Scottsdale Has the Best Websites I Audited. Best Isn’t the Same as Busy.

There’s a file on my desktop called scottsdale.csv, and last week I filled the whole thing in.

One row for every business, one column for every check I run. It took three evenings, a great deal of coffee, and a browser that gave up on me twice.

The work itself is dull. Load the page, wait for it, look for a way to get in touch, read the top line, close the tab, open the next one on the list.

I go city by city with this because I sell websites for a living, and after about a decade of it I got tired of guessing what normal looked like when an owner asked me whether her site was any good.

By the third evening I’d stopped being surprised.

When the totals came in and the city landed on 75 out of 100, the top of the 24 I keep sorting, what I felt wasn’t pride on anyone’s behalf. It was an old itch that I’ve never quite managed to scratch.

I know what my grade covers. I also know what it walks straight past.

What the grade is looking at

Ten weighted checks build that number, and every last one of them can be read from the sidewalk without ever going through the front door.

Does the page load fast on a phone? Does it work at phone size? Is the connection secure? Is there a headline, a description, something to read, a link to your Instagram?

Real things, all of them, and I could run the lot against your own site before your kettle boiled. I charge money to fix them and I’d defend the invoice in a room full of people who are convinced that websites ought to be free.

They also describe the front of the building and nothing else, which means not one of them has an opinion about whether the business inside is any good.

Accountants make that point better than I can. They build some of the quickest pages I test and still finished last of the 47 trades I sort, because speed was never the part holding them back.

Someone up there is actually writing

To get that grade I sampled 4,539 businesses in the city and audited 3,390 of their websites.

What stood out while I clicked was how many of them actually had something to read. Pages with dates on them. A post about a job that finished in June, photographs and all.

43.1% of the sites I opened up there publish a blog, the best of any city I went through and a clear step past the 37% I get nationally.

Whoever those owners hired, they hired a person who writes, or they sat down on a Sunday afternoon and did it themselves. Either way it’s a habit rather than a purchase, and habits are the hardest thing in the world to buy from a supplier.

So why am I not more cheerful about the whole thing?

The framer with nine checks out of ten

A framer I took on in 2023 had a lovely site. Quick, secure, tidy, and it would have passed nearly everything on my list without me touching a single line of the thing.

He had one way in, though, and it was a phone number sitting up in the header.

Anyone who found him at nine at night had to hold that thought until the morning, and a person who has decided something at nine at night has usually undecided it by breakfast.

30.3% of Scottsdale homepages carry a contact form, which is second of 24 and still leaves an enormous number of businesses exactly where he was.

He didn’t need a redesign. He needed a contact form sitting on the homepage, catching the people who were never in a hundred years going to call him at that hour.

When did you last try to contact your own business after dinner, without picking up a phone and dialing yourself?

The florist who couldn’t tell me either way

Another one. A florist I rebuilt for asked me, about six weeks after we launched, whether the new site was working.

I couldn’t answer her. Nothing on her old site had ever counted a visitor, so there was no before to hold the after up against, and I ended up telling her the truth, which is that neither of us knew.

Without analytics, a website tells you nothing at all about itself. Not how many people arrived, not which page they read to the end, not the Tuesday evening when the traffic jumped because a customer put your name in a neighborhood group.

62.0% of the sites I checked in Scottsdale run analytics, well clear of the 58% I see nationally, and it’s still the check I’d most like to see near a hundred.

She’s fine now. It took an afternoon of someone else’s time and cost her nothing at all.

What actually brings the work in

Think about the last five people you paid for anything at all. Not the last five websites you admired. Five actual human beings you handed money to.

Someone mentioned a name at a barbecue. Your sister sent you a screenshot. A van went past with a number on the door.

Then you looked them up.

At that exact moment, the website’s only job was to avoid losing a sale that another person had already half made on your behalf. Not win it. Hold it.

Was the website ever the reason you picked one of those five, or was it just where you went to confirm what you’d already been told about them?

A grade of 75 says the average site in that city is unlikely to lose it on a technicality, and I’d much rather my clients were in that group than the other one.

It says nothing whatsoever about whether anyone was ever going to say your name at the barbecue in the first place.

The nearest thing I can count is whether a business up there has ever collected a single Google review, which is the softest check the city holds, and no website quote on your desk covers that one.

The bit I’d spend money on

I build sites for businesses up there, and the owners who call me almost never call about a score. They call because June was thin and they can’t work out why.

I run into two shops in the same trade, both with a perfectly decent site, and only one of them busy more often up here than anywhere else I sell.

If it were your money, would you spend it on the ten checks? I wouldn’t. Most of them arrive with a decent build, and the rest are an afternoon of work each.

I’d spend it on the thing my grade can’t see, which is whether a stranger landing on your homepage can tell in four seconds what you do, where you do it, and why she should pick you instead of the next one on her list.

No check I run asks that particular question, and Google doesn’t ask it either.

Your customer asks it every single time, and she never tells you the answer.

If you’d rather I did the looking for you, send me the address and I’ll go through it the same way I went through those three evenings.

Borrow a stranger for five seconds

Find someone who doesn’t work with you and doesn’t love you enough to be kind about it. Unlock your phone, put your own homepage on the screen, and pass it across the table without saying a word about what it is.

Give them five seconds, then take the phone back and ask them what it is you actually sell.

Whatever they say out loud is your real headline, whatever you paid for the one that’s sitting on the screen.