Seven in ten agent websites can't take an enquiry from the homepage

In August we scanned the websites of 192 estate and letting agents across Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. Not a survey, and nobody was asked anything. Every check was computed from the sites themselves: how they answered, how they loaded, what was in the page.

The headline number is the one we did not expect to be so high.

135 of the 192 have no enquiry form on the homepage. Seventy per cent.

And 45 of them, just under a quarter, have no way to make an enquiry from that page at all. No form, no email address, no phone number. A visitor who lands there and wants to talk to you has to go looking.

What that number does and does not mean

It means the homepage. A firm with a working contact page and a clean form one click away still counts in that 135, and plenty of them have one. We checked the page people actually arrive on, because that is the page an ad click, a Google result and a shared link all land on.

It does not mean nobody can reach you. It means the moment of highest interest and the means of acting on it are on different pages, and some proportion of people will not make the trip.

We do not know what that proportion is for your firm. Nobody does, without measuring it. That is a separate problem and it showed up in the scan too: 59 of the 192 sites are running no analytics of any kind, so they could not tell you either.

Why the homepage matters more than it used to

A decade ago the homepage was a front door people walked through on their way somewhere else. Now it is more often the only page of yours a person sees. They arrive from a search or a portal link, they read for forty seconds, and they either act or they go back to the tab they came from.

The forty seconds is the whole opportunity. If acting means finding the navigation, choosing "Contact", waiting for a page, and filling in a form that asks for their title and how they heard about you, a good number of them will not.

The dull fixes are the ones that work

Nothing in this section is clever, and that is rather the point.

An enquiry route on the homepage. Not necessarily a full form — a phone number that dials when tapped and an email address that opens a message will do most of the work, and both took under a minute to check for.

A form somebody has actually submitted. Forms fail silently and stay failed for months. The only way to know yours works is to fill it in yourself, from a phone, and watch the message arrive.

Fewer fields. We recorded how many questions each form asked. The ones over eight are asking a stranger to do paperwork before you have given them anything.

Where your own firm sits

We built a scorecard for every one of the 192, and yours is free if you want it. It is a rank out of 192, a score in each of seven sections, and the specific findings behind it — including whether your homepage has a working enquiry route, and how many questions your form asks.

We publish nobody's score but their own. Ask for yours.