Five conversion mistakes that cost you customers

You invest in ads, SEO works, traffic grows — but orders don’t. A fraction of people fill in the enquiry form. The phone doesn’t ring. And you wonder whether the problem is the product, the price, or something else entirely.

Usually the answer is simpler than you expect: the problem is on the website. Not in what you sell, but in how the site presents it and how it leads a visitor to act.

Across dozens of conversion audits, the same five mistakes keep coming back. None of them are exotic. They’re things that look harmless — and together cost companies tens of per cent of their conversions.

Let’s go through them. For each one: a concrete example, and how to fix it.

1. A headline nobody cares about

The headline is the first thing a visitor reads. Often the last, too — if it doesn’t land, they leave. As the legendary copywriter David Ogilvy put it: “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.” A bad headline kills most of your conversion chances outright.

What a bad headline looks like

Generic phrases that could sit on any company’s site:

“Professional solutions for your business”

“We’re a team of experienced specialists with over 15 years of practice”

“Comprehensive digital marketing services”

These headlines say nothing specific. They solve no problem. They don’t separate you from competitors. The visitor looks, shrugs, and closes the tab.

What a good headline looks like

A good headline speaks directly to the problem or the outcome the customer is after:

Wrong: “Professional IT services for business” Right: “Your store goes down every Friday? We’ll fix it in 24 hours.”

Wrong: “Comprehensive accounting services” Right: “Accounting that saves you 10 hours a month”

A benefit-driven headline — one focused on a concrete gain for the customer — measurably raises engagement over generic copy. On a site with thousands of visits a month, that means significantly more people reading on.

What to do right now

Open your site and read the main headline out loud. Then ask: “If I were seeing this for the first time, would I know what this company solves and why I should stay?” If not, rewrite it. Focus on a specific outcome or problem, not on your company’s attributes. The guide to website copywriting goes deeper on how to write one that works.

2. Too many CTAs means no CTA

A CTA (call to action) is the button, link or form you want the visitor to click. The problem starts when there are too many of them on one page.

The paradox of choice kills conversions

Sheena Iyengar’s famous experiment at Columbia University showed that offering people 24 kinds of jam instead of 6 dropped purchases from 30 % to 3 %. The same principle runs on websites — the more buttons and links a visitor sees, the less likely they are to click any of them.

A typical example: the hero section has “Learn more”, next to it “Contact us”, below that “Download the catalogue”, and then “Follow us on social”. Four CTAs competing with each other. The visitor can’t tell what matters, so they click nothing.

The rule of one primary CTA

Every page (or section) should have one clear primary CTA. At most one secondary option for people who aren’t ready for the main action yet.

Wrong: four equally weighted buttons side by side Right: one prominent primary button (“Get a quote”) + one quieter text link (“Or read how it works first”)

And watch the button label itself. HubSpot’s data shows a personalised CTA describing the outcome raises conversions by 42 % over a generic “Submit”. The difference between “Submit” and “Get a free quote” is enormous — even though both lead to the same form.

Check your visual hierarchy

Open your page and squint. If you can’t tell where to look first, you have a problem. The primary CTA should be visually dominant: contrasting colour, enough white space around it, a strategic position (above the fold, after the key argument, at the end of the page).

3. A form that repels instead of converting

The form is where a visitor becomes a customer — or where they leave. And most forms do everything they can to put people off.

Every extra field costs you customers

Dozens of A/B tests confirm a simple principle: the more fields, the fewer people complete the form. A three-field form gets far more completions than an eight-field one — even when the “important” information asked for is the same.

And yet it’s common to see forms asking, at first contact, for:

First name and surname (two fields instead of one)
Email
Phone
Company
Company registration number
Job title
How did you hear about us?
GDPR consent (linking to a 15-page document)

That’s 8+ fields for a first contact. A visitor who doesn’t know you yet won’t make that big a commitment.

How many fields should a form have?

For first contact (an enquiry, a consultation, a download) the optimum is three to five fields. The ideal combination:

Email (required)
Name (one field, not two)
Message / question (optional, but it gives context)

Phone, registration number and other details come out in the follow-up. A form isn’t a market research instrument — it’s the start of a conversation.

The one-minute rule

The whole form should be completable in under a minute. Longer than that and you lose a significant share of people — especially on mobile, where filling fields is many times slower. And bear in mind: mobile users see a different site than you do — what looks tidy on desktop can be unusable on a phone.

Extra tip: inline validation (checking input as it’s typed) reduces errors and frustration. If somebody enters a malformed email, tell them right away — not after they hit “Submit”.

