Why is my website not converting? Finding where paid traffic stops short of an enquiry

The short answer

Your website is not converting because something between the click and the enquiry is stopping people, and it is rarely the design. Start by checking the count, then the promise, then the path. For scale, the median landing page in Unbounce's benchmark converts at 6.6%, so most visitors leave even on a good page. The question is whether yours leave for a reason you can fix.

Why does a website get traffic but no enquiries?

A website gets traffic but no enquiries when one of four things is true: the campaign brings people who were never going to enquire, the page does not confirm what the ad promised, the next step is unclear or broken, or the enquiries arrive and are not counted. Each has a different owner.

The most common mistake is to treat "our website is not converting" as one problem. It is at least four.

1. The wrong people arrive. The campaign is bringing traffic that was never going to enquire. That is a media problem.
2. The right people arrive and the page does not match what they were promised. That is a message problem, and it sits between the campaign and the website.
3. The right people arrive, understand the offer, and cannot easily act. That is a website problem.
4. The right people arrive, act, and you never find out. That is a measurement problem, and it is the one that wastes the most time, because it makes the other three look worse than they are.

If you skip straight to redesigning pages, you have guessed that the answer is number three. It often is not, and a polished design is now the floor rather than the advantage, as what makes a good website argues. The table below is the quickest way to tell them apart.

The same four-way split sits at the centre of a proper CRO audit, which is the longer version of this check.

How much of this is normal?

Some drop-off is normal, and it is worth knowing how much before you panic. Most visitors to any page leave without acting. The useful question is whether your rate is far below sites like yours, and whether the loss is concentrated at one step you can fix.

Two limits apply. Unbounce measures its own single-goal campaign pages, not whole sites, and Zuko is a form analytics vendor that does not disclose its sample. Ruler Analytics, which tracks calls and forms for lead-generation businesses, puts the average conversion rate at 5.13% across 13 industries in 2026, from 7.9% in legal and automotive down to 1.9% in travel. For benchmarks by industry and channel, read what counts as a good conversion rate.

Does the page match what the ad promised?

The page matches when its first sentence confirms the thing the ad or search result just promised. If a visitor has to read to the fourth paragraph to find the offer they clicked for, many will not. This is the cheapest problem on the list to fix, because it is copy, not a rebuild.

Open the ad or the search result exactly as a stranger would. Read the words. Then open the page it lands on and read the first screen, out loud.

A concrete version of this. An accounting firm runs an ad for "fixed fee tax returns for sole traders". The ad lands on a services page headed "Accounting and advisory for growing businesses", with the fixed fee mentioned in the fourth paragraph. Nothing on that page is wrong. It just does not confirm, within two seconds, that the visitor is in the right place.

Do this for your three highest spending ads or three highest traffic landing pages. Write down, in one sentence each, what the visitor was promised and what the page says. Where the two sentences do not obviously agree, you have a candidate. Our guide to message match, with examples shows what a good pair looks like.

A mismatch is a question, not proof. It tells you where to look, not what it cost you.

Is the next step obvious?

The next step is obvious when a stranger, given ten seconds on the page, can tell you what they were meant to do. If they cannot say, the page has a clarity problem. If they name the wrong thing, several actions are competing and the wrong one is winning.

Give three people who do not work in your business ten seconds on the page. Then take the page away and ask them what they were meant to do next.

Two specific things to look for, because they are common and easy to miss:

• The action is a word, not an outcome. "Submit" and "Learn more" ask someone to do something for you. "Get a fixed fee quote" and "See what this costs" tell them what they get.
• The phone number is a picture. On a lot of small business sites the phone number sits inside a header image or a graphic, so it is not tappable on a phone and not selectable on a desktop. Try tapping yours.

Trust matters here too. A visitor who cannot see who you are, who you have worked with or what happens after they enquire will hesitate at the button. The trust signals that make B2B buyers enquire are usually cheap to add.

Does the path actually work?

The path works when every link a motivated visitor clicks resolves, the form submits and arrives in an inbox a human reads, and the first screen loads fast enough on a phone. This is the unglamorous part, and in our experience it is where the real leaks are.

Walk the whole path on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Then do it again on a desktop. At each step, note anything that is slow, broken, or asks for something you would not give a stranger.

The specific checks worth doing by hand:

• Click every link a motivated visitor would click. Case studies, portfolio items, pricing, "meet the team". In a PostCliq audit of an Australian web design firm's site on 20 September 2026, three "View case study" buttons on the homepage returned a 404. They were linked from ten pages. Every visitor interested enough to look at the work hit a dead end, at the exact moment they were deciding whether to enquire. Nobody inside the business knew.
• Submit the form yourself, from an address outside the company. Then confirm the enquiry arrived in the inbox a human reads, not only in a plugin's database. Also check the spam folder, and check it on a weekend.
• Count the fields. Every field is a reason to stop. A twenty field quote form on a first contact page is a filter, and you should be sure you want to filter that hard. Our contact form best practices cover which fields earn their place.
• Time the first screen on a phone. Google's published "good" threshold for Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile (web.dev). If your homepage takes eight seconds on 4G, a share of the people you paid for never saw it at all. On WordPress, the usual causes are in why a WordPress site is slow.

