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What Makes a Lead Generation Website Work for a Small Business

What a lead generation website needs: a three-second promise, real proof, a short path to contact, speed on a phone, and the conversion rate to aim for.

Three inquiries a month from about 900 visitors: that's what a wedding planner in Cassis was getting from her website when she called me last March. Two of February's three were from people selling her something, a florist in Nice and a man with drone footage. The third was a couple from Denver who wanted a Saturday in June, and by Monday, when she answered, they had booked another planner. An agency had built the site in 2022 for €6,500, and I still have the proposal, which calls it a "lead generation website" on page 3.

I told her what I tell most people who ask me what a lead generation website needs. A stranger should see within about three seconds what you do and where, then find proof that you're real, like past weddings with names and dates on them, and then be able to reach you with one tap on a page that loads in under 2.5 seconds on a phone. After that it's a matter of counting. On the small business sites I look after, 2 to 4% of visitors send an inquiry when the site works, and hers was at 0.3%.

Three seconds

People judge fast. In a study Google's researchers published in 2012, volunteers were shown screenshots of real websites, and their opinion of how a site looked was formed in 17 to 50 milliseconds. A blink takes longer. They liked designs that were simple, and designs that looked like other sites in the same category. That second finding surprises my clients every time. So a wedding planner's site has to look like a wedding planner's site the instant it opens, and being better than the others is something you do after that.

Her home page opened on a slow-motion video of a bridal veil blowing off the cliffs of Cap Canaille, with "Timeless Moments" written over it in a script font. It didn't say the word wedding anywhere, or Provence, and it said nothing about the two things American couples ask about first, which are roughly how much is this going to cost and does she speak English.

We took the video down. In its place went a photo she took herself at a domaine out near Le Castellet, with one line on top of it: "Wedding planner in Provence for couples coming from abroad. 40 to 120 guests. Planning from €8,500. I reply within a day, in English." Under that there's a single button that says "Check my date."

Leave one of those answers out and you're asking a stranger to go looking. Strangers don't look. Further down the page she can be as lyrical as she likes; it's her site.

Proof with names on it

In 2017 the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern found that a product with five reviews was 270% more likely to be bought than a product with none, and that for higher-priced products, displaying reviews increased the conversion rate by 380%. A wedding with her starts at €8,500, and the couples paying it have usually only met her on Zoom, so they read every review on the page.

So her proof page is weddings only now, and for each one there's the venue, the month, how many guests, the couple's first names and a sentence they left on her Google profile.

We replaced the stock photo of champagne glasses on the About page with a photo of her, and added a line about the six years she worked in Boston before moving back to Cassis, which answers the question most American couples ask about her English.

The path to contact

The old form had fourteen fields. The budget field was a dropdown that started at "under €20,000," which told a couple with €15,000 that they were a small client before they had written a word, and both "How did you hear about us?" and the venue were required, although most couples haven't chosen a venue when they first write. Her phone number was an image in the footer, so it couldn't be tapped.

The new form has five fields, which are names, email, a date or season, the number of guests and a free text box. There is a WhatsApp button next to it because she found that American couples would rather text than type, and every section of every page ends with a "Check my date" button. I wrote about the contact page in more detail in what a small business website needs.

Someone also has to answer the inquiries, and that is rarely in the budget. In 2011 Harvard Business Review published an audit of 2,241 US companies that were each sent a test lead through their web forms. 37% replied within an hour and 23% never replied, and the companies that replied within 30 days took 42 hours on average. The same authors looked at 1.25 million sales leads received by 42 US companies and found that firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later.

The time difference made this worse for her. Couples in Denver would fill out the form after dinner, at 4 a.m. Cassis time, and by the time she answered at breakfast they had usually written to four other planners. Now an automatic email goes out as soon as the form is sent. She wrote it herself, and it has her prices, two real weddings of about the same size and a link to book a 20-minute video call in their time zone.

Under 2.5 seconds, on a phone

Most couples look at her site on a phone, so that's where I test it.

Her old home page took 7.8 seconds to show anything on her phone over 4G. Google's web.dev guidance treats a page as good when the largest element appears in 2.5 seconds or less for 75% of visits, measured separately on phones and desktops. A study Google commissioned from Deloitte and the agency 55, which followed the mobile sites of 37 brands for 30 days at the end of 2019, found that on lead generation sites a 0.1-second improvement went with 21.6% more visitors reaching the form page.

The old page was about 19 MB in total, and 18 MB of that was the veil video. The new home page weighs 1.1 MB with one photo, and the photo appears at 1.4 seconds on the same phone. I also test it on the La Ciotat to Marseille train, which loses signal in every tunnel. The site has two fonts and no page builder, and I resized every image by hand.

What conversion rate a lead generation website should get

In the end a lead generation website comes down to one fraction. On top go forms sent and taps on the phone and WhatsApp buttons; underneath, everyone who turned up. On my clients' sites a rate of 2 to 4% means the site is doing its job.

You'll see 6.6% quoted all over the place. That's the median in Unbounce's 2024 report on 41,000 landing pages and 57 million conversions, where industry medians ran from 3.8% to 12.3%. Landing pages usually have one button and get paid traffic sent straight to them. A full website also gets people looking for an address or opening hours, so I'd expect it to convert lower. If a site is under 1%, I look at the first screen, the form and the load time before anyone spends money on ads.

Before the redesign, hers had about 900 visits a month and 3 inquiries. First full month on the new site: roughly the same 900 visits, 17 inquiries, 1.9%, which still annoys me a little because my own bar is 2%. Those turned into nine video calls and two signed couples at about €9,000 each in planning fees, and nobody had touched the SEO.

At 600 visits a month and 2.5%, a site brings in 15 inquiries. If half of them are just looking and you sign one in three of the rest, that's two or three new clients a month.

What it costs, and how long

Her site cost €1,900 before VAT (about $2,200), which is where our prices start for a site designed from a blank page at the studio in the south of France. It usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. Hers took three because the photos were ready, and when the text turns up halfway through a project, everything slides by however late the text was.

There's a comparison with builders, freelancers and agencies in how much a website costs, and examples of our work in the portfolio. If you're hiring someone else, look in the proposal for a target number of inquiries before you sign; the other questions I'd ask are in how to choose a web development agency. If you already have a site that brings in nothing, read when a redesign is worth it first, since some of the fixes are cheap.

If you'd like me to look at yours, book a 15-minute call.

FAQ

What is a lead generation website?

A site that brings in inquiries you can count (forms, calls, WhatsApp messages), where somebody actually counts them every month. Most of the small business sites I'm asked to look at have never been counted. When we do count, they're usually under 1%, and at that point they're brochures.

What is a good website conversion rate for a small business?

I'm happy with 2 to 4% of visitors sending an inquiry on a full site, and under 1% I start looking for what's wrong. Unbounce's 6.6% is the median for landing pages, which get paid traffic and have one button, so it isn't really the same measurement.

How do I get more leads from my website without more traffic?

Start with the first screen and the form; they're cheap to change. Say what you do and where, cut the form to four or five fields, make the phone number tappable, and answer within the hour. The planner in this article went from 3 inquiries a month to 17 on the same 900 visits.

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