Why your website isn’t generating leads: nine leaks we found on our own site.

The short answer.

If your website gets visits but few real enquiries, look at the path an enquiry travels before you buy more traffic. A buyer has to find the form, trust it enough to fill it in, get it through without errors, and then hear back quickly from someone who has read what they wrote. Every one of those steps can fail quietly, and most of them fail without anyone in your business noticing.

We know because we audited our own path. We run search, AI visibility and conversion work for B2B companies, and our own site still had nine leaks, including one that stopped every enquiry notification reaching us. None of them showed up in a dashboard. All of them showed up when we tested the path the way a buyer would.

A form count is not a lead count.

The first number most teams look at is “form submissions”. It is the wrong number. Before changing anything, we went back through every submission our two forms had received between 15 September and 5 November 2026 and classified each one by hand.

Thirty submissions looked like activity. Read one by one, they were tests, spam, other agencies selling to us and messages written to look like genuine enquiries. If we had reported “30 leads” to ourselves, we would have made every later decision on a false number. This is how we now tell them apart:

The same thing happens in most businesses we look at: the dashboard counts actions, and nobody reads the actions. So the first fix costs nothing. Open the last thirty entries, read every one, and mark it as a real buyer or not. That single exercise usually changes what the team thinks its problem is. Our earlier guide on tracking website leads from first visit to CRM shows how to make that classification permanent.

Leak 1: the form asks too much, too soon.

Every question on a form is a small cost to the buyer. Our free-report form made buyers pick a service before they could ask for a report that was meant to be free and simple. Our contact form went further and made a monthly budget band compulsory. A buyer who is still deciding whether to trust you will not want to pick a budget before you have said anything useful.

We cut the free-report form back to what we need to do the work and reply properly: first name, last name, work email, website, and one optional box for what prompted the request. On the contact form, service and budget stayed, but both are now clearly marked optional, so a buyer can send a short brief without guessing.

How to decide what stays

For each field, ask one question: would we refuse to reply without this? If not, make it optional or remove it. Keep the fields that let you reply like a person, such as a first name, and drop the ones that only help you sort leads into a spreadsheet. You can ask the rest on the call.

Leak 2: the form looks broken on some screens.

When we simplified the form, we introduced a bug. The layout had been built to show “name” and “email” side by side. With the name field gone, the email box sat alone in the right half of the row, beside an empty gap. On a desktop screen the form looked broken. Our own checks passed, because they checked that the fields existed, not how they looked.

The fix took minutes. Finding it needed a habit: look at the form, as a visitor would, on a phone and on a desktop, every time anything changes. We now screenshot every changed page at phone and desktop width before calling a change done. If your developer tells you “the form works”, ask to see it on both screens.

Leak 3: nobody knows a lead arrived.

This was the most serious leak, and it was invisible. Our website sends its notification emails through a Google account. At some point that account’s authorisation expired. The form kept working, visitors saw the thank-you page, and every entry was saved, but the email telling us about it was rejected with a single line in a log: “Token has been expired or revoked.”

The last notification we can confirm went out on 28 October 2026. From the morning of 6 November, every one failed. We found it only because we submitted a test enquiry with our own address and waited for an email that never came. We re-authorised the connection the same day, and the next test arrived in seconds.

If your notifications rely on a connected Google or Microsoft account, ask who owns it and what happens when its password or security settings change. That is usually when the connection breaks.

Leak 4: the person who enquired hears nothing.

A buyer who has just sent an enquiry is at their most interested. Our site wasted that moment twice. The thank-you page said “Keep exploring” and little else, and the buyer received no email at all until someone replied by hand. From their side, it looked as if the enquiry had disappeared.

We rebuilt both. The thank-you page now changes with the form that was sent and says exactly what happens next and when. An automatic confirmation email now goes out within seconds, from a real address that can be replied to, and repeats the promise: the free report within 24 hours, and a personal reply from the team.

What a confirmation should do

• Arrive within a minute, from an address a person reads.
• Use the buyer’s first name and repeat what they asked for.
• Say what happens next and by when, and keep that promise.
• Invite a reply, so anything they forgot reaches you.

Leak 5: you can’t tell where the lead came from.

