term that students and competitors look up, not customers. Check which queries you appear for and whether they are the queries of somebody who wants to buy.
- Enquiries arrive and nobody reads them. The form emails an address set up by somebody who has left the company, or it lands in spam. Test it yourself from an unrelated address. This is the cheapest possible fault and it happens surprisingly often.
- The reply takes a week. A buyer contacts five suppliers and decides within days. Whoever answers on day three is competing for what is left.
- The site is not about what the company actually sells. The company makes its money on servicing, but the whole site is about manufacturing. Then service enquiries do not come, and that is logical.
Related articleWhat a website that does all of this costs, and what pushes the price upA website that leads nowhere is not badly written. It is unfinished
Frequently asked questions
I have traffic but no enquiries. What should I check first?
Mobile speed and the first two sentences of the home page. Speed decides how many people reach the content: on sites collecting enquiries the conversion rate falls from just under 40 per cent at a one second load to 13 per cent at five seconds. The first two sentences decide whether the ones who got there stay.
How many enquiries are normal?
There is no normal number, because it depends on what traffic arrives. A ratio is more useful: how many visits to a specific service page end in a submitted enquiry or a call. Track that ratio against your own past, not against somebody else's benchmark.
Will adding more Contact us buttons help?
On its own, barely. A button works when it sits at the end of content that convinced the customer and when it is clear what happens next. Before that it is just another thing to skip. Adding links to relevant case studies and a ballpark price at the end of a service page does more.
How many fields should an enquiry form have?
As many as you need for a first reply, usually three or four. You can ask for the rest in the first email. Checkout data shows 26 per cent of people leave purely because of length and complexity, and on an enquiry, where the customer is not buying anything yet, patience is lower rather than higher.
Do case studies on a website really matter?
In B2B they matter more than copy about the company. A buyer contacts a supplier only 61 per cent of the way through the journey, and four out of five deals go to the one they had already picked as a favourite. At that stage they cannot call you. They can only look at what you can prove.
How many visitors come from a phone?
In the Czech Republic mobile accounts for 46 per cent of visits across all websites, desktop for 52.7 per cent and tablets for 1.3 per cent (June 2026). B2B sites tend to see less mobile, but first contact with a site now routinely happens on a phone, with the desktop check coming later.
Can I just rewrite the copy instead of building a new site?
Often yes, and it is the cheapest step. Copy and the path to action are two of the five reasons and can be fixed on any website. A new site makes sense where you cannot get into the current one, where the structure cannot be changed, or where it is so slow that nobody will ever see the improved copy.
How do I rule out an email delivery problem?
Send an enquiry from an address with no connection to the company and watch how long it takes and who receives it. Check the spam folder too, and whether the address in the form settings belongs to somebody who actually still works there. It is the cheapest possible cause of a silent phone.
Summary
- Traffic without enquiries means the problem lies in what happens during the first few dozen seconds on the page, not in search.
- A B2B buyer contacts a supplier only 61 per cent of the way through the journey, and four out of five deals go to the supplier they already favoured. In that phase your website is your only representative.
- The five most common reasons: the site talks about the company instead of the customer, the content leads nowhere, the form asks for things nobody cares about yet, there is no evidence of results, and on a phone the site is slow.
- Deal with speed first: the difference between one second and five is three times the enquiries from the same traffic.
- The best effort to result ratio comes from three case studies and rewritten opening sentences. Both are an afternoon of work.
- Before rebuilding anything, rule out the silly causes: the wrong traffic, a form emailing into the void, and a reply that takes a week.
Want to know which of the five is yours
Send me your website address and what you expect from it. I will go through it against this list and tell you what I would fix first and what is not worth touching. If the answer is to rewrite the copy and leave the site alone, I will say so.
Send a no obligation enquiry or look at the case studies to see how I build these pages.
Sources
- 6sense: The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025
- Nielsen Norman Group: How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages
- Portent: Site Speed is Still Impacting Your Conversion Rate
- Google and Deloitte: Milliseconds Make Millions
- Baymard Institute: Checkout Optimization, Minimize Form Fields
- StatCounter Global Stats: device share in the Czech Republic