Most website problems don't announce themselves. Your site stays up. The homepage looks the same as it did last month. But somewhere behind it, a piece stopped working, and the leads that used to come in slowly thin out. By the time anyone notices, it's been weeks.
A website usually stops making money quietly, through a form that stops sending, an expired security certificate, a broken redirect, tracking that stops recording, email that lands in spam or pages that slow down after an update. You catch these by testing the path a customer takes on a regular schedule, and by checking what changed whenever the numbers drop.
When leads dip, the first guess is usually the big, expensive one. "Our SEO fell off." "We need a new website." Sometimes that's right. More often, in my experience, it's something small and cheap that broke. Here are the six I check first.
1. The contact form stops sending
This is the most common one I see, and the most painful. The form looks fine. Visitors fill it out and see a thank you message. The message just never reaches you.
It can happen after a plugin update, a change to your email provider, a spam filter set too tight or a small code error that only shows up on certain phones. A plugin is an add-on that gives a site like WordPress extra features, and updates to them are one of the most common reasons things change without anyone touching the site.
How to catch it: submit your own form from your phone and computer every week and confirm it arrives. I wrote a step by step guide: Is your contact form actually sending?
2. The security certificate expires
An SSL certificate is what puts the padlock in the browser bar and the "s" in https. It proves your site is who it says it is and keeps form data private. Certificates expire, and most renew automatically. When the renewal fails, visitors get a full page warning that your site is not secure.
Almost nobody clicks past that warning. Worse, you might not see it yourself if your browser remembers an old version of the page.
How to catch it: know your certificate's expiration date and put it on your calendar a couple of weeks ahead. Better yet, have your host or site manager monitor it. This is part of what we watch in our hosting and care plans.
3. Redirects break
A redirect sends someone from an old web address to a new one. They matter when you rename a page, move to a new site or switch domains. If they're missing or wrong, old links from Google, your Google Business Profile, ads and other sites lead to an error page.
Redirects also break quietly in another way. Some strip off the tracking tags at the end of a link, so a lead from a paid ad shows up as if it came from nowhere.
How to catch it: after any site change, click the links in your Google listing, your ads and your email signature. Make sure each lands on a real page. Google's guide to moving a site explains why redirects matter for search.
4. Tracking stops recording
Tracking is how you know which visitors became leads and where they came from. It's easy to break. Someone edits the thank you page address, a tag gets removed during a redesign or a settings change stops conversions from counting.
Here's the tricky part. When tracking breaks, your reports say leads dropped. But the leads might be fine. Only the counting broke. Owners sometimes cut an ad campaign that was working because the report said it wasn't.
How to catch it: compare two sources. If your analytics shows 3 leads last month but your inbox or CRM shows 15, the tracking is broken and the business is fine. Check this monthly.
5. Your email lands in spam
This hits two ways. Form notifications to you land in spam, so you miss leads. And your replies to customers land in their spam, so they think you ignored them.
The fix usually lives in a few settings on your domain called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. In plain terms, they tell inbox providers that your messages are really from you. When they're missing or out of date, often because you added a new tool that sends email for you, your mail starts looking suspicious. Google lays out the rules in its email sender guidelines.
How to catch it: send an email from your business address to a personal Gmail account and see where it lands. Do the same with a test form. If either hits spam, get your business email setup checked.
6. Pages slow down after updates
A site that was fast at launch can get slower over time. A plugin update adds scripts to every page. Someone uploads a photo straight off a phone at full size. A chat widget or a new tracking tag gets added. Each change is small. Together they add up.
Visitors notice. Portent's research found that "a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds" and "5x higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds" for B2B sites (Portent, Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate).
How to catch it: open your site on your phone over cell data once a month. If it feels slower than it used to, it probably is. Check what was added or updated recently before you blame your host.
A simple routine to catch all six, or let us check
You don't need fancy tools. You need a short habit. Here's what I'd put on the calendar:
- Weekly: submit your form from a phone and confirm it arrives outside spam.
- Monthly: compare leads in analytics with leads in your inbox or CRM. Load the site on your phone over cell data.
- After any change: click through from your Google listing and ads, then test the form again.
- Every quarter: check your certificate's expiration date and send a test email to a personal account.
- When leads drop: ask what changed around that date before you spend money on a fix.
That last point is the big one. The first sign of trouble shows you where it hurts. The cause can sit anywhere along the path a customer takes. I go deeper on that way of thinking in the longer version on my site.
If you'd rather hand this off, our free Lead Leak Check covers several of these at once. We test whether your forms arrive, whether people can call you from a phone, how fast the site is on mobile, whether your tracking works, how Google sees you and what AI answers say about you. You get a short written summary of what we found and what we'd fix first. Request your free Lead Leak Check.
Adapted for business owners from an essay by Hector Herrera.