Speed has a measurable cost. Portent's analysis of more than 100 million page views found B2B sites loading in one second convert three times better than those loading in five. It covered only 20 websites, so treat it as direction rather than a forecast.

If you want to watch real visitors instead of guessing, a free session recording tool shows where they stall. Our Microsoft Clarity guide for marketers explains how to set it up, and the rage clicks and dead clicks it reports are often the first sign of a broken path.

Are you counting enquiries correctly?

You are counting correctly when you can say, in one sentence, which event counts as an enquiry, and that count agrees with what actually arrived in the inbox over the same week. If you cannot, fix the count before you judge the rate.

• What event counts as a conversion? A form view, a form submit, a thank you page, or a click on a phone number?
• Does one person filling in the form twice count as two?
• Are you counting the same population on both sides? Sessions from all sources against leads from one channel is not a rate, it is two numbers divided.
• Is anything filtered out? Internal traffic, bots, a spam filter that quietly bins enquiries containing a URL.

A tracked event is not the same thing as a valid enquiry. Get the definition written down before the number goes in a board pack, because you will be asked, and "I think it is form submits" is not an answer you want to give. Setting up GA4 key events for lead generation properly is usually a one-afternoon job.

Which fix should come first?

Fix first whatever sits closest to the moment someone decides to enquire and costs least to change. A dead link on the page before the form beats a navigation restructure, even though the restructure feels more important.

Order your list by those two things. A dead case study link sits right at the decision point and takes ten minutes. A full navigation restructure sits further away and takes six weeks. Do the first one first.

Resist the urge to change five things at once. If you change the offer, the form, the headline and the tracking in the same week, you will not know which one mattered, and the next time this happens you will be exactly where you are now. The fixes ranked by effort and impact are in how to increase your conversion rate.

How PostCliq checks this

PostCliq reads up to 50 public pages of a site the way a careful visitor would. It follows the links a buyer would follow, reads the forms and calls to action, and checks page speed with Lighthouse lab data and Chrome UX Report field data. It never submits your forms, logs in or reads your ad account, so the "submit it yourself" check and the ad-beside-the-page check stay yours. The output is a private report with evidence and three quick wins to make first. You can run the free audit on your own site.

What to do next

Pick your single highest traffic landing page. Do these things on it, today:

1. Click every outbound link on the page and note any that fail.
2. Submit the enquiry form from a personal email address and confirm where it lands.
3. Load the page on your phone, on mobile data, and time how long until you can read the headline.
4. Compare last week's enquiry count in analytics with the enquiries that actually arrived.
5. Write down what you find in three lines and book fifteen minutes with whoever maintains the site. Our guide to writing a website brief that gets the fix done shows how to hand it over.

That is not a report, and it does not need to be. It is the first thing you have had in this conversation that is a fact rather than an opinion. If the list gets long enough that you need help ordering it, the one hour website check walks the same ground in a form you can tick off.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my website getting traffic but no leads?

Usually one of four reasons: the traffic is the wrong audience, the page does not match what the ad or search result promised, the path to enquire is slow or broken, or leads arrive and are not tracked. Check the tracking first, by comparing a week of inbox enquiries with your analytics count. Then read your top landing page as a stranger and submit its form yourself.

What is a normal conversion rate for a website?

It depends on what counts as a conversion and who the site serves. Ruler Analytics put the 2026 average at 5.13% across 13 industries, ranging from 7.9% in legal and automotive to 1.9% in travel, and Unbounce puts the median campaign landing page at 6.6%. A whole website usually converts lower than a single-goal landing page, so compare like with like.

Can a bad website design stop people enquiring?

Yes, but less often than people think. Design problems that stop enquiries are usually specific: a call to action that says "Submit" instead of an outcome, a phone number inside an image, a slow first screen on mobile, or a form with too many fields. A fresh visual design rarely fixes those on its own. Find the specific blocker before you commission a redesign.

How do I find out where visitors drop off?

Combine three sources. Your analytics shows which pages people leave from. A free session recording tool such as Microsoft Clarity shows what they did before leaving, including rage clicks on things that do not work. And walking the path yourself on a phone, on mobile data, shows problems neither tool labels. Start with your highest traffic landing page and its enquiry form.

How long does it take to fix a website that is not converting?

The first fixes often take hours, not months. Dead links, a mislabelled button, a form that sends to the wrong inbox or a headline that does not match the ad are quick changes. Speed and navigation problems can take weeks. Change one or two things at a time and give each change enough traffic to judge, so you know which fix mattered.