Website conversion
What losesthe call.
Three things, mostly: the page that won’t load on a phone, the site Google and the AI assistants can’t read, and the lead nobody answers. Here’s each one, measured on a real site.
TL;DR
Most lost calls come down to three things: a page too slow on a phone, a site Google and the AI assistants can’t read, and a lead nobody answers. Southern Belle Construction’s old WordPress home page took 18.4 seconds to show its main content on a phone, against Google’s guideline of 2.5, and its robots.txt shut out GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot; the site we built shows it in 2.2. None of the three needs more traffic to fix: each is measured first, then fixed on the site itself.
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One: the slow page
18.4 seconds on a phone.
Google’s guidance is that a page’s largest element should be on screen within 2.5 seconds. On 24 September 2026, Southern Belle Construction’s old WordPress home page took 18.4 seconds to get there on a phone, and Google scored its mobile performance 54. The page we built to replace it: 2.2 seconds, and 96.
Speed moves money. In a study Google ran with Deloitte, shaving 0.1 seconds off mobile load time lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. Retail isn’t remodeling, but a homeowner on a phone has the same thumb and the same back button.
Two: the site nobody can read
Blocked from the answer.
Southern Belle’s old robots.txt told GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot to stay out. OpenAI’s documentation is plain about the second one: sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.” PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to surface and link websites in its results, so blocking it shuts the door there too.
The old site also had no sitemap, and an address that didn’t exist answered as though it did. Four days before the scan, five AI engines asked who to hire for construction around White House read the old site in none of twenty answers, and cited angi.com 16 times.
Our scanner checks for every one of these. Run it on your own site; it takes about half a minute.
Three: the lead nobody answers
A form is only a lead if someone reads it.
A call that rings out after hours and a form that drops into an inbox nobody checks are both gone. Some forms lose leads before anyone could answer: we’ve rebuilt forms that silently threw submissions away, and that’s why every form we build saves the lead in the site’s database before it sends a single email.
AI integration closes the rest of the gap: a reply to every form within a minute is the target, day or night, and every missed call gets a text back, in your name, in words you approved.The worked example
Southern Belle, measured twice.
Southern Belle Construction is a woman-owned custom home builder and remodeler in White House, Tennessee. Its old site ran WordPress on GoDaddy. We scanned it on the day our build replaced it, with the same 103-check scanner every site we build is held to, and scanned the new one too.
- Website scan, 103 checks
- Old WordPress site: 69 of 100
- Our build: 99 of 100
- Failed checks
- Old WordPress site: 8
- Our build: 0
- Google mobile PageSpeed
- Old WordPress site: 54
- Our build: 96
- Largest Contentful Paint, phone
- Old WordPress site: 18.4 seconds
- Our build: 2.2 seconds
- Home page fetched in
- Old WordPress site: 1,384 ms
- Our build: 369 ms
- AI crawlers
- Old WordPress site: Five blocked in robots.txt
- Our build: Allowed
- Sitemap
- Old WordPress site: None
- Our build: 56 URLs
- A page that doesn’t exist
- Old WordPress site: Answered 200
- Our build: A real 404
Both scans were run on 24 September 2026, the old site live on its domain and the new one at its preview address the day it went live.
The move itself
Two WordPress sites, one careful move.
Spring Haven Mansion, a wedding and event venue in Hendersonville, Tennessee, ran WordPress twice: from 2014 to 2019, and again from 2024 into early 2026. When a site changes platforms, the old addresses are where lost visitors hide.
For the move to our build, we found 126 old URLs in the Wayback Machine and Search Console and made 117 of them answer on the new site, 112 by a permanent redirect. The other nine were left alone, each for a reason we wrote down. One of the 117, the old WordPress pricing page, had drawn 170 clicks and 6,668 search impressions between May 2025 and April 2026; it now sends people to the venue’s packages page.
Answers
Website conversion, asked and answered
Why is my website not converting?
Usually for one of three reasons: it loads too slowly on a phone, the people and engines who arrive can’t find what they came for, or the leads it does produce go unanswered. The free scan on our home page checks the first two in about half a minute.
Does website speed affect how many calls I get?
Yes. Google wants a page’s largest element on screen within 2.5 seconds, and its study with Deloitte found a 0.1-second mobile speed gain lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. One builder’s old home page took 18.4 seconds on a phone; the one we built for them takes 2.2.
Should I block AI crawlers on my website?
Not if you want to be recommended. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and PerplexityBot exists to surface sites in Perplexity’s results. Blocking GPTBot only keeps your pages out of OpenAI’s model training, which is a separate setting.
Is my website locked out of ChatGPT?
It can be, and nobody tells you. Look in your robots.txt for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, make sure there’s a sitemap, and check that a missing page returns a real 404. Our free scan reads all of it. The free audit goes further and asks five AI engines your customers’ questions.
What is a high-converting website for a contractor?
One whose main content shows in under 2.5 seconds on a phone, with the call button and the form within thumb’s reach on every page, the homeowner’s questions answered before they call, and every lead saved before it’s emailed. Real photos, names and reviews do the rest.
What happens to my old URLs when I change websites?
If nobody maps them, they break, and the visitors and rankings they carried go with them. Before Spring Haven Mansion’s move we found 126 old addresses and made 117 of them answer on the new site. Every move we make starts with that inventory.
Sources
Where every number came from.
- Our website scans of sbcnashville.com, old site and new, 24 September 2026; our AI visibility reading for construction around White House, Tennessee, 20 September 2026; the Spring Haven Mansion migration inventory, 28 September 2026. Our records
- web.dev (Google), “Largest Contentful Paint,” updated 4 September 2025: web.dev
- web.dev (Google), “Milliseconds make millions,” 2020: web.dev
- OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI crawlers,” read 14 October 2026: developers.openai.com
- Perplexity, “Perplexity Crawlers,” read 14 October 2026: docs.perplexity.ai
