Why does my website get visits but no calls?

Your website gets visitors. Your Google listing says people are clicking through. Maybe a web designer has shown you a graph going up. But the phone isn’t ringing any more than it was.

That’s one of the most frustrating spots to be in, because it feels like the hard part (getting found) is done. Usually it is. The problem is the last few seconds: what someone sees when they land, and whether getting in touch is easy. The good news is that most of the causes are quick to test and cheap to fix.

First, check the visits are real

Before you change anything, find out who’s visiting. Two free places to look:

• Your Google Business Profile. Open your profile and choose Performance. Google’s help pages define website clicks as “The number of times people clicked on the website link on your Business Profile” and calls as “The number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile”. These are people who found you on Google and wanted to know more.
• Google Search Console. Google calls it “a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results”. It shows the searches your site appeared for and how many people clicked.

Look at the searches. If people are finding you for “tree surgeon Marlborough” and you’re a tree surgeon in Marlborough, those are customers. If they’re finding you for “how to fell a tree yourself”, “tree surgeon apprenticeship” or a town 50 miles away, the visits were never going to ring. That’s a traffic problem, not a website problem, and it’s covered further down.

If the searches look right and the visits are real, the problem is on the site. Here are the usual causes, roughly in the order we find them.

1. The phone number isn’t a button

On a phone, a customer should be able to tap your number and it starts dialling. On a surprising number of trade sites, the number is just text, or a picture of text, so the customer has to remember it, switch apps and type it in. Plenty don’t bother.

Test it: open your site on your own phone, find the number, and tap it. Does the dialler open with the right number in it?

Fix it: the number needs to be a link that starts tel: followed by your number in international form. For a made-up number, the code looks like this:

<a href="tel:+447700900123">07700 900123</a>

If you can’t see how to do that in your website builder, look up phone links in its help pages, or ask whoever built your site. Put it at the top of every page and again near the bottom.

2. It’s slow on a phone

People who find a trade on Google are mostly on a phone, often on a weak signal. If the page takes several seconds to show anything, they press back and try the next firm.

Google’s web.dev site measures this with Largest Contentful Paint, the time until the biggest image or block of text on the screen shows. It says a good score is “2.5 seconds or less”, and anything over 4 seconds is poor. Put your address into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and check the mobile result.

The usual culprits: huge photos straight off a phone, background video, slideshows, and too many add-ons loading at once.

3. It doesn’t say what you do and where

A visitor needs to know in a few seconds that you do the job they need, in the place they live. A one-page site with a slogan, a photo and “get in touch” doesn’t tell them.

What we have seen

Benny’s Barbershop in Swindon had 141 five-star Google reviews and about 260 clicks a month from his Google listing to his website, in the six months to September 2026. The website they landed on had 52 words on one page: no prices, no list of services and none of his reviews. On a throttled phone test it took 8.9 seconds to show its main content. His listing also had no phone number, and his address differed between the listing, his booking app and the old site. All measured on 28 September 2026. Read the case study.

That’s a barber rather than a trade, but it’s the clearest example we have of visits being wasted. The listing was doing the hard work, and the site was letting those people down. We rebuilt it on 28 September 2026: his real prices, his services, his reviews, booking from every page, and 3.5 seconds on the same phone test. The first month’s results go on the case study when the month is up, whatever they show.

Fix it: your trade and your town in the first line, your main services and the towns you cover in the next, and a page for each. We go through the first screen line by line, with real examples, in what should be on a trade website’s first screen.

4. There’s no proof

Customers are choosing between you and two or three others. If your site has no reviews, no photos of real work, and stock photos where your work should be, you look like the riskier choice.

Fix it:

• Your Google rating and number of reviews near the top.
• Three or four real reviews, word for word, with a first name and village.
• Your own photos of real jobs. Before and after if your work suits it.
• Anything true and checkable: insured, certified, registered, years trading.

5. The form doesn’t reach you

This is the one that hurts most, because you never know it’s happening. The customer fills it in, presses send, sees “thanks, we’ll be in touch”, and waits. You never get it. They ring someone else.

Common causes: the form sends to an old email address, the emails land in junk, the form’s connection to your email or system was never set up, or a website change broke it months ago.

How to test your own form and phone link

Do this now, on your own phone, then again on a computer. It takes five minutes.

1. Tap your number on the home page, a service page and the contact page. Each should open the dialler with the right number.
2. Ring it from a different phone while you’re busy, and let it go unanswered. What happens? Voicemail? A text back? Nothing at all?
3. Fill in your form as a customer would, using a name you’ll recognise (“Test Smith”) and an email address that isn’t the one the form sends to.
4. Time how long it takes to arrive, and note where it lands: inbox, junk, or nowhere.
5. Check the customer side. Did the “customer” get a reply or confirmation? Does it make sense?
6. Try the form with a photo attached, if your form allows photos. Large photos from a phone are a common thing to break.
7. Repeat every month, and after any change to the site.

If the test enquiry doesn’t arrive, assume every real one since the problem started has gone missing too. Fix it before you spend a penny on getting more visitors.

6. They’re the wrong visitors

If the searches in Search Console aren’t ones a customer would type, more visits won’t help. Common causes:

• Blog posts or pages ranking for how-to searches. Useful, but the people reading them want to do it themselves.
• Pages ranking in towns you don’t cover, or for services you don’t do.
• Bots. Some of what shows up as visits isn’t people at all.
• Paid traffic aimed too wide, if you’re running ads. More on that in are Google Ads worth it for a trade.

Fix it: make sure your pages are about what customers search for: your services, in the towns you cover, in the words they use.

7. They did get in touch, and nobody got back to them

Sometimes the site worked. The customer rang while you were up a ladder, didn’t leave a voicemail, and booked someone else. Or they sent a message at 9pm and heard nothing until the next afternoon.

From your side, it looks like the website brought nothing. From theirs, the firm didn’t answer. A missed call from a mobile can get a text back automatically while you’re working; we explain how in missed call text back. And once you’ve quoted, keep at it: how to follow up a quote has word-for-word messages.

What to do this week

1. Check your Google Business Profile Performance screen and Search Console. Are the visits real customers?
2. Tap your number on your own phone, on three different pages.
3. Send yourself a test enquiry through the form and see where it lands.
4. Ring your own number and let it go unanswered. See what the customer gets.
5. Read your first screen on a phone. Does it say your trade, your town and how to get in touch?
6. Put your Google rating and three real reviews on the home page.
7. Run your home page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.

How we do it, and why it works

When we take on a trade, the first thing we do is count: every call, every form, every message, from the same records each time, so we know what the site is actually doing instead of guessing from a graph.

Then the three parts of the work:

• Found: your Google listing set up and worked every week, a review asked for after every job, and a website built to be called, fast on a phone, with your number one tap away on every screen.
• Answered: calls ring you as they always have. A missed call from a mobile gets a text back in your name, every form and message is replied to in your name, anyone who goes quiet is followed up, and every quote is chased to a yes or a no.
• Counted: after each enquiry a text asks whether you won it and for how much. Once a month, one page: what came in, what you won, what it was worth.

It works because it fixes both ends of the problem: the site turns visits into calls and forms, and nothing that comes in goes unanswered. You pay nothing until you’ve won £500 of work through us. The free check shows who Google lists for your trade in your town and where you sit.