I Charged a Salon Owner for the Wrong Fix

For about six years I believed that if a website passed the phone test, the phone was handled and I could go and worry about something else.

I said it to clients. I put it in proposals. I even used it to talk two salon owners out of spending money with me, which felt noble at the time and probably was.

Then a third salon owner paid me for a rebuild she didn’t need, and I’ve been a good deal slower to say it ever since.

What she came to me with

Her cousin had told her the website wasn’t mobile friendly, and she repeated that sentence to me twice before I’d finished my coffee. She had already decided it was why her Saturdays were soft.

A mobile check is Google asking one plain question: can a thumb work this page? Your customer settles it long before Google does, because the second she has to spread two fingers apart to read your opening hours, she’s back in the results and tapping the salon underneath yours.

So I ran the check on her site, and what did it tell me? Her cousin was wrong. The page passed.

82.7% of the salon websites I audited pass those checks, against 78% of every small business site in my sample.

Electricians edge past salons on that particular column and wineries land just under them, which puts the trade 7 of 47 on it. For a trade that plenty of people in my industry write off as behind, it’s the best result they get on anything I run.

I told her all of that on the call, and then I went ahead and rebuilt her website anyway.

Why I did it

It looked dated. The photographs were the ones from the week she opened, the colors were from about 2014, and she wanted to feel proud of the thing when her clients pulled it up.

None of that is a crime, and she was entitled to want it.

Would you have told her no? A woman who has waited eleven years to feel proud of the thing her clients pull up in the chair is not in the mood for a lecture about photograph sizes.

I didn’t lie to her. I let a problem she didn’t have stand quietly in for one she did, took the deposit, and built her something handsome.

Six weeks later she rang to say Saturdays were about the same. Not worse. The same.

Have you ever had to explain to a client why the thing you sold her changed absolutely nothing? I’d honestly rather clean a grease trap in August.

What was actually wrong

I opened her new website on my own phone, outdoors, on cellular data, standing in the parking lot behind her building. Before that particular week it had never once occurred to me to bother.

Fourteen seconds before anything appeared except the tab.

Her gallery held forty-one photographs, every one of them dragged straight off a phone at full size, and the page was hauling all forty-one down the wire before it would show a stranger so much as the name of the salon.

I took a shortcut on a plastic surgeon’s gallery once for the same reason, and what that cost her was more than the fix would have been.

A speed score is out of 100, and underneath it, the thing being counted is a stopwatch. Every point missing from the top is time your customer spends looking at a blank rectangle, deciding whether you’re worth the wait, and she is not a patient woman on a Saturday morning.

Salon websites average 51 out of 100 on that stopwatch, where the small business average is 58.

Google calls anything from 0 to 49 poor and everything from 50 to 89 in need of improvement, so nobody in this trade is in flames, and this trade is sitting lower inside that middle band than most of the ones I keep.

Do you know how long your own homepage takes on a phone that isn’t sitting on the salon wifi? Almost no owner I ask does, and the ones brave enough to guess are always about four seconds under the real answer.

The layout was never her problem. Her problem was that the layout turned up long after her customer had gone.

The part that cost me the most

I couldn’t prove any of it. Not the before, and not the after either.

Analytics is the thing that would have told me eleven people opened her page on a Saturday morning and not a single one of them ever reached her price list. Without it, a customer you lost leaves no mark anywhere at all, and you go on believing whatever you already believed.

Running nothing isn’t unusual in this trade. Salons come out at 43.0% on that check, the small business average of 58% isn’t much to boast about either, and hers counted nothing at all.

So when she asked me whether the rebuild had worked, the honest answer was that I had no idea and neither did she. I’d sold a fix with no way on earth of checking it.

She was gracious about the whole thing, which somehow made it worse than being shouted at.

We fixed it afterwards, on my time, and the gallery came down to nine photographs. Saturdays moved that autumn, though I still can’t swear to you which of the two changes did it, and that’s the bill I’m still paying for the first mistake.

What I do differently now

I don’t run the phone check first anymore. I run it late, and mostly I run it to rule things out rather than to find them.

Before it, I do three things, in this order, and none of them takes longer than lunch.

1. Open the homepage on my own phone, outdoors, on cellular data, and count the seconds out loud like an idiot.

2. Try to book an appointment the way a stranger would, without calling anybody or knowing anyone’s name.

3. Check whether anything on the site is keeping score, so that in six weeks the two of us can find out together whether I was right.

Not one of those three is a design question. Two of them can be done standing in a parking lot before anyone has met the owner, which is how most of my first conversations now begin.

They’re all questions about what the visit feels like, which is most of what user experience actually covers.

How many of the three has anybody ever done on your website? Be honest, because the answer is usually none, and none is not a scandal.

Most of what I do on a salon website these days is subtraction. Photographs cut down to a sensible size, the video taken off the front page, and one way to book put where a thumb lands first.

Owners keep telling me the booking software is what’s holding them back, so I went and counted the women who meant to call a salon and didn’t.

The thing I got wrong, in one line

Passing the phone check means your page turned up in one piece. It says nothing whatsoever about whether she stayed, and I spent six years treating those two as the same sentence.

Calgary showed me the same split at city scale, clearing the phone check at the national rate and still crawling on speed.

Your trade already wins the first one. It wins it more often than almost any trade I audit, and no salon owner has ever once mentioned that to me on a call, because nobody notices the door that opens properly.

What she notices is the wait. What she notices is that your prices sit three taps deep and one of the three taps goes nowhere at all.

Nobody has ever left a salon a bad review for a page that fit the screen. They just quietly go somewhere that answered faster, and you get told nothing about it, ever.

So which of those two is your website doing to a stranger tonight? Do you actually know, or are you going off the last time you looked at it on the laptop in the back room?

If it were my salon, I’d stand outside my own front door tonight, open my own homepage on my own phone, and count the seconds out loud. Whatever number I got would decide what I spent money on next, and nothing else would get a vote.