Website not getting enquiries? Run this 20-minute check

If your website isn’t getting enquiries, check the path a customer takes before anything else. Send a test enquiry from your phone, tap your phone number, and see whether the message arrives. Then spend the rest of the 20 minutes on mobile, speed, tracking and Google Search Console, in that order.

A lot of what loses enquiries is mechanical. A form that stopped sending after a plugin update looks exactly like a quiet month, and so does a phone number nobody can tap. Neither shows up unless you test it.

What should you check first if your website isn’t getting enquiries

Check that an enquiry can reach you at all. A broken form loses every enquiry sent through it, so the contact route comes first.

Here is how the 20 minutes break down:

1. Minutes 0 to 5: test every form and contact link on your phone.
2. Minutes 5 to 9: read the site on a phone as a customer would.
3. Minutes 9 to 13: run your homepage and main service page through PageSpeed Insights.
4. Minutes 13 to 16: check that enquiries are being counted in your analytics.
5. Minutes 16 to 20: check Google Search Console for pages Google can’t index.

You need a phone, a laptop and access to your website email, Google Analytics and Search Console. If you don’t know who holds those logins, that’s the first thing to fix.

How do you test whether your website contact form works

Fill it in yourself on your phone, using an email address that isn’t your business one so you see what a customer sees, including any auto-reply, and time how long the message takes to arrive. If it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes, check the spam folder, then check where the form is set to send.

Things to note while you do it:

• Does the form show a clear confirmation after you press send, or just reload the page?
• Does the enquiry land in an inbox someone reads every day, or in an old address from a former employee?
• Do you get an automatic reply? If so, does it say when you’ll respond?
• Does the phone keyboard switch to numbers for the phone field? Chrome’s sign-in form guidance says type="tel" brings up a telephone keypad on mobile, so this is a small fix for your developer if it doesn’t.

If form emails go to spam, check email authentication first. Gmail’s sender guidelines have required everyone sending to Gmail accounts to set up SPF or DKIM since 1 February 2024, and say messages that aren’t authenticated “might be marked as spam or rejected”. Ask whoever manages your domain whether the form’s messages go out through a mail service that is set up with SPF or DKIM for your domain.

How do you make a phone number clickable on a website

Code it as a tel: link, and put it on every page. MDN notes that on a mobile, “cellular devices autodial the number”. A number in an image can’t be tapped at all.

Tap the number in your header and footer. Then compare the number, address and opening hours with what’s on your Google Business Profile. A solicitor’s office in Manchester that changed its number two years ago and updated only one of them has two versions of itself online, and some customers will ring the old one.

For an online shop, the equivalent is the route to the basket and checkout. Add a product to the basket on your phone and go as far as the payment page, without paying.

How do you check your website works on a phone

Open the site on your phone and try to do what a customer would: find out what you offer, where you are and how to get in touch. Count the taps it takes to reach your phone number or form from the homepage. If it takes more than a tap or two, put the number and an enquiry button in the header.

Under mobile-first indexing, “Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking”, and “Only the content shown on the mobile site is used for indexing.” If your mobile site leaves out the page about emergency call-outs, Google may not count it either.

Check for:

• Buttons and links big enough to tap. web.dev recommends tap targets of around 48 by 48 pixels, roughly 9 mm, spaced about 8 pixels apart.
• Pop-ups that cover the page before it has loaded, especially newsletter boxes on a site whose main job is getting calls.
• Text you have to zoom to read, and tables that run off the side of the screen.

How fast should your website be

Fast enough to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals: the main content should load within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shift score should stay at 0.1 or less. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals “for success with Search”.

Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses for real-user experience. web.dev defines them as:

Metric	What it measures	Good	Poor
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	How long the main content takes to appear	2.5 s or less	over 4 s
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	How quickly the page reacts to a tap or click	200 ms or less	over 500 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	How much the page jumps around while loading	0.1 or less	over 0.25

The “poor” limits come from the Search Console Core Web Vitals report. web.dev recommends measuring each one at the 75th percentile of page loads, on mobile and desktop separately, so a page is good when at least 75% of visits meet the good limit.

