01It takes too long to load on a phone
Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, not the office Wi-Fi. Count. If you're still waiting after a few seconds, so is your customer, and they have a competitor one tap away.
The usual causes are oversized photos uploaded straight from a camera, cheap shared hosting, and themes loaded with features nobody uses. All of them are fixable.
02Nobody can tell what you do in five seconds
"Welcome to our website" says nothing. Neither does a slider of stock photos. The first thing on screen should answer three questions: what you do, where, and for whom.
"Family dental clinic in Jumeirah, open until 10pm" does more work than any amount of design.
03There's no obvious next step
Every page should make one action obvious: call, WhatsApp, book, or get a quote. If a visitor has to hunt for a phone number, many won't bother.
In the UAE, plenty of customers would rather send a WhatsApp message than fill in a form or make a call. Make that one tap, on every page.
04The information is out of date
Last year's prices. A branch that closed. Ramadan hours from two Ramadans ago. A phone number nobody answers. Each one tells a customer the business might not be paying attention, and that doubt spreads to everything else.
05It looks like everyone else
Template websites in the same industry tend to look the same, because they are the same. If a customer can't tell you apart from the clinic or restaurant they looked at a minute ago, they compare on the only thing left: price.
If you look like everyone else, you get compared on price.
06The contact form goes nowhere
Fill in your own contact form. Did the message arrive? Where? Forms that send to an old email address, or straight into a spam folder, are far more common than owners think. Every one of those is a customer who thinks you ignored them.
07Google doesn't understand it
Every page titled "Home". No mention of the area you serve. Services hidden inside images instead of text. If Google can't tell that you're a dentist in Jumeirah, it won't show you to people searching for one.
This is the least visible problem on the list and often the most expensive, because the customers you lose never knew you existed.
testThe five minute check
Tonight, pick up your phone, switch off Wi-Fi, search for your business the way a customer would, open your website and try to contact yourself. Note everything that slows you down. That list is where your website is leaking customers.
nextWhere to go from here
Want a website that gets this right from day one? See everything included in every custom website we build in Dubai, or see how yours could look, free. We also wrote practical notes for salons, clinics, restaurants and more industries.