Integrated digital storefront. Enquiries go into your systems, not into an inbox.
The website's there, the form works, the enquiry arrives. And it arrives as an email in a shared inbox, where someone has to read it, understand it and copy it somewhere else. This piece builds the front door, and connects it to everything behind it.
Enquiries arrive ready to act on. Which page they came from, what the person was looking at, which product they're asking about. The person replying starts further along.
Performance is a requirement, not an opinion. The thresholds are public: main content within 2.5 seconds, response to interaction within 200 milliseconds, measured at the 75th percentile.
The metric is useful enquiries, never visits. A page with lots of visits that produces no qualified enquiries is just an elegant expense.
This page covers a single piece of the system. The other pieces, and how we choose which one to start with, are on the services page.
The problem is that the form just adds another email
A website that isn't connected to anything moves work around instead of removing it. Someone fills in the form, a message lands in an inbox with everything else, and that's where the real work starts: working out who they are, what they want, whether they're already a customer, and where it all needs recording.
The second effect shows up in the year-end figures. Nobody knows how many enquiries came from the website, how many got a reply or how many turned into anything, because the enquiry's trail stops dead inside an inbox and leaves no record anywhere.
A website that isn't connected to anything creates work. It looks like a channel, but in practice it's a contact form with a nice cover.
What changes in practice
The person replying starts further along. The enquiry arrives showing which page it came from, what the person was looking at and which product or service it's about, so the first reply is already relevant instead of being a request for clarification.
The second change is that nothing gets lost. Every enquiry leaves a log entry with its arrival time and status, and one still waiting for a reply after a set time becomes visible instead of slipping to the bottom of a list.
The third is that the website becomes measurable against a number that matters. Not visits, which rise and fall for reasons outside your control, but the enquiries that proved worthwhile, counted one by one.
Design decides trust before anyone reads a word
It has been measured, and the figure is higher than most people think. In Stanford's research on website credibility, 2,684 people explained in their own words why they did or didn't trust 51 real websites, and every answer was classified by hand.
The most frequently cited factor of all was design. The study report puts it like this: “The most frequently mentioned category was design look and feel of the site, accounting for 46.1% of the comments”, ahead of information structure and content.
People who don't know you decide whether to take you seriously by looking, before they've read a single line. That's why good design isn't a luxury on a page that new buyers land on, and why it isn't the place to cut corners.
Speed has thresholds, and they're public
The three measures Google uses to judge a page's experience come with published numbers. According to the official documentation, the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to interaction within 200 milliseconds, and layout shift should stay below 0.1.
How it's measured matters as much as the threshold: “a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices”. In other words, you look at the experience of the slowest quarter of visitors, not the average, and mobile and desktop are counted separately.
The cost of missing them shows up in behaviour. Google's data on mobile sites shows that 53% of visits are abandoned when a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, before the visitor even finds out what you sell.
What the system does, step by step
The work breaks down into five parts, and the fifth is the one hardly anyone builds. Each step leaves a log entry, so at the end of the month you know what happened instead of trying to remember.
| Step | What happens | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| The pagesone question per page | The structure is built around the questions you actually get asked, with the answer in the first few sentences of each page. |
Visitors find their answer without hunting for it, and stay long enough to get in touch. |
| Performancepublic thresholds | Images, fonts and code are kept within the thresholds, measured at the 75th percentile and split by device. |
Mobile visitors stop giving up before the page has even loaded. |
| Entry pointswhere people get in touch | Forms ask only for what's strictly necessary, and carry the context of the page they were sent from. |
Fewer fields to fill in, and more people getting to the end of the form. |
| The connectioninto your systems | The enquiry goes into your internal workflow already categorised, instead of generating a message in a shared inbox. |
No retyping, and the person replying can see straight away who got in touch and what they were looking at. |
| The logwhat happened | Every enquiry has an arrival time, a status and an outcome, and any left waiting beyond the threshold are flagged. |
At the end of the month you know how many enquiries came in and how many turned into something. |
The connection is the part hardly anyone builds
Almost every website stops at the form, because connecting it means knowing what happens inside the business afterwards. It's analysis work before it's programming, and it starts by looking at how an enquiry is handled today, step by step, including the steps nobody has ever written down.
A real connection takes one of three forms, depending on what already exists. Where there's an internal system that can be connected to from outside, the enquiry is written straight into it; where it can't, the system prepares a record in the format that system imports; where there's nothing at all, you start with a shared list using the same fields.
The third form is the most common in small businesses, and it isn't a watered-down version. A list with the right fields and a status log does ninety per cent of the job, and stays compatible with whatever comes next.
What goes out on its own, and what waits for a person
Anything that repeats information already approved runs on its own: confirming receipt to the person who got in touch, categorising the enquiry, assigning it to the right person and flagging anything that's been waiting too long.
