How three Gold Coast shops stopped losing customers to their own websites

1. How a Burleigh boutique, a Robina gym and a Coolangatta surf shop realised their websites were costing them sales Picture this: a Burleigh boutique doing $320k a year in-store sales, a gym in Robina with 450 active members and a Miami-based wellness brand shipping CBD rollers across QLD. All three invest time, sweat and cash into products and service. They get good foot traffic and local buzz. Yet when I ran their websites through simple checks, the numbers told a different story — mobile bounce rates above 60%, conversion rates below 1.2%, checkout abandonment around 78%. Those are customers walking away without even trying the door. On the Gold Coast, people search, skim and decide on their phones. If your site is slow, confusing or makes checkout painful, you’ve lost the sale before the customer reaches you. These businesses knew they needed a better site but kept putting it off. Small businesses do that — you’re busy running staff rosters, restocking, chasing invoices. But waiting costs real money. This case study follows what happened when they finally acted, the practical steps taken and the real results six months later. Why good local businesses were losing customers: the website problems that matter The problem wasn’t "we need a new logo" or "our colours are off". It was measurable friction that stopped people buying. Here are the specific issues we found across the three sites. Mobile load time: average page load 6.2 seconds on 4G. That’s long enough for many people to close the tab. Poor navigation: product pages buried behind non-intuitive menus. Search result zero helpful filters. Clunky checkout: mandatory account creation, extra postage steps, confusing returns policy. Broken trust signals: no local address, no clear contact phone, no real customer reviews visible on product pages. Missing fundamentals: no analytics goals set, no heatmaps, and no structured product data for Google. Put numbers to those issues and the scale of loss becomes clear. For the boutique: monthly sessions 8,500 with conversion 1.1% = 94 orders. After we fixed things, the boutique hit 3.4% conversion. That’s an extra 187 orders a month on the same traffic. For the gym: online sign-up completion rate 12% for free-trial sign-ups. We lifted it to 31% by simplifying the form and making the trial promise obvious. For the surf shop: mobile checkout abandonment 82% reduced to 38% after removing unnecessary steps. Choosing a fix that actually produces sales: focus on conversion and speed, not vanity We didn’t start with a full-blown brand overhaul. The priority was measurable revenue uplift with minimal downtime. The plan had three parts: Technical: speed, mobile-first, and reliable hosting. UX: simplify journeys and remove friction from checkout. Measurement: analytics, tracking and A/B testing to confirm moves were working. Why this approach? A shiny design that doesn’t convert is just expensive wallpaper. You want action that shows up in the till within months. We set clear targets before any design work: increase conversion by 150% for the boutique, reduce checkout abandonment by half for the surf shop, and lift trial sign-up completion for the gym to 30% within 90 days. Rolling it out: the 90-day website rescue plan we ran for each business Here’s the step-by-step playbook we used. It’s the same structure for each business, adapted for their specifics. Days 1-10: Rapid diagnosis and measurable targets Run speed tests (GTmetrix, Lighthouse) and mobile-first audit. Set baseline metrics: traffic, bounce rate, conversion, average order value (AOV), checkout abandonment. Map the user journey from landing to purchase, mark friction points. Agree on targets and budget. For the boutique we agreed on a $9,500 rebuild budget; gym $6,000; surf shop $7,200.