A visitor arrives at your site for the first time. They don’t know you. They don’t know whether you’re trustworthy. Everything you claim on the site is, so far, just your word. And people are naturally sceptical — especially online.

Social proof is what gets past that barrier. Testimonials, reviews, numbers and evidence from real customers confirming that what you promise actually works.

Why generic testimonials don’t work

Most sites have a “What our clients say” section with quotes like:

“Great cooperation, highly recommend!” — John N.

“Professional approach.” — A satisfied customer

These are so generic they read as invented. No context, no specific outcome, no verifiable identity.

What works instead

Strong social proof has three components: a specific outcome, a real person and relevant context.

Weak: “Great cooperation!” — John N. Strong: “After redesigning the contact form our enquiries went up 35 % in the first month.” — Jane Novak, Marketing Manager, ABC Software

Every element does work:

A specific number (35 %) → proves a measurable result
Full name and role → verifiable identity
Company name → relevance for similar companies in B2B

Don’t tuck testimonials at the bottom of the page where nobody scrolls. Put trust signals near the CTA — where the visitor is actually deciding. Adding a trust badge or a testimonial next to the conversion button measurably raises conversions.

Other forms work too: client logos, number of completed projects, press mentions, certifications. But the rule is always the same — it has to be specific and verifiable.

5. A slow site kills conversions (even when you don’t notice)

Load speed is a conversion factor companies routinely forget. Google’s own data says 53 % of mobile users abandon a page that takes over 3 seconds to load. Every extra second means fewer customers.

And that’s not all — Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. A slow site doesn’t just lose conversions, it gets less organic traffic too.

The metrics worth knowing

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how fast the main content appears. Target: under 2.5 seconds. Over 4 seconds is critical.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the page jumps while loading. Target: under 0.1. When a button moves at the moment somebody taps it, they leave frustrated.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how fast the page responds to interaction. Target: under 200 ms. (INP replaced the older FID metric in March 2024.)

The usual culprits

Unoptimised images — most sites serve images 3–5× larger than needed. A 4000×3000 px image displayed at 800×600 is pure ballast.
Too many external scripts — every chat widget, analytics tool and marketing pixel adds latency. Some sites carry 15+ of them.
Unused CSS and JavaScript — code that loads but never runs.

Quick wins

Convert images to WebP (25–35 % saving over JPEG)
Add lazy loading to images below the fold
Resize images to the dimensions they’re actually displayed at
Check whether any scripts can simply be removed

You can test your speed for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. A good score is above 90 — measure yours, you may be surprised. What to do with the result, step by step, is in the separate article on site speed.

Bonus: copy about “us” instead of “you”

This one runs through entire websites and is among the most common conversion barriers in copy. Most companies write about themselves — their experience, values, technology. But the customer cares about one thing: what they get out of it.

Wrong: “We’re a market leader with a 15-year tradition and a team of 50 specialists.” Right: “We save you 10 hours a month on accounting — so you can spend them on what you enjoy.”

Wrong: “We offer a comprehensive portfolio of digital services.” Right: “Get more customers from your website without raising your ad budget.”

A simple rule: go through your page and count how often you write “we/our/we offer” versus “you/your/you get”. If “we” wins, you have rewriting to do.

That shift in perspective — from feature-driven to benefit-driven copy — has measurable impact. The guide to website copywriting covers how to do it in practice.

Summary: five mistakes and the quick fix

Mistake	What you see in the data	Quick fix
1. Weak headline	High bounce rate on the homepage	Benefit-driven headline: what, for whom, what outcome
2. Too many CTAs	Low click-through to the main action	One primary CTA per page, suppress the rest
3. Long form	Low form completion rate	Cut to 3–5 fields, ask the rest after contact
4. Weak social proof	Exits at pricing or before ordering	Specific testimonial with name and outcome, near the CTA
5. Slow site	High bounce rate on mobile	Compress images, remove unnecessary scripts

How do you find out which of these your site has?

Maybe you recognised your own site somewhere above. Maybe you suspect some of these are costing you customers — but you’re not sure which, or how much. Before you start fixing, make sure you know what a conversion means on your site and how you measure it — without that, no fix has a visible effect.

The fastest route is a conversion audit — what one actually covers is a separate article. Go through the site systematically across four areas — copy, UX, technical state and forms — and you’ll see exactly where visitors are lost. Every problem gets a concrete recommendation and a measurable hypothesis to verify it.

Not a general “improve your UX”. For every barrier, a specific recommendation — with the reasoning and a way to measure it. That’s what Kaen does continuously, not once.