Where enquiries were getting lost on our own website

01 · Problem

The website has visitors, but nobody gets in touch

Business owners describe it in similar terms: the website exists, it looks decent, but the phone does not ring and no emails arrive. There can be many causes. Some are in the offer and the copy, some are purely technical and cannot be seen from outside.

02 · What we observed

Three places where an enquiry was getting lost

These are not textbook examples. We found all three on our own website while preparing it.

• A form that worked on only one address. On the production domain the enquiry was sent. On the test address the form reported that it could not send the message. The cause was the address of the service, written in a way that was valid on only one domain.
• A button without a number. The WhatsApp button was on the page before there was a real phone number behind it.
• A long way to the contact. When we measured an older version in August 2026, the opening of the page was about 9,900 pixels tall, roughly eleven screens, before a person reached a way to get in touch.

A fourth finding came later: addresses that did not exist on the site did not answer with a “page not found” error but with a redirect to the homepage. That is confusing for a visitor and misleading for a search engine.

03 · Method

Walking the route of an enquiry step by step

Instead of judging the look, we walk one specific route: a person arrives on the page, understands the offer, finds a way to get in touch, sends a message, and the message reaches someone. At each step we ask what can go wrong and whether we would notice at all.

04 · Tool

Checks that stop the build

We turned some of these questions into automatic checks. The website build does not complete if a real phone number is missing, if a link leads to a page or anchor that does not exist, if a translation is missing on the homepage or if a script has a syntax error.

An AI assistant helped us search the source code and the build. We treat its findings as leads: we verify them before fixing anything, and a person decides on the change.

05 · Human verification

What an automatic check cannot tell

An automatic check cannot say whether a message really arrived in the inbox and whether the person who receives it understands it. A person has to verify that: send a real enquiry from a phone and from a computer and look whether it arrived.

Equally, no tool can judge whether a visitor understood the offer. That has to be shown to someone who does not know the business.

06 · What changes

What we changed

• The address of the service that receives the form is written so that it works on both the production and the test domain.
• The build refuses to complete without a real phone number.
• A way to get in touch is in the header and in several places on the page, not only at its end.
• A real “not found” page is prepared for addresses that do not exist.

07 · What we learned

What we take from it

• A lost enquiry is invisible. Nobody writes to tell you the form failed to send.
• Most of the faults were not in the design but on the route between the button and the inbox.
• A check that runs on every build is more reliable than a good intention to check by hand.

How many enquiries these faults cost we do not know, so we give no number.

08 · Related service

If you recognise yourself in this

We walk client websites the same way before we propose anything new. More on how we work is under websites and landing pages.