Practical

Six signs your website is quietly costing you enquiries

Most websites that underperform are not ugly. They look fine to the person who commissioned them, which is exactly why the problem survives. The failures are usually invisible from the inside — they happen to people who left without telling you. Here are six checks you can run yourself, today, without buying anything.

17 September 2026 · 7 min read · TwinFusion

1. Open it on your phone, on mobile data

Not on office Wi-Fi. Turn Wi-Fi off and load your homepage on a normal connection. Count the seconds until you can read something and tap something.

If it takes more than about three seconds, you are losing people before the site has said a word. Most visitors in Kenya arrive on a phone, often on a connection that is nothing like your office.

2. View the page source and search for your own sentences

Right-click, View Page Source, then search for a sentence from your homepage. If it is not there, your content is being assembled by JavaScript after the page loads.

Search engines mostly cope with this. AI assistants largely do not. If your text is not in the source, you are invisible to the tools an increasing number of customers now ask first.

3. Count how many clicks it takes to contact you

From the homepage, how many taps to reach a phone number that dials? If the answer is more than one, you are asking a ready customer to work for it. Phone numbers should be tappable links, not images or plain text.

4. Search Google for your business name plus your city

Look at what appears. Is it your site, or a directory listing, or a competitor? Does the description underneath read like something you wrote, or has Google invented one from stray page text because you never set a meta description?

That snippet is often the first sentence anyone reads about you. It is worth controlling.

5. Ask an AI assistant about your industry in your city

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the question a customer would ask — "who supplies commercial tyres in Nairobi", or whatever fits your business. See whether you are named, and whether what it says about you is correct.

If you are absent, that is a growing share of demand you are not in. If you are present but described wrongly, that is worse, and it is fixable.

6. Send your link to someone on WhatsApp

Watch what preview appears. A blank grey box, or the wrong image, or no description, is how your link looks every single time anyone shares it. That preview is set by a few lines of metadata that take minutes to fix and are missing from most sites.

What to do with the results

If you failed one or two of these, they are quick, specific fixes. If you failed four or more, the problem is structural — usually a site built for how it looks rather than how it is found — and patching individual items will not move much.

Either way, the checks above cost nothing and nobody needs to sell them to you. Run them before you buy anything.

Want this checked on your own site?

We will look at it and write back within one business day — speed, search visibility, and what the AI assistants currently say about you.

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