Is your website costing you customers?
A checklist for Brisbane business owners

This isn't a checklist about pixel-perfect design or having the latest animations. It's about the practical, revenue-impacting problems that cause real customers — in Chermside, West End, Ipswich, Caboolture, and everywhere in between — to give up on your website and call someone else instead.

The checklist

Go through each one honestly. If you're not sure, pull out your phone right now, open your site in a fresh browser tab, and check.

• 1
  It takes more than 3 seconds to load

  Test it at pagespeed.web.dev. If you score below 70 on mobile, you're losing visitors before they've seen a single word. This is the most common problem we find on Brisbane small business sites — and the one with the biggest immediate impact on leads.

• 2
  It looks broken on a phone

  Hold your phone in portrait mode and open your site. Does anything overlap, overflow, or require pinching to read? Most trades and hospitality businesses get 70–80% of their traffic from mobile. A site that doesn't work on a phone is a site that doesn't work, full stop.

• 3
  Your phone number isn't one tap away

  On mobile, your phone number should be a tappable link at the top of the page — not buried in a Contact page three clicks deep. If someone has to work to call you, a percentage of them won't bother. That percentage costs you real jobs every month.

• 4
  It doesn't say what suburb or area you service

  Google uses your website copy to understand where you operate. If your site doesn't mention Springfield, Morayfield, Fortitude Valley, or wherever your customers actually are — Google won't confidently show you to people searching in those areas. This is one of the most fixable local SEO issues and most sites completely ignore it.

• 5
  There's no clear call to action above the fold

  When someone lands on your homepage, what's the first thing they can do? If the answer is "scroll around and figure it out," you're losing them. A single clear action — "Book a free quote," "Call now," "Get in touch" — should be impossible to miss without scrolling.

• 6
  Your site doesn't show up in Google at all

  Search for your business name plus your suburb — e.g., "electrician Chermside" or "café West End Brisbane." If you're not on the first page, you're effectively invisible to people who don't already know your name. A website that isn't indexed properly, doesn't have a Google Business Profile connected, or lacks basic on-page SEO may as well not exist.

• 7
  The design looks like it was built before 2018

  Customers make a gut decision about your credibility in under a second. An outdated design — clashing fonts, stock photos from a decade ago, dense walls of text — signals that you're either out of business or not paying attention. We've seen Brisbane beauty salons, gyms, and trade businesses double their enquiries within a month of launching a clean, modern site. Design is not vanity. It's trust.

• 8
  There are no reviews or social proof on the site

  A visitor who doesn't know you needs a reason to trust you before they'll call. Google reviews displayed on your site, a few client quotes, or even photos of completed jobs tell that story in seconds. Without them, your site is just a brochure with no credibility signal — and the next business they visit probably has a wall of five-star reviews front and centre.

• 9
  Your contact form goes nowhere — or no one checks it

  Test your own contact form right now. Send yourself a message. Does it arrive? Does it go to an email you actually check daily? A broken or unmonitored contact form is a silent lead killer — you'll never know how many enquiries you've missed because they hit a dead end.

What to do next

Some of these issues you can fix yourself with a few hours of work — updating your contact page, adding suburb names to your copy, making your phone number a tap-to-call link. Others, like site speed, mobile layout, and proper Google indexing, require either a developer or a platform that handles them by default.

The businesses we work with at Clawmark typically come to us because they've tried to fix things piecemeal — patching an old site, hiring someone on Fiverr, watching a few YouTube tutorials — and the problems keep coming back. At some point, it's cheaper and faster to start clean.

How we approach it

Every Clawmark website is built from scratch on Webflow — fast by default, mobile-first, and designed for the specific industry and suburb our client operates in. We don't use templates. We don't recycle layouts. If you're a plumber in Ipswich, your site looks and reads like a plumber in Ipswich — not like a generic "handyman" placeholder.

The GROWTH plan ($189/mo) includes local SEO built into the site structure, Google Business Profile optimisation, and ongoing support. You see the design before you sign anything, and there's no upfront build fee — you get a professional, custom website and start paying monthly once you're happy with the result.

If you're not sure whether your current site is costing you, the fastest way to find out is to book a free call. We'll look at it with you and give you an honest assessment — whether that leads to working with us or not.