10 Conversion Killers on Service Business Websites
Ecommerce CRO advice doesn't map cleanly onto a service business. There's no cart to abandon, just a form, a phone number, or a chat widget standing between a visitor and a lead. Here are the ten patterns we see most often when running a CRO Audit.
- The phone number isn't actually clickable on mobile. Styled to look like a link but missing a real
tel:href. - The contact form asks for too much, too soon. Budget, project timeline, and address fields before a visitor has decided to trust you yet.
- No clear single call to action above the fold. Three competing buttons (call, form, chat) with equal visual weight forces a decision the visitor didn't come to make.
- Testimonials with no specifics. Generic five-star quotes read as filler; a testimonial naming a real result reads as proof.
- No visible pricing signal at all. Even a starting-from range reduces the number of unqualified inquiries and builds trust with qualified ones.
- Slow load on the exact page the ad traffic lands on. The homepage might be fast; the landing page linked from your Google ad often isn't.
- Trust badges that are years out of date or irrelevant. A 2019 award badge is a small but real credibility drag.
- No confirmation after form submission. A blank redirect or a generic "thank you" with no next-step information leaves visitors unsure if it worked.
- Navigation that buries the contact page. If getting in touch takes more than one click from any page, that's friction that compounds with every extra page a visitor has to find their way through.
- No urgency or scarcity signal where one is honestly true. Not fake countdown timers, but real information like limited appointment slots or seasonal demand, left out entirely.
Most of these take under an hour to fix once identified. The hard part is seeing them on your own site, since familiarity makes obvious friction invisible to the person who built it.