The enquiry you never got, and where it went. 

Almost every conversation about a website that is not working starts in the same place: we need more traffic. Sometimes that is right. More often the visitors are already arriving, quite liked what they saw, got as far as the contact page, and left.

That failure is invisible. Nobody fills in half a form and then rings up to explain why they abandoned it. So the business concludes the problem is at the top of the funnel and spends money on more visitors, who leak straight out of the same hole. Here are the seven holes, roughly in order of what they cost.

Every field is a small negotiation, and every optional-looking field that turns out to be required is a large one. The worst example we see regularly is a first enquiry form wanting a full postal address, a preferred contact time and a budget dropdown. That form was written for the convenience of the person receiving it, and it filters out exactly the polite, undecided people you wanted to hear from.

Ask for the minimum you need in order to reply, and ask for the rest in the reply. Ours asks for a name, a business name and an email. The phone number is optional and so is the message, because somebody who only wants to say "can you call me" should be able to do it in about eleven seconds.

A form suits some people and not others. Plenty of customers, particularly for anything urgent or expensive, want to speak to a human before they commit anything in writing. If the only route is a form, those people simply leave.

Give both, at the same size. A phone number set as small print under a big form reads as the option you would rather they did not take. We put ours at the same weight as the email for that reason, and a local dialling code is worth showing rather than hiding: it tells somebody in the same town that you are in the same town.

On a phone, a number sitting there as plain text has to be memorised or copied by hand, and a fair share of people will not bother. It needs to be a link that opens the dialler. This is a ten minute change on any site, it needs no design work at all, and it is probably the highest return per minute of anything in this article.

While you are in there: the same goes for your address, which should open a map, and for your email. Then check the tap targets. A link crammed between two others on a phone gets mis-tapped, and a mis-tap is very often the end of the visit.

Sending an enquiry is a small act of faith. You are handing your details to strangers with no idea whether you will get a call within the hour, an email next week, or three months of marketing you never asked for.

One sentence beside the button fixes it. Who replies, how, and how quickly. The only rule is that it has to be true, because this is a promise and it is the first thing a new customer will measure you against. We say we reply the same day, and it is on the page because we actually do.

Watch what happens after somebody presses send on your own site. On a surprising number of small business sites the page scrolls, nothing visible changes, and the visitor cannot tell whether it worked. So they send it again, or they give up and assume you are broken. Sometimes they are right and it is broken, because nobody has tested the form since the day the site launched.

Test yours today. Send a real enquiry from your phone, see what you see, and check where it lands. Forms stop working silently all the time, usually after a hosting or email change, and the failure is completely invisible from outside: the business just notices a quiet few weeks.

A broken contact form does not look broken. It looks like a slow month.

This one is not a website problem at all, and it is the biggest of the lot. Somebody who enquires has usually enquired with two or three businesses inside the same ten minutes. The order the replies arrive in matters more than almost anything on the page, because the first credible answer sets the terms and everything after it is compared against that.

You do not have to be instant. You have to be first, and a short honest holding reply counts. Getting back to somebody within the hour with "got it, I will call you tomorrow morning" beats a considered quote two days later, most of the time.

Reassurance is usually all bunched at the top of the page, and the moment of doubt is at the bottom, right next to the button. By the time somebody is deciding whether to press it, the testimonials are two thousand pixels away and out of sight.

Put one piece of proof beside the form. A single real review with a real name, or how many years you have been doing it, or a line about who you have worked with locally. It has to be true and specific: trusted by hundreds of happy customers is read as decoration and skipped.

Test the form first, because if it is broken nothing else on the list matters. Then make the phone number tappable, then add the sentence about what happens next, then cut the fields you do not need. All four together are an afternoon, and none of them require a redesign.

If you work through that and the site still produces nothing, then it is worth asking the harder question about whether the site itself is the problem. But do it in that order. Rebuilding a website to fix a form that was quietly failing is an expensive way to solve a ten minute problem, and we would rather tell you so.

Written by Luke and Lewis, who run Studio Two. If any of it does not match what you are seeing on your own site, tell us and we will look at it properly.