The three pages every business website gets wrong

The homepage usually gets all the attention. It's the first thing shown in a redesign pitch, the first thing a client approves, and the first thing a designer puts in their portfolio. The pages that actually lose customers sit quietly behind it.

The contact page

Most contact pages are a form, a phone number and sometimes a map. That's the whole page. And then the business wonders why nobody uses it.

Here's what a visitor needs from a contact page: a reason to believe someone will reply, a sense of how long that takes, and a way to start that matches how they like to communicate. A form with five required fields and no confirmation message answers none of those questions.

The specific failures come up again and again:

• The form sends to an inbox nobody monitors after 6pm
• There's no confirmation — the visitor submits and wonders if it worked
• Phone and email are listed but there's no indication of hours
• Mobile visitors have to zoom in to tap the right field

Fix the confirmation first. A simple "We'll reply within one business day" is worth more than a redesign. Then check that the form actually sends — not in the staging environment, on the live site, to the right inbox, on a phone.

The about page

The about page is usually either a wall of company history nobody asked for, or three sentences so vague they apply to any business on earth. "We are passionate about delivering results for our clients" is on roughly a third of all about pages. It tells the visitor nothing.

What people actually want from an about page: who they're dealing with, whether this business has handled something like their situation before, and whether they trust it enough to proceed. That's it.

The fix is specific over general. Not "over a decade of experience" but what kind of work, for whom, with what result you're allowed to describe honestly. A real photo of a real person is worth three paragraphs of copy. If there's a team, show them — not a stock photo of people in a glass office.

The about page is also where social proof sits if you have it. Not invented statistics, not vague testimonials, but a concrete description of a problem you solved for a type of client the reader recognises as similar to themselves.

The services or product page

This is the one that costs the most in lost business, and it's the one most often written by whoever had time that week.

The failure pattern is consistent: the page describes what the service is rather than what it does for the customer. "We offer comprehensive HR software with modular onboarding tools" is about the product. "Your new hire completes their paperwork before day one, without anyone chasing them" is about what happens when the customer has it.

A second failure: listing every feature at equal weight. If everything is highlighted, nothing is. Visitors scan, they don't read. The one thing that closes a sale — the feature that answers the question they came with — is buried in the fifth paragraph because the person who wrote the page thought everything was equally important.

A third failure: no price, no indication of price, no way to know if this is for them. This drives people away faster than a high number would. At minimum, give a range and explain what the range depends on. People can handle "from €1,500, depending on what you need" — they can't work with total silence.

Why these three pages stay broken

They're not the ones that get redesigned. When a business decides the website needs updating, the budget goes on a new homepage, maybe a new colour palette, often a new hero image. The contact, about and services pages carry across from the old site with a few words changed.

A designer presenting a concept shows the homepage. Nobody presents the contact page. So it never gets the same attention, even though it's the last thing someone looks at before they decide to reach out — or don't.

The other reason is that these pages require decisions, not just design. The contact page needs someone to decide what the response time is and own it. The about page needs someone willing to say something specific about themselves. The services page needs someone to prioritise ruthlessly. Those decisions are harder than picking a colour.

What to do this week

Open your site on your phone. Go to Contact. Submit the form with a test message and a real email address. Check whether a confirmation appears. Check whether the message arrives, and where, and how quickly.

Then go to Services. Read the first paragraph. If it describes the service rather than what the customer gets from it, that's the rewrite.

These aren't redesign jobs. They're an afternoon's work each. They're also the changes most likely to produce a visible difference in how many people actually get in touch.

If you want someone to look at all three and tell you what's actually costing you, the 30-minute intro call is free and comes with a straight answer.