Being on WordPress Isn’t an Answer in Assisted Living

“We’re on WordPress, so we’re fine.”

A man who runs three assisted living homes in southern Ontario said that to me about four minutes into a call, right after I asked him why his own website had taken eleven seconds to open on my phone while I was sitting in his parking lot.

He wasn’t being difficult with me. He was repeating a sentence that someone he trusted had handed him years earlier, and in all that time nobody had ever bothered to push back on it.

He had a point about the popular part, and I want to give it to him properly before I take it away.

WordPress runs 53.0% of the assisted living sites I opened, against 36.4% of small business sites everywhere else.

More than half of his trade is standing exactly where he’s standing. That’s not a fluke and it isn’t a mistake either.

So why did I keep pushing him on a call he was clearly ready to end?

The objection is better than most people admit

I’ve never paid a penny for WordPress itself, and every host I’ve tried it on has run it. Every town I’ve worked in has had someone who could open it up and change your dining room photo without a support ticket.

You also own the thing. The files are yours, the content is yours, and no company can raise your rent, change the rules on you, or switch your website off because a department got restructured.

I build on it. If that man had called me before he built, I’d most likely have put him on it too.

So when an owner tells me the platform is fine, my honest answer is that the platform probably is fine.

The word doing the damage in his sentence isn’t WordPress. It’s “so”.

“So” is the part where a name for the software quietly turns into a verdict about the website, and once an owner has made that jump he stops asking questions about it for years at a time. I’ve watched that sentence buy a broken site an extra four birthdays.

Your family never sees the platform

WordPress is the software your pages are stored in and edited with, and a visitor never lays eyes on it. Not once, not ever.

What the daughter sees is a page that either shows up before her thumb gets bored or doesn’t.

A plugin is a small add-on someone installs to give the site one more feature. A photo slider, a contact form, a cookie banner, a chat bubble. She doesn’t see those either.

She sees the page hop under her finger while nine of them finish loading, and the button she was aiming at slides out from under her.

Every technology decision you have ever made reaches her as one of three sensations. A wobble, a wait, and a decision about whether to go back to the list and try the next home instead.

Which of those three has your website handed a family this week?

What the numbers do and don’t say

These sites average 55 out of 100 for mobile speed, against 58 across the small businesses in my data.

What that score turns into on her end is time spent staring at a mostly empty screen with her thumb hovering over the back arrow.

Google’s own scoring puts anything from 50 to 89 in the band that needs improvement, so your whole trade is sitting in that middle band together, a little lower down inside it than everybody else.

The mobile check is a separate question and your trade does worse on it. 73.5% of these sites pass, against 78% of small businesses in general.

Passing it means she can read your page on her phone without pinching at it, which is a low bar to leave lying on the floor.

Now, am I about to tell you that WordPress caused those two results? No. I can’t show it, I won’t pretend I can, and anyone who does that with a chart is selling you something.

What I can tell you is what I find when I open a slow one in your trade, because I’ve done it a lot and it’s the same three things nearly every time.

A pile of add-ons nobody has counted since the day the site launched. A video playing behind the header. And a photo of the front garden loaded straight off the camera at full size, because it looked lovely on the big screen in the office.

None of those three are WordPress. All three of them are what happens when a website has no owner.

The question underneath the objection

Who logged into your website last?

Not who built it. Who logged in, opened it up, looked at it, and changed something on purpose. I ask law firms the same thing and then have them try the password before the call ends, because an owner who can’t get in has answered me already.

If the answer is a company that stopped returning calls in 2021, then the platform under it is beside the point. A car with nobody driving is still a car, and it still ends up in the ditch.

When I take on a care home website, most of the first month goes on deleting things rather than designing them. The gallery plugin that replaced the gallery plugin. The booking tool from a company that folded. The tracking script for an advertising campaign that ended before the pandemic.

Every one of those was installed by a person who was trying to help you, on an afternoon when it seemed like a good idea, and not one of them was ever taken back out again.

Do you know how many are running on your site tonight? Nobody I ask ever does, and the number is always higher than the guess. A charity homepage I rebuilt got fast without ever leaving WordPress, because clearing out that pile was the whole job.

For the record, the rest of the field is thin. Wix runs 4.9% of these sites, Squarespace 3.2%, GoDaddy 2.7% and Webflow 1.8%.

Those shares don’t add up to everything, because a single site can match two of them at once and plenty of sites never announce what they’re built on at all. So nobody should read that list as a vote, and I’d hate for you to switch because of it. Choosing one before you build is a different question, and Weebly still suits plenty of owners better than WordPress does when nobody in the building wants to deal with a developer.

Would moving your site onto a different platform fix any of the three things I listed a minute ago? It wouldn’t. Someone would rebuild it, hand it back with a lovely little training video, and then walk away, and in about two years you’d be on a call with a guy like me who was parked outside your building.

The habit is the product. The platform is only the box that habit lives in, and I have never once fixed a home’s phone calls by swapping out the box.

Your own trade proves that somewhere else. Assisted living beats every other industry I ranked on title tags, and no care home owner has ever told me they paid extra for it.

Who I didn’t write this for

Not the operator whose site opens in two seconds and who has a real person touching it every month. You’re fine, and you should go and do something better with your evening.

Not the WordPress developer who has been drafting an angry comment since the fourth paragraph, either. You’re right about most of what you’re about to say, and I use the thing every week.

I wrote it for the man in southern Ontario, and for every owner who has said his sentence to me since.

If the answer to “how is your website doing” is the name of a platform, you don’t have an answer yet. You have an empty space where one belongs, and it’s been sitting there long enough that you stopped noticing.