The Tech Problems on Your Website You Probably Don’t Know Are There

You’ve been running your business for years. You know your clients, you know your craft, and you know what works. But your website? That feels like someone else’s problem. You might check it once every few months, and when you do, you think, “Looks fine to me.” Then you move on with your day.

Here’s what I want you to know: your website is probably doing something you can’t see, and it’s quietly working against you.

I’m not talking about design or copy. I’m talking about the invisible stuff that happens behind the scenes, every single day, on every device your potential clients use to find you. The things that slow everything down, that make buttons not work right, that send your visitors away without you ever knowing why they left.

You don’t see these problems because you’re not looking in the right places. And honestly, why would you? You’re busy running your business. Tech isn’t your thing. You just want your website to work.

But here’s what happens when it doesn’t: people land on your site, something feels off (even if they can’t name it), and they click away. Sometimes they land on your site and can’t even do the one thing you want them to do, like book a call or download your thing. And you never know it happened.

This is the article for that.

The Problems You Don’t See (But Your Visitors Do)

Let me start with something I see in my work all the time. A woman’s website looks beautiful on her computer. The colors are right, the photos are nice, the words make sense. But then a potential client lands on it on their phone, and the whole thing falls apart. Text is too small. Images don’t load. The contact form is impossible to fill out with a thumb.

Mobile is no longer optional. It’s not some nice-to-have feature. Many women find that more than half of their website traffic is coming from phones and tablets. So if your website doesn’t work on mobile, you’re losing business on the device where most people are actually looking at you.

But here’s the thing, and this is important: you can’t always tell by just looking at it on your phone. The real problems show up in the data, in the code, in the way browsers are trying to read your site and can’t.

Let me walk you through the biggest categories of invisible tech problems I find.

Speed Issues That You Only Feel, Never See

Your website loads. It feels fine. You click a button, the page changes, you move on. But what if I told you that your home page is taking 8 seconds to load? What if your contact page takes 6?

You don’t notice it because you’re sitting in your own browser, with your own fast internet, on your own computer. But a potential client on a slower connection, or a busier network, or an older phone, is watching your site load and watching, and watching. And by second 4 or 5, many of them are gone.

In my experience, slow websites are one of the biggest invisible killers. People don’t think, “This website is slow, so I’m leaving.” They just think, “This website isn’t working right,” and they go somewhere else. You never get the feedback that speed was the problem.

The culprits are usually things like images that are way too large, code that’s running in the background that you don’t even know is there, or hosting that’s undersized for what you need.

Mobile Layout Problems That Break On Certain Phones

Here’s something that happens more than you’d think: a website works fine on an iPhone, but on an Android phone, the buttons are in the wrong place. Or the text is overlapping itself. Or the form fields are too narrow to actually type in.

This happens because different phones have different screen sizes, different operating systems, and different ways of rendering websites. A business owner I worked with recently had a contact form that worked perfectly when she tested it on her own phone, but when her potential clients tried to fill it out on their phones, half the fields were invisible.

She had no idea. She was probably getting fewer inquiries than she could have been, and she thought it was about her marketing or her messaging. It was about her form.

Broken Links and Missing Pages

You update your website, move things around, change a service offering. But somewhere in your site, there’s still a link pointing to an old page that doesn’t exist anymore. A visitor clicks that link, and they land on a 404 error page that basically says, “Dead end. Go away.”

Or you’ve got pages that are live but that aren’t showing up in search results the way they should because something in the code is telling search engines not to index them.

These are things you literally can’t see by just browsing your own site, unless you click every single link and check every single page. Which, let’s be honest, nobody does.

Forms That Don’t Actually Send

This one makes me sad every time I find it. A woman has a contact form on her website. She’s been waiting for inquiries. And then we discover that the form isn’t actually sending the messages anywhere. The visitor thinks they’ve hit submit successfully, but you’re never getting the email.

Sometimes the visitor gets no confirmation at all, so they don’t even know if it went through. Sometimes they get a message that says it worked, but in the background, nothing is happening.

How many inquiries have you lost because of this?

Why These Problems Happen (And Why It’s Not Your Fault)

Here’s what I want you to understand: these aren’t problems that happen because you’re bad at tech or because you didn’t pay attention. They happen because websites are complex. They require maintenance. They need someone who understands both the visible side and the invisible side to actually look at them.

Most of the time, these problems sneak in quietly. You built your website years ago with someone you trusted, and that person moved on. You’ve made updates yourself, or you’ve had small tweaks done here and there. But nobody’s actually auditing the whole thing to see what’s broken.

Or you’re using a template or a website builder that was great three years ago, but now it’s running on old code, and it hasn’t been updated in a way that keeps up with how the internet actually works in 2024.

Or you hired someone who was great at making things look pretty but didn’t test anything before they handed it off.

None of these are failures on your part. They’re just the reality of maintaining anything online.

The Opportunity Here

But here’s what I want you to see: once you know what’s broken, you can fix it. And once you fix it, your website does what it’s supposed to do. It works for your clients instead of against them.

I see women get this huge wave of relief when their website starts functioning the way they imagined it would. They weren’t broken. Their websites were broken. And there’s a real difference.

When your website works like it should, you’re not losing business to invisible tech problems. You’re getting calls from people who actually found you and actually liked what they saw. You’re getting the inquiries you deserve.

How to Find These Problems Before They Cost You

The easiest way is to have someone audit your site. Not a redesign, not a rebrand, just an honest look at what’s actually happening under the hood.

There are also some free tools you can use yourself. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will tell you about your speed issues. Google Search Console will show you if there are indexing problems. You can plug your website into a mobile checker to see how it renders on different phones.

But honestly, most of the women I talk to are too busy to do that, and I don’t think you should have to. Tech is a language, and if you didn’t grow up speaking it, why should you have to become fluent just to make sure your website works?

That’s where someone like me comes in. I look at your website from a marketing perspective first, which means I’m not just looking at the code, I’m looking at whether it’s actually doing what you need it to do. And I make it easy. I speak human, even though I speak tech too.

The biggest opportunity on your website right now might be invisible to you. But it’s not invisible to me. And I’d love to take a look.

Learn more about how I can help →

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my website has these kinds of problems?

The honest answer is, you might not. That’s the whole point. But some signs to look for are: people tell you they tried to contact you but their message didn’t go through, your site feels slow to you even on a good internet connection, or when you test your website on your phone, things look weird or don’t work right.

Can I fix these problems myself?

Some of them, maybe. If you’re comfortable poking around in Google Search Console or using free tools like PageSpeed Insights, you can get a sense of what’s happening. But most tech problems require someone who understands code and how websites actually work to fix properly.

Will fixing these problems help me get more clients?

Not directly. What fixing these problems does is remove the invisible barriers that are stopping you from getting the clients who are already interested in what you do. You won’t suddenly have a thousand new inquiries, but you’ll stop losing the good ones to broken buttons and slow pages.

How often should I audit my website for these problems?

I’d suggest at least once a year, or any time you make major changes to your site. If you’re updating a lot of content or trying out new features, a check-in makes sense. If your site has been stable for a while, annual is plenty.

If your website no longer feels like you, let’s talk about it – Book a Free Website Clarity Call with Beth →