10 mistakes that kill your website's conversion
Most websites 'leak' somewhere — there are places where a visitor who already showed interest (clicked an ad, browsed products, added something to the cart) suddenly gives up and leaves. These 10 mistakes are the most common culprits we see in practice over and over again. The good news: 8 out of 10 can be fixed within a week, without a big redesign and without a big budget. Even better news — every fix shows up directly in the number of inquiries and orders, because you're patching exactly the spots where you lose people who already wanted to buy.
Table of contents:
1. The site is too slow
Google's well-known research says that more than half of mobile users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In practice that means: before anyone has even seen your offer, a slow site has already cut your audience in half. How speed is measured and what exactly Google looks at, we explained in detail in the article Site speed and Core Web Vitals.
The most common culprits: uncompressed images (a photo straight from a phone is 3-5 MB, while on a site it should be under 200 KB), too many plugins on WordPress, cheap hosting without caching, and a video that autoplays in the hero section.
Quick fix: run your images through Squoosh or TinyPNG, enable a caching plugin (WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache) and measure the result on PageSpeed Insights. If the problem runs deeper — a slow server, a bloated theme, poorly written code — that's a job for a web development team, not for yet another plugin.
2. Unclear or hidden CTA buttons
A visitor should never have to search for what to do next. A 'Send inquiry', 'Buy now' or 'Book a free call' button must be obvious at first glance: a contrasting color you don't use anywhere else on the page, a position above the fold, and a repeat at the bottom of the page.
Mistake #1: a CTA button in the same color as the header or the rest of the design — it blends in and nobody notices it. Mistake #2: generic 'Learn more' button text that doesn't say what the user gets by clicking. Instead, be specific: 'See pricing', 'Book a free consultation', 'Download the guide'. And the most frequently broken rule: one page — one primary CTA. If there are five buttons, the user usually picks none.
3. Forms with too many fields
Every form field is additional friction. A well-known HubSpot analysis showed that cutting a form from 11 to 4 fields can multiply conversion — and our experience confirms it: when we shorten a client's contact form, the number of inquiries reliably goes up.
Ask yourself: what is the minimum information you need to respond to an inquiry? Most often it's a name, an email and a short project description. Phone, company name, budget and deadline you can ask in your first reply — each of those fields in the form costs you a share of visitors upfront.
Rule: never more than 5 fields in the first form. If you genuinely need more data, for example to prepare a quote, use a multi-step form: 2-3 fields per step, with a progress bar and the easiest questions first.
4. Poor mobile experience
In practice, most visits today come from phones — the mobile version isn't an 'extra', it's the primary version of your site. Why design now starts from the small screen, we explained in the article Mobile-first design, and our web design service builds every site in exactly that order.
The most common mobile mistakes: buttons smaller than 44x44 pixels (fingers miss them), text smaller than 16px (it forces zooming), form fields that don't open the right keyboard (text instead of tel for a phone number), and pop-ups that can't be closed on a small screen.
A two-minute quick test: open your site on your own phone and try to fill out the contact form or complete a purchase. If you have to zoom, keep missing buttons or fight the keyboard — that's exactly where you lose the biggest share of visitors.
5. Missing 'trust' signals
A visitor landing on your site for the first time doesn't know whether there's a serious company behind it or someone who'll take the money and disappear. Trust signals reduce that sense of risk — and without them, even the best offer won't convert.
What to add: an SSL certificate (the padlock in the browser), reviews with a name and photo — Google reviews are gold here, because people trust them more than text on your site — logos of known clients, the number of completed projects or years in business, a physical address and phone number, and a photo of your actual team instead of smiling stock-photo people.
For e-commerce, additionally: a money-back guarantee, visible payment method logos (Visa, Mastercard, IPS), clear shipping and return terms. One honest sentence — 'no-questions-asked returns within 14 days' — is worth more than ten marketing slogans.
6. Hidden price or shipping
The classic scenario: a user adds a product to the cart, fills in the address, and only at the last step sees that shipping costs another 490 dinars. The result is predictable — an abandoned cart. Hidden costs are, in practice, the number one reason people give up at the very end of a purchase.
The solution: show the shipping cost as early as possible — ideally on the product page itself, at the latest at cart entry. If you offer free shipping over a certain amount, use it as motivation: the message 'Free shipping over 3,000 RSD — you're only 450 RSD away' both reassures the buyer and raises the average order value. The same goes for services: if the price depends on the project, give at least a rough range (e.g. 'websites from 800 EUR') instead of complete silence.
7. Bad product photography
In an online store, the photo IS the product — the buyer can't pick it up, so the decision is made purely from images. Blurry pictures, one photo from one angle or, worst of all, stock photos pulled from the internet that buyers recognize from other sites — all of that destroys trust, and conversion with it.
Rule: a minimum of 5 photos per product — multiple angles, close-ups of the material, the product in use or on a person, and something for a sense of scale. Images should be on a clean background and large enough to zoom (at least 1500x1500px).
It doesn't have to be a professional right away: a newer phone camera, daylight next to a window and white paper as a background give perfectly solid results to start with. Save professional photography for your best-selling products — that's where the investment pays back fastest.
8. Overloaded pages
A page that tries to do everything at once — hero section, five rows of products, blog, testimonials, FAQ, Instagram feed and a newsletter pop-up — sells nothing, because the user doesn't know where to look. More options don't mean more opportunities, they mean choice paralysis.
Rule: one page = one main goal. The homepage leads to services, a service page leads to contact, a product page leads to the cart. Every element that doesn't push the visitor toward that goal is noise — remove it or move it to a page where it makes sense.
A practical exercise: open your most important page and for every block ask 'does this help the visitor do what they came here for?'. You'll be surprised how much you can delete while making the page better.
9. Dead links and 404 errors
A user clicks a link and gets '404 — page not found'. Most never come back after that. Dead links come from banal causes: a deleted page, a redesign or URL change without 301 redirects, a typo in a link — and besides conversion, they quietly hurt your SEO too.
Quick check: Google Search Console shows, for free, all the 404 errors Google sees on your site. Go through the list once a month: for deleted pages set up a 301 redirect to the closest living page, and fix typos at the place where the link sits.
And build a custom 404 page — with search, links to your most important sections and a human tone instead of a dry system message. That way you still keep a share of 'lost' visitors on the site.
10. No feedback after an action
A user clicks 'Send' on a form — and nothing happens. No 'Thanks, we'll get back to you within 24h', no animation, no confirmation. What do they do? They click again (so you get three identical inquiries) or conclude the form is broken and go to a competitor. Buttons that show no reaction after a click cause the same problem.
Rule: every action gets feedback within half a second. A button click = a visible state change or a spinner while waiting. A successfully submitted form = a clear thank-you message with the next step. A validation error = a red outline next to the specific field and an explanation of what to fix, not a generic 'an error occurred' at the top of the page.
Where to start
You don't have to do everything at once. Start by measuring: PageSpeed Insights for speed, Google Search Console for 404 errors, and half an hour of honest clicking through your own site on a phone. Then fix the cheapest things that hurt the most first: speed, the contact form and CTA buttons — those are fixes done in a day or two, with an effect visible within the first week.
Track the number of inquiries or orders before and after each change, so you know what actually helped. And if you'd like someone from the outside to review your site, we do a UX audit with a concrete, prioritized list of issues and an estimate of what each fix delivers. Reach out through the contact form and send us your link — we'll take it from there.
Let's talk about your project!