How do I know if my contact form stopped working recently or has been broken for months?

Check your email for the last confirmed form submission — do you remember when that was? Also check your analytics for a drop-off in form completions (if you have goal tracking set up). Your hosting provider's email logs will show the precise date of the last outbound email attempt from the site. If you have no analytics and no email logs, the honest answer is you cannot know without a technical audit.

My site loads fine on my laptop. Why does the PageSpeed score say it is slow?

The PageSpeed test simulates a mid-range Android device on a 4G connection — not your office laptop on fibre. That is a much closer approximation of how most of your visitors experience the site. What feels instant on your machine can be painfully slow for a visitor on a phone on the street.

Is a website speed fix worth it if my business relies on referrals more than search?

Yes, even for referral-heavy businesses. A referred prospect still visits the site to validate the recommendation before calling. If the site loads slowly or the contact form does not work, you have just undermined the trust the referral built. Speed and form reliability matter regardless of traffic source.

What is a realistic budget to fix the problems this diagnostic uncovers?

It depends entirely on the severity and cause. A broken contact form is often a $200–$500 fix. A checkout that requires plugin replacement and testing might be $800–$2,000. A full performance remediation — images, caching, script audit — is typically $1,500–$4,000. A proper audit will tell you the scope before any money is spent on fixes.

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Rescue

Is Your Website Costing You Sales? A Self-Diagnostic

A site that looks fine can quietly lose you money every day. Broken forms, failing checkouts, and slow load times rarely announce themselves — they just lower your conversion rate. This guide gives you a systematic way to find those problems, measure what each costs, and decide what to fix first.

8 min read · Updated June 2026 · By Anthony Garces

Start with load speed — it affects everything else

Page speed is the most reliably measurable problem a website can have, and it affects both SEO ranking and the percentage of visitors who stay long enough to become leads. Google's research puts it bluntly: when a mobile page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 32%. At five seconds, that figure is 90%. Most business websites, especially those built on WordPress with accumulated plugins, sit somewhere between three and seven seconds on a mobile connection.

The free test to run right now: go to web.dev/measure or pagespeed.web.dev and enter your site's URL. Do it on the mobile tab, not desktop — that is where most of your visitors are. The tool returns a score out of 100 and a list of specific issues. A score below 50 on mobile is affecting your search ranking and conversion rate. Below 30 means you have a serious problem. Write down the top three issues it lists — those are your starting point.

What the numbers actually mean

If your site gets 500 visitors a month and converts at 2% (10 leads), and fixing load time improves conversion to 3% (15 leads), that is 5 extra leads per month. If your average lead is worth $500, you are looking at $2,500 per month in recovered value — $30,000 per year — from a performance fix that typically costs $1,500–$4,000.

Check every form that is supposed to send you an inquiry

Contact forms are the most commonly broken feature on small business websites. They break silently: a hosting company changes their email configuration, a plugin stops being maintained, a spam filter starts catching legitimate form submissions. The visitor sees a success message. You never see the email. The lead disappears.

1Submit a test inquiry through every contact form on your site, from a personal email address you don't normally use.
2Check your inbox AND your spam folder. Some hosting email relays have poor sender reputation and land in spam by default.
3Wait 10 minutes. If nothing arrives, the form is broken. Check your hosting provider's email logs if you have access — they will show whether the send attempt was even made.
4Do the same test on a mobile device, in a different browser. Some forms break only on mobile or only in Safari.

If any form is broken, fix it before anything else. A broken contact form is a direct revenue leak — every inquiry that goes to /dev/null is a prospect who took the effort to reach out and got nothing back.

Check your checkout if you sell anything online

Checkout failures are the most expensive single bug a commerce site can have. A broken checkout does not just lose you one transaction — it loses you the customer's trust permanently. Most people who hit a checkout error do not try again. They go somewhere else.

The places checkout breaks most often: the payment gateway's API credentials have expired or changed; a plugin update changed the checkout flow without being tested first; the SSL certificate lapsed and some browsers are now blocking the transaction; or the checkout works fine on desktop but fails on iOS Safari because of a JavaScript compatibility issue.

