Why Isn't My Website Getting Leads? A Contractor Checklist

A contractor website that gets visits but no enquiries is usually failing one of the seven checks below. Work through them in order, because each fix only pays off once the step before it works, but if you suspect enquiries are going missing, run the free delivery test first.

• Finding: does Google show your site to people in your area?
• Arriving: are the visitors local and after your kind of job?
• Understanding: can a stranger say what you do, where and roughly for how much?
• Trust: can a homeowner check you?
• Contact: can they call with one tap?
• Delivery: does a test enquiry reach the right inbox?
• Follow-up: does someone call back the same day?

We build websites and sell monthly plans, so treat what we say about redesigns as a seller's view. Most of these checks are free.

How many real leads did you get?

Count them by hand before you change anything, because a dashboard "lead" is any form submission at all.

Our analytics dashboard showed leads up almost threefold in the 28 days to 7 November 2026 against the four weeks before. Half were our own tests and the other half were sellers or an off-target request from abroad. Of every form submission from 15 June to 5 November:

• More than a third were our own tests.
• Nearly as many came from people selling SEO, design or paid links.
• The rest were spam, requests from outside Canada (one about electrical wiring) and messages from one Ontario business.

Your junk will differ, but sort yours the same way. Take three months of form emails, texts, direct emails and calls, and mark each a local job, out of area, seller, spam or test. Enquiries are seasonal, so compare with last year's same months, and ask new callers how they found you.

Is a low number of real enquiries a month bad? It depends on your visits and trade, and we know no benchmark worth quoting, so count calls too before you decide.

Is anyone finding your website?

Open Google Search Console (set it up first if you haven't), choose the Performance report and set the last three months. An impression is each time your site appeared in Search results; a click is each time someone came through. The newest data can be preliminary, so judge on months.

No total counts as "enough", so search for your main job and town in a private browser window. If you aren't on the first page or in the map results, that's a findability problem, which our guide to how customers find contractors covers. Plenty of impressions with few clicks usually means you're shown for the wrong searches.

In our experience the Google Business Profile matters as much as the site for most trades. Check the calls your Business Profile reports for the same months, if it shows them; they overlap with calls already in your log, so read them as how much phone traffic starts on Google, not as extra calls.

Are the right people arriving?

Open the Queries tab. Good queries pair a job with a town, such as "basement renovation Whitby" or "bathroom renovation Oakville". Your business name means people who already know you; how-to questions or another trade's jobs mean readers, not buyers.

In the Pages tab, see where impressions go. If the homepage gets nearly all of them, Google has no page to show for "kitchen renovation Mississauga". Give each service its own page naming your towns, without near-identical copies for every town.

The Countries tab only tells you Canada or not, and if almost no impressions come from Canada, Google isn't treating you as a local business. For town-level detail, use Google Analytics' city report.

Can a stranger tell what you do, where and for how much?

Try the five-second test. Hand your homepage, on a phone, to someone who doesn't know your business and take it back after five seconds. Ask what you do, which towns you cover and whether a typical job is closer to $5,000 or $50,000. If they can't answer, fix the first screen: trade, towns and phone number.

Nielsen Norman Group, an independent usability firm, reported in 2011 that people often leave web pages within 10 to 20 seconds. That data is from 2011, so on a phone aim for the answer to be readable in the first few seconds; five is our own, stricter test. Our Don't Make Me Think summary has more like it.

Most contractor sites skip cost. In a July 2024 Houzz survey of 2,866 US Houzz users planning, doing or just finished a kitchen or bathroom renovation, 34% said getting clear, detailed estimates or proposals was a struggle. That's about quotes, but a published range sets expectations before the quote. The homepage only needs a "kitchens from" line or a link to a price page. There, publish price ranges per job type, with what changes the price and whether HST is included, and date them. You'll get fewer enquiries from budgets that don't fit, which is the point.

A slow page never gets its five seconds. Google rates a page good when its main content loads within 2.5 seconds, it responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds and its layout shift score is 0.1 or less, for at least three in four visits. A small site often has too little data for Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, so run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and read the Mobile tab. Our Core Web Vitals post explains each number.

Can they trust you?

In the same Houzz survey, 48% said finding someone they trust was a challenge. Give homeowners things they can check.

If you build or sell new homes, the Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) requires licensed builders and vendors to show their licence on their website (Directive 4). Link to your entry in the Ontario Builder Directory, which shows licence status, convictions and warranty history.