To check, paste your homepage into PageSpeed Insights and select Mobile. The report has two parts, and Google’s documentation explains the difference:

• Field data at the top comes from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days. This is the Core Web Vitals assessment, and it passes if all three metrics are good at the 75th percentile. If there isn’t enough INP data, it passes on LCP and CLS alone.
• Lab data underneath is a simulated load on one device and network. It gives the 0 to 100 performance score, where Lighthouse counts 90 and above as good, 50 to 89 as needing improvement and below 50 as poor.

If there isn’t enough real-user data, the field section shows none. In that case, use the lab results and the suggestions under them. The score also varies between runs as conditions change, so run it twice before worrying about a small drop.

How do you know if your website tracking is working

Check that Google Analytics records a test enquiry. If it doesn’t, your reports are undercounting enquiries, and decisions based on them rest on the wrong numbers.

Google Analytics 4 can record form activity through enhanced measurement, which logs form_start the first time someone interacts with a form in a session and form_submit when they submit it. First make sure enhanced measurement is switched on under Admin, Data streams, then open its settings and check that form interactions is on.

Then open the Realtime report (Reports, then Realtime), send a new test enquiry and look for the form_submit event.

Finally, make sure the enquiry counts as a key event, Google’s name for an action that matters to your business. In Admin, under Data display, open Events, find the event and click its star. Taps on your phone number aren’t among the enhanced measurement events Google lists, so counting calls from the site needs a separate custom event.

What should you check in Google Search Console

Check two reports: Page indexing, to make sure Google can index your important pages, and Performance, to see what people search before they click on you. If you haven’t set up Search Console, add a Domain property, verified with a DNS record at your domain provider, and come back to this step once it’s verified and has data. A Domain property includes all subdomains and both http and https.

The Page indexing report splits pages into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each. Google says plainly, “Don’t expect every URL on your site to be indexed”, so focus on your main service pages. If one is missing, paste it into the URL Inspection tool and request indexing. That doesn’t guarantee inclusion, and there’s a daily limit on requests.

The Performance report shows clicks, impressions (how many times your site appeared in results), click-through rate and average position. Sort by impressions. A page with plenty of impressions and very few clicks is being seen and passed over, and its title and description are the place to start.

Website health check example for a small business

Here’s a worked example for a hypothetical plumbing firm in Swindon running the check on a Monday morning.

The enquiry reaches the business mailbox, but the automatic reply to the owner’s personal Gmail lands in spam, because the form sends from the web server and the domain has no SPF or DKIM record for it. A customer using Gmail would never see the confirmation. Fixing the email setup is a job for whoever manages the domain.

On the phone, the number in the header is plain text with no link. That’s a one-line change to a tel: link.

PageSpeed Insights shows no field data, and a lab score of 41 on mobile with LCP at 6.8 seconds, well over the 4-second “poor” line. The top suggestion is a 3 MB photo of a van at the top of the homepage.

Google Analytics has enhanced measurement switched off, so GA4 has no record of how many people started the form and gave up.

Search Console lists the “boiler repair” page as “Crawled - currently not indexed”. Google says that status is common and not always a problem, but for the job the firm most wants it is worth inspecting the URL and requesting indexing.

None of these took long to find, and the missing confirmation and the plain-text phone number both make it harder for a customer to get in touch than it needs to be.

The same check works for any business that takes enquiries online. A dental practice in Leeds would test its new-patient form instead of a quote form, and an estate agent its valuation request.

What to do next

Run the check this week and write down what you find, with the date, so you can compare next month. Fix anything that stops an enquiry reaching you before you spend time on speed scores.

If the check shows the site itself is the problem, our websites page explains how we fix one or build a new one.

If you’d rather have someone else look, Padon’s free check compares your site with your competition nearby and emails a short report within two working days.