How to Find What's Broken on Your Website

You open your dashboard and see the number that worries you: five hundred visits this month, three bookings. Last week it was six hundred visits and two bookings. Something isn't working, but the number doesn't tell you what.

Is it the price you set? The cover photo? The text where you explain the service? The booking button, which might be sitting somewhere nobody sees it? Changing something at random and waiting two weeks to see if it goes up is the slowest way to find out, and the most expensive. If it works, you won't know why. If it doesn't, you'll have burned two weeks of traffic for nothing.

There's a better order to do this in. Before deciding what to change, you look at exactly where along the path people drop off.

Where People Drop Off, Not How Many Show Up

The visit count tells you whether people find you. It doesn't tell you whether you convince them. For that, you need to break the path someone takes, from landing on your site to paying, into three or four steps, and see how many people make it to each one.

Take a bike repair shop. The path is: land on the website, open the service page, tap the booking button, pick a time slot, and pay the deposit. Four steps. If you only look at the first number and the last one, you see a bad result but you don't know where it starts.

At this shop, out of every hundred people who land on the site, forty-five leave without even opening the service page. That's the big drop-off, not the last one. If the owner had only looked at the final result, six out of a hundred pay, he'd have suspected the price or the checkout process. The real problem sits much earlier: the homepage doesn't hook people, or the search results are bringing in people looking for something else.

We touched on this in What do you want the visitor to do: if you don't know what decision you're asking the visitor to make, you can't measure where they get stuck. The step-by-step funnel is that decision, turned into numbers.

Every Drop-Off Has a Different Cause

Not every drop-off gets fixed the same way. A drop-off before reaching the booking button is almost always about persuasion: price, photo, copy, trust. A drop-off after tapping the button is almost always about friction: the form asks for too much, checkout fails, or it's not clear what happens after you pay.

Mixing up the two is why so many people redo their homepage three times and still don't sell anything.

A Change in Wording, Not in Intent

Back to the bike shop: the big drop-off was before the button, on the service page. The copy explained what they did, not what problem it solved. So they changed a sentence, not the underlying idea.

The price didn't change, and neither did the photo. What changed was what the reader actually worried about: how much it would cost and how long they'd be without their bike. They knew to fix that because the drop-off was right there, before the button, not in the form.

Next time your dashboard shows you a number you don't like, don't start by changing the first thing that comes to mind. Start with the funnel, that's where the real question gets answered, not a hunch.