Renovators and trades can show a current WSIB clearance, which proves the business is registered and up to date with the WSIB, and their liability insurance. Electrical contractors should show their 7-digit ECRA/ESA licence number, which the Electrical Safety Authority tells homeowners to ask for. Check whether your city licenses renovators too.

Use photos of your own jobs. In February 2025 the HCRA reported the conviction of an unlicensed builder who had used a home he didn't build as an example of his work; he was fined $75,000.

Show a few real reviews with first name, town and job, link to your Google profile for the rest, and ask every customer for one.

One tap to call, and a short form

On a phone, put your number at the top of every page as a tap-to-call link, with your hours, matching your Google listing. If you're on the tools all day, a missed-call text-back or answering service will probably do more than any page.

Keep the form short enough for one thumb: name, phone, email, town and the job, with optional start date and photo, and a line under the button saying when you'll call. NN/g's form guidelines start with "keep it short".

Are the enquiries reaching you?

Find out today with a free test that takes about ten minutes.

• On your phone, turn off wifi so the test goes over a phone network, as a customer's would. Fill in your form using a personal Gmail address.
• Check two emails: the notification in your business inbox (and its spam folder), and, if your form sends one, the customer's confirmation in that Gmail inbox (and its spam and Promotions tabs).
• Check who the notification goes to. Often it's a former employee, the agency that built the site or an inbox nobody reads, so add a second address someone checks daily.
• Check the form tool's own spam folder, and upload a photo from your phone if the form takes them.
• Keep a copy of every submission outside email; some form tools store nothing once the email is sent.
• Repeat monthly and after any change to the site, hosting, domain or email.

Notifications often land in spam because the web server sends them as your domain without your DNS records authorising it. SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain, DKIM adds a signature checked against a key in your DNS, and DMARC tells receivers what to do when a message claiming to be you fails.

Ask your web person to send them through an authenticated service (your form platform, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365), not the host's default mail. WordPress's built-in mail function uses the server's own mail unless an SMTP plugin changes that, and can report success even when nothing arrives.

Check the From line too. The notification should come from your own domain, with the customer's address in Reply-To. A form that sends "from" the customer's Gmail or Yahoo address gets junked or bounced for some customers and not others, so nobody notices.

Gmail's sender rules, in force since 1 February 2024, apply to mail sent to personal Gmail accounts: every sender needs SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending over 5,000 messages a day needs DMARC. They matter if your business inbox is @gmail.com or your form emails customers back.

Have whoever runs your email set these up. A domain can have only one SPF record, so adding a second breaks it, and DMARC should start at p=none, which only monitors, until every service that sends as you is covered. To check a message, use "Show original" in Gmail or the message details in Outlook, and look for "pass" beside SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Is someone calling back the same day?

Call back the same business day, and the next morning for evening and weekend enquiries, with an auto-reply that says when.

In a 2011 Harvard Business Review study by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, as quoted by SmartCompany, 37% of 2,241 audited US companies responded to a test web lead within an hour and 23% never did. In a second dataset from the same research, 1.25 million leads at 42 US firms, those that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that tried even an hour later. A 2007 study by MIT and InsideSales.com, a sales-software company, of six companies and over 15,000 leads, found the odds of reaching a lead were 100 times lower at 30 minutes than at 5. Neither looked at renovation, Canadian homeowners or jobs won.

None of this needs software:

• An auto-reply: "Got it. We'll call you by [time]."
• One named person who owns new enquiries, with a backup for site days.
• A first call that asks the address, the job and the timing, and books the site visit. Then follow up every quote within a week.
• A note of how each enquiry ended, so next quarter's count is quick.

When it's the website, and when it isn't

A redesign makes sense when the five-second test fails across the whole site, or when the platform can't be made fast on phones or can't send mail properly.

For a second opinion, our free audit checks your speed on phone and desktop, whether Google and AI tools can read your pages, how often six AI tools mention you and your content gap against your closest competitor, and says which build and monthly plan would fit, within 24 hours. It can't see your inbox, Search Console or callback times, so the count and delivery test stay with you.

How we checked

We read every linked source on 8 November 2026. Google's Business Profile help page wouldn't load, so we describe that screen without quoting it. The MIT figures come from the study's 2007 slides; HBR is paywalled, so its figures are as SmartCompany quoted them in July 2011. Houzz figures come from Houzz's own post. Our form counts come from our site's records, pulled 8 November and sorted by hand, with nothing that could identify a sender.