Someone was told to call you. Before they do, they look you up. That visit is the one your site has to handle, and it is not the visit most website advice is written for.
A referred visitor is already interested. Somebody they trust has vouched for you, which means the persuasion has happened offline and the site is not being asked to do it again.
What the site is being asked to do is confirm that you are the business that was described. You cannot win the referral here. You can only lose it.
A site built to convince a stranger loads the first screen with claims. A site built for a confirmation check puts the evidence where someone glancing at a phone will find it in a few seconds.
The distinction sounds small and it changes the whole brief. If you are about to write one, say in it that most work is referred. It is the single fact that most changes what the first screen has to carry.
The referrer said something specific — she rebuilds websites for studios, he does the books for tradies. If the site describes something broader or older than that, the visitor has to reconcile two versions of you, and some of them will not bother.
For anything where the output is visible, this is most of the visit. Finished examples, easy to reach, not behind a contact form. If you have one good project and no others, show the one properly rather than padding it out.
What happens after they get in touch, roughly what it involves on their side, and what they are committing to by sending an email. Referred visitors are often not comparing you to anyone, so they are asking whether this is going to be awkward.
A name, a face if you are the business, and a way to make contact that clearly arrives somewhere. A form with no person behind it reads worse to someone who was given your name than to someone who found you cold.
Referral-led sites get neglected, rationally.
When the work arrives anyway, the site never becomes the thing that needs attention. So it sits there describing a business from four years ago, and it does not cost anything visible — nobody sends an email saying they looked at your site and decided against it.
The second pattern is subtler.
A site that has been worked on, but worked on for search visitors: a wall of service pages, a blog, copy shaped around the phrases someone thought people typed. That site can perform fine for strangers and still undercut a referral, because the one thing a referred person wants to confirm is now three clicks in.
Micky Sabat’s film and photography studio in Sydney. Referred work is the engine — someone is sent to the studio and then looks it up — so the site had to show the work and explain how a job runs.
That is the whole brief for a business like this, and it is why the rebuild started with the words rather than the design. The previous site sat on Squarespace, which is a separate problem covered on the ownership page. It is live at cinema7.com.au.
This is reasoning from one published project and from what referred clients ask, not a study. I have not tracked referred visitors, run a test, or measured what changing any of this does to enquiries, and I am not going to put a number on it.
If you want to check it on your own site, the cheapest version is to ask the next person who was referred to you what they looked at before calling, and whether anything gave them pause. Two or three answers will tell you more than this page can.
Tell me about the site