An enquiry without a source can’t tell you which channel to fund. Our forms were saving the message but not the route. A lead from a LinkedIn post and a lead from a Google ad looked identical.

Every form now carries seven hidden fields that fill themselves: the five standard campaign tags (UTM source, medium, campaign, term and content), the Google Ads click ID and the referring page. The buyer sees nothing different. We see, on every entry, where it came from. Our guide on cost per lead versus cost per qualified opportunity explains what to do with that data once you have it.

Leak 6: your analytics counts one lead twice.

Google Analytics lets you mark certain events as “key events”, the ones that count as conversions. When we tested a form submission, two key events fired for one enquiry: our lead event and an older advertising event left over from a previous setup. Every lead was being counted twice, so every report overstated what the site produced by about half.

We removed the duplicate, so one enquiry now counts once. If your analytics reports more conversions than your inbox receives enquiries, this is the first place to look. Our article on why Google Ads leads don’t convert covers the other common causes.

Leak 7: spam and pitches drown the real enquiries.

Spam is easy to spot. The harder messages look genuine: a real-looking company website, an email on a matching domain, a polite opening. We had several. What gave them away was the message itself: a long note written in the first person about what they could do for us, asking for a “proposal” or a reply, sometimes with a link to book a call in their own calendar, sent through a form that asks one short question.

We wrote those patterns down and now screen every entry against them before anyone spends time replying. Real enquiries go to the top of the queue; pitches are filed, not answered. That protects the only resource that matters at this stage: a fast, thoughtful reply to the people who actually want to buy.

Leak 8: the first reply is slow or generic.

The first human reply decides whether an enquiry becomes a conversation. Two things kill it: time, and a reply that could have been sent to anyone. We now prepare each reply within hours of the enquiry: a short note using the buyer’s name, confirming what they asked for and when it arrives. For our free report, that is within 24 hours. If they choose to share read-only access to their analytics, we add their own data; if not, we work from public data and say so.

The reply never includes a price or a sales sequence. It gives them something useful, then makes the next step easy: a short call at a time that suits them, arranged by email.

Leak 9: the page around the form doesn’t earn trust.

A form sits inside a page, and the page does the persuading. A buyer deciding whether to send their details is asking three questions: are these people credible, what happens if I do this, and what will it cost me? Our forms now sit beside dated evidence, a plain statement of what happens next, and a promise of no marketing sequence.

Dated evidence matters more than big numbers. When we show a client result, such as organic-search key events for FullTilt Team Development rising from 13 to 234 between 1 May and 28 November 2024 compared with the six months before (GA4), we show the source and the dates, and the screenshot is on the case study. Our landing page trust audit goes deeper into what to put beside a form.

The 30-minute leak audit.

Tick each statement that is true for your website today. Your score appears at the end. Nothing you tick is sent anywhere.

If you scored below eight, start with the lines closest to the inbox: notifications, the confirmation and the first reply. They take the least time to fix and they protect the enquiries you already have.

Questions owners ask.

Should I buy more traffic if my website isn’t generating leads?

Not until the path is tested. More traffic through a leaking path produces more lost enquiries. Fix the leaks above first, then measure for a few weeks, then decide whether the remaining gap is traffic. Our guide on finding your real growth constraint walks through that decision.

How many fields should a B2B enquiry form have?

As few as you need to reply well. For a first enquiry that is usually a name, a work email, the website and one optional message box. Ask about budget and timing on the call.

How do I know if my form notifications are failing?

Send a test enquiry from an outside address and wait. If it doesn’t arrive within a minute, check your mail plugin’s log for failed sends. Do this weekly and after any change to the site, your hosting or the email account behind it.

Is a high form count a good sign?

Only once you have read the entries. Tests, spam and vendor pitches can make up most of a form count. Classify every entry and report real buyers, not submissions.

What should happen in the first hour after someone enquires?

They should see a clear thank-you page, receive a confirmation email, and the enquiry should reach a named person on your team. A thoughtful personal reply should follow within one business day.

Sources: Prolinkage’s own forms, analytics and email logs, audited 6 November 2026. Client result: FullTilt Team Development, GA4 organic-search key events, 1 May–28 Nov 2024 vs 2 Oct 2023–30 Apr 2024.