Last night, millions of business owners watched the Super Bowl. And between the celebrity cameos and the CGI spectacles, a handful of tech companies made the same promise they’ve been making for years: building a website is easy.
Just drag. Drop. Done.
I’ve spent over two decades building websites for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to scrappy nonprofits. And every year — especially after a wave of “build it yourself” advertising — I have the same conversations with founders who tried exactly that.
They built the site. It looks great. And nobody’s buying.
This is actually what inspired us to create Website Reality Check, our podcast series about what drives conversions. Because the gap between “I have a website” and “my website is working for my business” is enormous. And the ads never mention it.
In one of our episodes, we tell the story of a consultant who invested real money and significant time into building what everyone agreed was a gorgeous website. Clean design, beautiful photography, the works. But when she looked at her numbers, she was hemorrhaging potential clients. Her conversion rate was roughly half of what an optimized site should deliver.
The site wasn’t broken. It was beautiful. But those two things aren’t as connected as you’d think.
That’s the part the Super Bowl ads skip over. The platforms are genuinely impressive tools — I’m not here to bash them. They’ve democratized web creation in ways that matter. But they’ve also created a dangerous assumption: that access to professional-looking templates means you’ll get professional-grade results.
It’s a bit like handing someone a professional kitchen and assuming they’ll produce restaurant-quality meals. The equipment matters, sure. But so does knowing which ingredients work together, how long to let something rest, and when to pull it off the heat before it burns.
The research backs this up. Nielsen Norman Group found that people believe beautiful things work better — even when they don’t. It’s called the aesthetic-usability effect, and it means your gorgeous website might actually be hiding problems from you. You see the polish and think everything’s fine. Your visitors see the polish, feel good for a moment, then leave because they can’t figure out what to do next.
Most business owners never find out.
They look at the site, feel proud of it, and assume the problem must be their marketing or their pricing or their product. Meanwhile, their homepage has fifteen competing calls to action, their mobile experience requires a magnifying glass, and their navigation reads like a mystery novel.
Here’s the thing: the fixes are usually simple. Removing unnecessary form fields, simplifying navigation, making one clear call to action instead of a dozen competing ones. One major company saw a 50% increase in conversions just by making their navigation more predictable. Another added $12 million in annual revenue by removing a single optional form field.
These aren’t massive redesigns. They’re small, research-backed adjustments that require knowing where to look — and having enough experience to recognize what’s actually wrong versus what just feels wrong.
That distinction is why we built UX Helpdesk. Most growing businesses need experienced UX guidance to make their website actually perform, but can’t justify hiring a full-time specialist. UX Helpdesk gives you direct access to certified User Experience professionals — through monthly expert calls, next-day support, and a research library built from years of real-world projects.
Think of it as having a UX pro on speed dial. Not to rebuild your site from scratch, but to help you spot the conversion killers hiding behind all that beautiful design.
So if you watched those Super Bowl ads last night and felt inspired to finally build that website — good. The tools are better than they’ve ever been. But once it’s live, consider taking the next step. Listen to Website Reality Check to learn what actually makes a site convert. And when you’re ready for a second set of expert eyes on your specific situation, that’s exactly what UX Helpdesk is for.
Because the website you build is just the starting line. What happens after that is where the real growth begins.