Nothing that commits the business goes out on its own. A quote, a price, confirmed availability or a delivery promise is prepared with the context gathered and waits for a person. The first reply to enquiries that come in through several channels is a separate piece, handled by Inbox AI. The reasoning behind keeping a person in the loop is on our page about the principles we build by.
Same mechanism, different name in every trade
The mechanism is identical; the enquiry isn't. It's worth looking at your own case, because that's where you see which information gets lost along the way today.
| Sector | The enquiry that comes through the website | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Food and agricultureand export | A foreign distributor asking about pack sizes and terms, who currently gets a generic reply because nobody knows which page they came from. |
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| Restaurantsand bars | A booking for twelve on a Saturday, which arrives as an email and gets copied by hand into a notebook. |
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| Hospitalityaccommodation and events | A request for a quote for a particular date, where the number of guests is always missing and it takes two emails to find out. |
What this piece doesn't do
It doesn't bring in traffic on its own. A well-built website answers the people who arrive, and getting it found is a different piece: visibility in search engines and AI assistants. Building the first without the second gives you a front door on a street nobody walks down.
It doesn't write the content. The pages need copy that gives your figures, and that's produced by sales copy and materials, working from the same set of facts.
It doesn't replace your internal systems or impose new ones. It connects to what you have, and where there's nothing, it starts with the simplest thing that works, chosen so it can be swapped out without rebuilding the website.
Questions and answers
What difference does a connected website make compared with an ordinary one?
The difference is what happens after the form is sent, and it's the only one that shows up in the numbers. On a website that isn't connected to anything, the enquiry becomes an email in a shared inbox, where someone has to read it, understand it, pass it on and copy it somewhere.
On a connected website, the same enquiry goes into the workflow with its context attached: which page it came from, what the person was looking at, which product it's about, plus a log entry recording when it arrived. The person replying starts further along, and no enquiry gets lost at the bottom of a list.
How fast does a website need to be?
The thresholds are public, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, with mobile and desktop counted separately. Google rates it as good when the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to interaction within 200 milliseconds, and layout shift stays below 0.1.
The reason to take this seriously: Google's data on mobile sites shows that 53% of visits are abandoned when a page takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Does design really matter, or is it just a matter of taste?
It matters, and it has been measured for twenty years. In Stanford's research on website credibility, where 2,684 people explained in their own words why they did or didn't trust 51 websites, the most frequently cited factor was design: it came up in 46.1% of comments, ahead of structure and content.
People who don't know you decide whether to take you seriously before they've read a line, and they decide by looking.
Does everything have to be rebuilt from scratch?
Not always, and the decision rests on two things. If the current website meets the performance thresholds and has a sensible structure, it's often better to connect it than rebuild it, adding the entry points and the log.
If it's built on a platform that won't let you fix how it loads, the time spent patching it keeps costing you every month. We measure where it stands today, using the same public metrics, and decide on that basis.
How do you measure whether it's working?
By the number of enquiries from the website that turn out to be genuinely qualified, agreed as the metric before we start, and never by visits. Visits go up and down for reasons outside your control, and a page with lots of visits that produces no useful enquiries is just an elegant expense.
The second number is the share of enquiries that arrive complete, meaning they didn't need an exchange of emails to work out what the person actually wanted.
Notes on sources
- The 46.1% comes from research on website credibility by B.J. Fogg's group at Stanford, covering 2,684 participants and 51 websites: full report, and the academic version, How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites?. The study dates from 2002 and looked at US consumer websites: we cite it because it measures the order in which people judge a site, and that order is the point, not the exact figure.
- The thresholds of 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1, and the 75th percentile, come from Google's official documentation on Core Web Vitals, quoted word for word. They're the thresholds Google itself uses to judge pages, so they should be treated as a requirement, not a convenient target.
- The 53% of visits abandoned after 3 seconds comes from Google, September 2016, based on aggregated, anonymised data from around 3,700 mobile sites worldwide that had opted in to benchmarking. It's a 2016 figure, from sites using Google's advertising tools: we cite it for the order of magnitude, and mobile networks have improved since.
- We don't publish any percentage increase in enquiries or conversions. The figures going around on this topic come from sectors, offers and websites that have nothing to do with yours. The number to look at is how many useful enquiries you get today, counted over a real month before any quote.
- This page doesn't report results achieved for a client, because this piece hasn't yet been delivered to a client. The tests mentioned are functional checks run in a test environment.
The other pieces in this group
Customers who are out there but don't find youFifteen minutes, with your case in front of us.
How many enquiries came through your website last month, and how many turned into something? If answering that means opening an inbox and counting by hand, you already have your diagnosis. In fifteen minutes on the phone we'll look at it together and tell you where it makes sense to start, even if we never end up working together.
You'll speak to Mattia Esposito, who then builds the system: there's no salesperson in between. If you'd rather measure things yourself before talking, the Diagnostico (in Italian) is twenty questions and five minutes.