5 Website Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads (and How to Fix Each One)

Your website gets 500 visitors a month. Your product is solid. Your pricing is fair. But your contact form gets maybe 2 submissions per month — and one of them is spam.

The problem isn’t your traffic. It’s what happens after someone lands on your site.

I’ve audited over 30 founder-led websites in the last two years. The same five mistakes show up in almost every one. None of them are hard to fix. Most can be resolved in a weekend. But left unchecked, each one silently kills 10-40% of your potential leads.

Mistake 1: No Clear CTA Above the Fold

“Above the fold” means the portion of your page visible without scrolling. On desktop, that’s roughly the top 600 pixels. On mobile, it’s the top 500.

Most founder websites put their company name, a vague tagline (“Empowering businesses through technology”), and a hero image in this space. No button. No action. Nothing for the visitor to do except scroll — which 40-60% of them won’t.

The fix: One button, one action, visible within 3 seconds of page load. The button text should be specific: “Book a Free Discovery Call” beats “Learn More” every time. “Get Your Free Audit” beats “Contact Us.”

Place the CTA button in the hero section with a contrasting color. If your site is mostly dark, the button should be bright. If your site is white, use a bold color that stands out from the body text.

Revenue impact: Adding a clear above-the-fold CTA typically increases click-through rate by 20-30%. On a site with 500 monthly visitors, that’s 100-150 more people reaching your conversion point each month.

Mistake 2: Page Load Time Over 3 Seconds

Google’s data shows that 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Every additional second of load time reduces conversions by roughly 7%.

Most slow founder websites have the same culprits: uncompressed images (a 4MB hero image that should be 200KB), render-blocking JavaScript, no CDN, and shared hosting that costs $5/month but serves pages like it’s 2008.

The fix: Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) right now. It’s free and tells you exactly what to fix, in priority order.

The three highest-impact fixes, in order:

1. Compress images. Use TinyPNG (tinypng.com) or Squoosh (squoosh.app) to compress every image on your site. Target under 200KB per image. Convert to WebP format where possible — it’s 25-35% smaller than JPEG at the same quality.

2. Enable lazy loading. Add loading="lazy" to every image tag below the fold. This tells the browser to only load images when the user scrolls to them.

3. Use a CDN. Cloudflare’s free tier takes 15 minutes to set up. It caches your site on servers worldwide, so a visitor in Lagos isn’t waiting for a response from a server in Virginia.

Revenue impact: Dropping load time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds can recover 15-25% of lost visitors. On 500 monthly visitors, that’s 75-125 people who previously bounced before seeing your content.

Mistake 3: No Social Proof on the Landing Page

Visitors who’ve never heard of you need a reason to trust you. A polished design helps. But nothing works like proof that other real humans have paid you money and been happy about it.

Most founder websites either have zero testimonials, or bury them on a dedicated “Testimonials” page that nobody visits.

The fix: Place 2-3 short testimonials directly on your homepage, above the fold or immediately below it. Each testimonial needs three elements:

1. The person’s real name and company (or at minimum, first name and role)
2. A specific result (“Launched in 18 days” or “3x more leads in 60 days”)
3. A photo or company logo (stock photos destroy credibility — skip the photo entirely if you don’t have a real one)

If you don’t have testimonials yet, use client logos. Even 3-4 recognizable logos in a “Trusted by” bar creates social proof. If you don’t have logos either, add a specific metric: “12 MVPs shipped” or “$2M+ in products built.”

Revenue impact: Pages with social proof convert 15-20% better than identical pages without it. This compounds with every other fix on this list.

Mistake 4: Contact Form With Too Many Fields

I recently audited a SaaS founder’s website. Their contact form had 11 fields: name, email, phone, company name, company size, industry, budget range, project timeline, project description, how they heard about the company, and a checkbox for newsletter opt-in.

Their form completion rate was 3%. Industry average for a simple 2-3 field form is 20-25%.

Every field you add to a form reduces completion rate by roughly 5-10%. By the time you’re asking for “company size” and “budget range,” you’ve lost most of the people who were genuinely interested.

The fix: Reduce your form to three fields maximum:

1. Name
2. Email
3. One open-ended question (“What are you building?” or “How can we help?”)

That’s it. You can ask everything else during the call. The form’s job is to start a conversation, not qualify the lead.

If you need more information for routing or qualification, collect it on a second step — after the initial submission. Multi-step forms with 2-3 fields per step convert 86% better than single-step forms with the same total fields (Unbounce data).

Revenue impact: Reducing a form from 8+ fields to 3 fields typically doubles to triples the submission rate. If you’re currently getting 2 submissions per month, expect 4-6 with just this one change.

Mistake 5: Not Optimized for Mobile

Over 60% of web traffic is now mobile. But many founder websites are designed on a 27-inch monitor and never tested on a phone.

Common mobile issues: text too small to read without zooming, buttons too close together (causing mis-taps), horizontal scrolling (usually caused by images or tables that don’t resize), and forms that are painful to fill out on a small screen.

The fix: Start with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test (search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly). It flags specific issues.

Then manually test your site on your own phone — not just the homepage, but every page in your conversion funnel. Tap every button. Fill out every form. If anything feels frustrating, your visitors are experiencing the same friction and bouncing.

Three specific fixes:

1. Set the viewport meta tag: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. If this is missing, your site won’t resize properly on mobile.
2. Make all tap targets at least 44x44 pixels (Apple’s minimum recommended size). Buttons, links, and form fields all need to be finger-friendly.
3. Use responsive images with max-width: 100% so they shrink to fit the screen instead of causing horizontal scroll.

Revenue impact: Fixing mobile usability issues typically recovers 15-25% of mobile traffic that was previously bouncing. Since mobile is 60%+ of your traffic, this is often the highest-impact fix on the list.

The Compound Effect

These five mistakes don’t operate in isolation. A visitor who hits a slow-loading page, sees no social proof, can’t find a CTA, then encounters an 11-field form on a broken mobile layout — that visitor is gone forever. You’ll never know they existed.

But the inverse is also true. A fast site with clear social proof, a prominent CTA, a simple form, and a smooth mobile experience can convert 3-5x better than the broken version. On the same traffic.

If you want to go deeper on turning your website into an active lead engine (not just fixing leaks), read how to turn your website into a lead generation system.

And if your website issues stem from a deeper build problem — maybe you’ve outgrown your no-code tool or inherited a codebase that’s fighting you — here’s how to know when it’s time to switch to custom development.

What to Do This Week

Pick one mistake from this list — whichever one made you wince — and fix it before Friday. Don’t try to fix all five at once. Ship one improvement, measure the impact for two weeks, then tackle the next one.

Want a structured audit of your website’s conversion pipeline? Book a free discovery call and we’ll walk through your site together.