2. Days 11-30: Quick technical wins and priority UX fixes Switch to faster hosting with CDN. For the boutique this cut Time-to-First-Byte from 800ms to 120ms. Enable image compression and modern formats (WebP) — typical savings 45-60% on image payload. Mobile-first redesign for product pages: single-column layout, larger CTAs, sticky "Buy" button on scroll. Simplify cart: remove mandatory account creation, add guest checkout, show shipping costs earlier. Days 31-60: Content and trust signals Localise content: add Gold Coast address, local phone number, and in-store pickup options for Burleigh and Coolangatta customers. Implement schema markup on product pages so Google shows price and stock snippets — small change, big visibility boost. Collect and display real reviews: launched a two-week campaign offering a $5 in-store credit for reviews — generated 120 new reviews across stores. Days 61-90: Test, measure and iterate Set up Google Analytics goals and Hotjar heatmaps. Run three A/B tests in parallel: product page layout, CTA text, and checkout form length. Start a small traffic push with a $1,200 Facebook/Instagram campaign targeted to Gold Coast local audiences to validate conversion improvements. All three businesses kept a bare-bones schedule to avoid disruption — live site changes were staged and rolled out during low- traffic hours. We used a feature-flagged approach for checkout changes so we could rollback if needed. From slow phones and drop-off to real extra sales: measurable results in six months Numbers matter. Here are the concrete before-and-after figures across the three businesses after six months. Metric Burleigh Boutique (monthly) Robina Gym (monthly) Coolangatta Surf Shop (monthly) Sessions 8,500 → 13,200 (+55%) 4,200 → 5,800 (+38%) 6,400 → 9,100 (+42%) Conversion Rate 1.1% → 3.4% (+209%) 12% trial completion → 31% (+158%) 0.9% → 2.6% (+189%) Checkout Abandonment 68% → 34% n/a (trial form) 88% → 42% 82% → 38% Page Load Time (mobile) 6.2s → 1.9s 5.8s → 2.1s 6.5s → 2.0s Monthly Online Revenue $12,400 → $21,950 (+77%) N/A (membership sign-ups) → 58 new paid sign-ups (net new $6,960/month) $9,300 → $17,100 (+84%) Return on spend was clear. The boutique spent $9,500 on the rebuild and $1,200 on the first paid campaign. Within three months they saw an extra $9,550 per month. Payback achieved within the second month post-launch. The surf shop paid $7,200 and matched payback within four months once local pickups and faster checkout lowered abandonment. Four blunt lessons every Gold Coast small business must learn about their website These aren’t tricks. They’re the hard, practical truths we learned from the work. Speed beats style when you’re deciding between the two. If your page takes more than 3 seconds on mobile, you’re handing customers to competitors. Make buying as easy as walking through your shop door. Reduce clicks, remove mandatory sign-ups and be explicit about shipping and returns before they hit checkout. Local signals convert. Showing a Gold Coast pickup option or local phone number increases trust and drives in-store traffic. People like knowing they’re dealing with a local business. Measure everything. Without baseline metrics you’re guessing. A/B tests protect you from gut decisions that cost money. Thought experiment: imagine two versions of your checkout Think about your checkout as a physical doorway. In version A, the door is narrow, there’s a sticky gate that asks for ID before you can enter, then a clerk asks six questions. In version B, the door is wide, the clerk smiles and asks one simple question and hands over the goods. Which version gets more customers through? That’s the exact thought experiment we ran when trimming form fields. Remove one unnecessary question and watch completion rates rise.

3. How your shop, studio or brand can replicate this playbook this quarter If you run a boutique in Burleigh, a gym in Robina, a wellness brand in Miami or a surf shop in Coolangatta, here’s a practical to- do list you can action in the next 30 days, with estimated cost and time. Run a 10-minute speed check. Use Google PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile score is under 50, call your developer or host. Time: 10 mins. Cost: free. Fix one checkout blocker. Remove account creation or add guest checkout. Time: 1 day. Cost: $0-$300 if you need developer help. Show local pickup and phone number on all product pages. Time: 2 hours. Cost: free. Set up conversion tracking and one heatmap. Google Analytics + Hotjar. Time: 2 days. Cost: Hotjar basic free, or $40/month for more data. Run one A/B test: headline or CTA colour. Time: 2-4 weeks to collect results. Cost: $100-$300 for tools or developer time. Budget for a focused rebuild (if needed). Expect $6k-$12k for a practical, mobile-first rebuild with fast hosting. Payback is typically 2-4 months based on our examples. Start small. If you can’t do the full rebuild this quarter, do the high-impact technical and UX mobile website design items first: speed, checkout simplification, local trust signals. Track results for 30 days and then decide whether to proceed further. Thought experiment: what happens if you do nothing for another year? Take your current monthly online revenue and assume conversion stays the same. Now imagine traffic grows 20% year-on-year but your conversion drops 0.5 percentage points because competitors optimise faster and ads get more expensive. That small drop compounds into lost revenue. This thought experiment forces a simple question: is procrastination saving you money or costing you customers? Usually it’s the latter. If you want a practical next step, I’ll run a no-nonsense 10-point audit of your site and give an honest estimate of the changes that will move the needle. No design fluff — just clear numbers and a realistic timeline so you can decide like a business owner. On the Gold Coast people buy local but research globally. Make your website the place they choose to spend their cash.