I’m in Vietnam, and I can’t get your website to load in my browser. Why?

Because someone has “secured” your website from foreign visitors using a plugin like this or by changing some server settings. Now, only visitors from your home country can load your site. Maybe your website guru read this article and got excited. Did the guru ask you first?

You’re now secure from foreign visitors. Another phrase used to describe “foreign visitors” is “prospective customers.”

More than 20% of the visitors to our family law site are connecting from outside of the United States. I suspect you’ve got some foreign visitors too.

When these folks attempt to connect to your site and it fails to load, they get frustrated. The average visitor—like an affluent expat living abroad or a soldier on duty in another country—will give up when he or she hits the wall set up by your website guru. Visitors will go elsewhere since alternatives are just a click away.

It gets worse.

Some visitors, like a client’s family member seeking to pay your fee online, will get frustrated and annoyed. These people wanted to give you money, and now you’ve aggravated them. That’s not good.

I speak from annoyed experience. I can’t log in to the North Carolina State Bar CLE site nor the site of my health insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield, without firing up my VPN or employing a proxy server. It drives me nuts.

If you’d prefer to avoid revenue from expats, soldiers, and others living abroad, then keep the website block in place. Maybe the savings in bandwidth and added “security” are worth it to you. But, the way I see it, the riskier move is to block those folks. Open your door, make the website available to the whole world, and let your website bring you some new clients from abroad.