Do a real test purchase — put something in the cart, go all the way through checkout with a real card. Refund it if you need to, but actually complete it.
Check your payment gateway's dashboard (Stripe, Square, etc.) and look at the decline and abandonment rates for the past 30 days. A sudden spike is a red flag.
Look at your analytics: if the drop-off at the cart or checkout page is above 70%, you have a problem beyond normal cart abandonment.
Test on a real iPhone using Safari — not just desktop Chrome. iOS Safari is consistently where checkout issues hide.

Audit your mobile experience — not just how it looks, but how it works

A site that looks reasonable on mobile can still be functionally broken: tap targets too close together, a phone number that is not click-to-call, a form that requires horizontal scrolling to complete, or a menu that does not close after a selection. These are friction points that cost you conversions without ever showing up as an error.

Borrow a phone that is not your own — ideally an older Android — and try to complete the most important action on your site. If you are a service business, that is submitting a contact form or booking an appointment. If you sell products, it is completing a purchase. Time yourself. If it takes you more than 45 seconds or requires more than three taps to find what you need, a cold visitor has already left.

Check where leads are dropping — not just whether they are

If you have Google Analytics (or any analytics tool) set up, look at the funnel: how many people arrive on your contact or booking page, and what percentage actually complete it? If 80% of people who reach your contact page leave without submitting, the problem is on that page — not in the quality of the traffic that arrived. If the drop-off happens earlier, the navigation or the homepage messaging is not directing people to the right place.

If you have no analytics on your site, fix that immediately

You cannot make good decisions about a website without data on what visitors are doing. Google Analytics 4 is free and takes about an hour to set up properly. Without it, you are flying blind — you will never know which page is losing you the most leads.

Prioritise fixes by revenue impact, not by complexity

Once you have found the problems, the natural temptation is to fix the easiest ones first. Resist it. Instead, estimate what each problem is costing you per month: a broken form on a page that gets 200 visitors is more urgent than a slow load time on a page that gets 10. A checkout that fails 15% of transactions is more urgent than a form that converts at 3% instead of 5%.

The order of priority for most business sites: (1) fix anything that is completely broken first — forms, checkouts, logins; (2) fix mobile usability problems that block the primary conversion action; (3) address load speed; (4) fix everything else in descending order of traffic and conversion impact.

One honest note

If your audit surfaces several serious problems — a broken checkout, a form that has not been sending emails for months, and a mobile experience that does not work — that is a sign the site has not been maintained properly. A proper technical audit will tell you whether these are individual fixable issues or a sign of deeper structural problems. At Anito, the audit comes before any quote, and you get the findings in writing whether or not you proceed.

What to remember

Run the PageSpeed test on mobile — below 50 hurts ranking and conversions.
Test every contact form. Silent failures are the most expensive website bug.
Do a real checkout on a real iPhone — most commerce failures hide on iOS Safari.
Without analytics you cannot confirm what is broken or that your fixes worked.
Fix by revenue impact: broken features first, high-traffic pages before low-traffic ones.

Common questions

Check your email for the last confirmed form submission — do you remember when that was? Also check your analytics for a drop-off in form completions (if you have goal tracking set up). Your hosting provider's email logs will show the precise date of the last outbound email attempt from the site. If you have no analytics and no email logs, the honest answer is you cannot know without a technical audit.
The PageSpeed test simulates a mid-range Android device on a 4G connection — not your office laptop on fibre. That is a much closer approximation of how most of your visitors experience the site. What feels instant on your machine can be painfully slow for a visitor on a phone on the street.
Yes, even for referral-heavy businesses. A referred prospect still visits the site to validate the recommendation before calling. If the site loads slowly or the contact form does not work, you have just undermined the trust the referral built. Speed and form reliability matter regardless of traffic source.
It depends entirely on the severity and cause. A broken contact form is often a $200–$500 fix. A checkout that requires plugin replacement and testing might be $800–$2,000. A full performance remediation — images, caching, script audit — is typically $1,500–$4,000. A proper audit will tell you the scope before any money is spent on fixes.

If you want a hand with this

Broken checkout. Developer unreachable. Every day down is revenue gone.The spreadsheet running your business is now your biggest risk

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