TL;DR:
Your website isn’t there to sell, persuade, or close anyone on the spot. Its real job is to earn the first micro-commitment by showing visitors you understand their problem, you’re competent and trustworthy, and the next step is obvious and low-friction. If it doesn’t move the right people toward a call or first conversation, it’s not underperforming — it’s miscast.
Chris Foley
Founder & head honcho over here at PXLPOD Web StrategyI wrote this because I keep seeing smart businesses ask their websites to do a job they were never meant to do. When you stop treating your site like a salesperson and start treating it like a guide, everything gets simpler and more humane. This is the lens I use on my own work, and it’s saved a lot of people a lot of unnecessary frustration.
There’s a dangerous myth floating around the business world, and it’s been around long enough that people repeat it without thinking: “My website needs to close deals.”
No, it doesn’t.
No, it won’t.
And no, it probably never has.
A website is not your salesperson. It is not your closing pitch. It is not the room where decisions happen.
A website has exactly one job — earn the call. Everything else is delusion, usually encouraged by agencies that want you to believe their homepage redesign is the reason you’ll quadruple revenue next quarter.
Let’s get something straight: the moment someone lands on your site, they are not thinking about buying. They are deciding whether or not you’re worth their time. That’s all. If your site can secure that first micro-commitment — “Okay, fine, I’ll talk to you” — it has already done 95 percent of its job.
I want to inject an argument into my own argument here
Your website’s job isn’t actually to get people on the phone. That’s an oversimplification. The site’s job is to move people into the first stage of your sales process – whatever that is.
Two things about this:
- So many site owners are still a little fuzzy about what the first step of their sales process even IS, which means defining this conversion goal a bit of a moving target.
- For around 90% of the people I work with, that first stage of the sales process IS a phone call. So I’m what I said earlier is true.
The Conversion Lie
You see this especially in service businesses. Someone will say, “My site isn’t converting.” And I always ask, “Converting into what?” Because unless you’re running an e-commerce store, your visitor isn’t here to buy something. They can’t. There is no checkout button for $5,000/month service package. There is no “Add to Cart” for a high-ticket engagement. Nobody is impulse-buying a fractional CFO.
The conversion is the call.
The conversion is the booked appointment.
The conversion is the moment they decide you’re worth speaking to.
All real sales happen after human contact — not through a homepage, not through a feature list, not because you listed sixteen bullet points of “core services.” And once you finally accept that, your entire approach to web design changes.
A Website Isn’t a Brochure — It’s a Chaperone
A good website doesn’t present information. A good website guides.
It doesn’t sit politely and hope the visitor wanders into the right corner. It shows them the path. It shows them why that path matters. It reduces the decision to its simplest emotional logic: “These people get it. I should talk to them.” That’s the entire game.
What People Need to See
If your website isn’t earning calls, it’s almost always because the messaging is trying too hard. Cleverness, cuteness, word acrobatics — none of that helps a stressed, time-poor buyer who wants the fastest route to certainty.
When someone lands on your page, they’re asking five questions in the space of about three seconds:
Do you understand my problem?
Are you competent?
Are you modern?
Are you safe?
Are you worth my time?
They do not care about your mission statement. They do not care how long you’ve been in business. They do not care that your founder once won a “Rising Star of Accounting” award in 2012 or was voted top 30 under 30 back in the aught years. These are the things companies love to talk about but buyers never ask about.
Clarity is what earns the call:
“This is your problem.
This is why it sucks.
This is why we’re good at fixing it.
Here’s what the next step looks like.”
That’s it. That’s the recipe. Everything else is seasoning.
Narratives Need Tension, Not Lists
A common mistake? Listing everything you do at the top of the homepage like a panicked grocery list:
- Bookkeeping
- Tax Prep
- Audits
- Payroll
- CFO Services
- Human Sacrifice
- Seasonal Discounts
These lists do nothing except overwhelm buyers and prove you don’t understand narrative flow.
A narrative, even a short one, needs tension:
“You want X.
You’re stuck with Y.
Here’s why it’s painful.
Here’s why the pain ends with us.”
Tension creates action. Lists create cognitive overload. The moment your website becomes a catalog, it stops being a conversion engine.
The Urgency Problem: Why Visitors Don’t Act
There’s a reason people bounce from most service websites without doing anything: your site didn’t give them a reason to act now. People don’t move because something is interesting. They move because something is intolerable. “It would be nice to improve bookkeeping” doesn’t lead to a phone call. “I’m fed up with missed deadlines and bad communication” leads to a phone call.
As I tell clients:
Pain activates. Precision converts. Urgency closes.
Your website’s job is to activate.
The First Step Must Be Obvious
If the only call to action on your homepage is buried in the footer or hiding under a “Contact Us” link the size of an aspirin molecule, your site is not earning its keep.
People need to be told explicitly what to do:
“Book a call.”
“Schedule your review.”
“Find out if this is the right fit.”
“Let’s fix this.”
And the CTA needs to be everywhere — not in an annoying way, not like you’re shouting — but like a guide who consistently points to the door when the visitor is ready to walk through it.
If your CTA isn’t frictionless, your lead flow won’t be either.
The Website’s Real Job
At the end of the day, your website only needs to accomplish three things:
- Identify the visitor’s problem faster than they can articulate it. If they feel seen, you’ve earned attention.
- Create enough emotional relief to make “talk to you” feel like the next logical step. Nobody books a call unless they believe the conversation will remove a burden.
- Make the action step unavoidable, unambiguous, and zero-risk. The easier the click, the easier the call.
That’s it.
You don’t need a museum, you don’t need a novel, you don’t need a fireworks display. You need a chaperone that walks people to a decision.
The Bottom Line
Your website is not your closer, your website is your opener.
If it earns the call, it has succeeded, if it dazzles but doesn’t convert, it has failed, if it explains every detail but doesn’t create urgency, it has failed even harder.
A great website doesn’t try to do everything — it does the one thing that truly matters:
It gets the right person to say,
“Yeah… let’s talk.”
Cheers,
Chris
