Web Design Agency: Site Changes Over Four Weeks

A web design agency came to me through a referral. Someone they knew suggested they should take a look at their website. They had traffic coming in. Around 300 visitors a month. But they weren’t getting many inquiries from it.

Looking at the data, they received maybe one or two inquiries per month. That seemed low for the amount of traffic they were getting. They mentioned the site felt slow when they used it. The layout was cluttered. The call to action wasn’t obvious. When I looked at the page load time, it was 4.8 seconds. Not unusually slow, but noticeable.

We made changes over four weeks. Here’s what we did and what happened.

They came through a referral, which meant they were already thinking something could be better. They weren’t defensive about feedback. They just weren’t sure what to change.

When we looked at the site, several things stood out. The page load time was slow enough that people might leave before the page fully loaded. The homepage had a lot of competing elements. The form to request a quote took multiple steps to complete. They tracked their analytics so we could see patterns. Visitors came, spent a short time, and left without going deeper. The bounce rate was high.

The four weeks was faster than many website projects because we weren’t waiting for rankings or building content. We were modifying what was already there.

Before the changes, they received roughly one or two inquiries per month from 300 monthly visitors. After the four weeks, the inquiry count appeared to increase. They started receiving more contact form submissions. How many is uncertain because I didn’t track it closely afterwards, but they mentioned noticing a difference in their inbox.

The traffic volume didn’t change dramatically. Still around the same monthly visitors. But the proportion of visitors who inquired appeared to shift. There’s information about how page speed can affect whether people stay on a site, though whether that was the main factor here is difficult to isolate.

They mentioned one inquiry turned into a client project. Whether that would have happened anyway, I don’t know. But the timing aligned with the changes.

In this case, two things changed at the same time. Speed improved and the layout simplified. It’s hard to say which had more effect. A faster site gives people less reason to leave immediately. A clearer layout makes it easier to find the contact form once they’re there. Both could have played a role.

This situation was different from other cases. They weren’t trying to get Google traffic. They had traffic. The issue was that visitors weren’t converting into inquiries. You can read about how conversion works more broadly if you want the wider context.

The timeline moved quickly partly because the work was focused. We weren’t starting from zero. We were adjusting what existed.

A website with traffic can appear to get more inquiries when the site is faster and simpler. This one seemed to. Whether this would happen the same way for a different business, I can’t say. The circumstances matter.

The referral brought them in, which may have helped. They were open to changes. They had data to measure against. They had traffic already. All of those things made it possible to see a shift relatively quickly.

They could continue optimising after week four. I don’t know if they did. But the basic changes were there. The site was faster. The path to inquiring was clearer. If you have traffic but few inquiries, you can explore what affects whether visitors take action.