Dallas Came Fifth of 24 Cities Without Winning Anything

Dallas has the most boring website data of any city I looked at.

That’s unfair and I’ll take half of it back straight away, because boring isn’t the same as bad, and this city sits a little ahead of the country on nearly every check I run.

But I spent an hour across a table from a Dallas owner last month failing to make a single one of those numbers matter to him, and he was right to push back at me.

“My site’s fine”

Ray has run the same business off Northwest Highway for eleven years, and he let me open my laptop mostly to be polite about it.

“My site’s fine,” he said, before I’d shown him anything at all.

So I started with the whole city instead of with him. Dallas scores 73 out of 100, under Scottsdale, Denver and Kelowna, over Anaheim, Windsor and Montreal.

The grade behind it comes out of 6,100 businesses across 47 markets, of which 4,264 websites got opened and checked and 3,255 sat through a phone speed test.

Ray found the rank column on his own and read it off the screen. “Fifth,” he said. “Out of twenty-four. So we’re winning.”

Charleston, Houston, Indianapolis, Raleigh, Seattle and Washington DC all scored exactly what Dallas scored. Charleston got sorted in above it on the letter C, the rest got sorted in below, and alphabetical order built that fifth place rather than anything anybody in this city did.

“Then why are you here?”

Because fifth arrived without a single win underneath it. The best placing this city takes on any one check is sixth, the worst is nineteenth, and nothing at all sits in the top three or the bottom three.

The check Dallas comes closest to leading on is one line of text at the top of a homepage, which tells you how thin the margins are up and down that column.

Do you know where your own website would land if I opened it tomorrow morning and ran the same checks over it?

“We’ve got the padlock”

He typed his own address into my laptop and pointed at the little padlock sitting in the corner of the browser.

He’s right, and so is most of the city. 94.5% of the sites I opened here load over a secure connection, against 94% nationally.

Being right about the padlock isn’t the same as being done with it. A funeral director told me exactly what Ray told me, and then I asked him to open his own site from the parking lot on the plain address a customer types from memory.

The lock covers the trip between her phone and your page. The rest of keeping a site out of trouble happens somewhere she will never look.

“And the reviews,” he said. “People find us through the reviews.”

Also true, and it’s the most impressive habit I found anywhere in this city. 90.0% of businesses here hold at least one Google review, and the average one carries 187 of them at 4.6 stars.

Someone has been asking customers for those on purpose, because reviews in that quantity don’t wander in by themselves.

Ray had a card by his register with a code on it for people to scan. He’d been asking for four years without ever calling it a marketing campaign.

How many customers have you asked for a review since the beginning of this month, and could you name a single one of them?

“Nobody’s complained”

Then I gave him the two checks that go the other way.

82.2% of Dallas businesses have a website at all, against 83% across the country, and Dallas sits sixteenth of 24 on that one.

“One point,” he said.

He’d found it before I could finish. The average Dallas site scores 57 out of 100 on a phone speed test where the national average is 58, and one point of anything is worth nothing to a man with a business to run.

“So you drove out here to tell me I’m a point off.”

Sort of. Speed is the only check on my list your customer can feel in her hand, standing on the sidewalk outside your door, waiting for you to appear on a screen.

“Nobody’s complained.”

Nobody ever complains. They tap back and open the next one, and the whole thing is over in less time than it took you to read this sentence.

The question he asked that I couldn’t answer

Ray got to the real problem before I did, and he got there the way owners always do, by asking what he was supposed to do about it in the morning.

“So what do I hand my guy on Monday? Go fix the thing that’s a point off?”

Give me a city with one broken number and I’ll give you a project for Monday morning. Everybody can see a disaster, everybody agrees about it, and someone fixes it eventually because it’s embarrassing to leave sitting there.

Dallas has a long column of small gaps instead, and not one of them is loud enough to get anybody out of a chair.

When did a one point gap ever make you change anything about your business? Which of your own numbers is bad enough that you’d cancel a meeting over it?

Nothing in this city is broken enough to schedule. So nothing gets scheduled, and twelve months later the same checks come back reading exactly the way they read today.

“Maybe it’s the software”

“Everyone keeps telling me to get off WordPress,” he said. “Maybe that’s my problem.”

Line the tools up by how often they turned up in the Dallas sites I audited and you get WordPress at 36.1%, Wix at 7.2%, Squarespace at 7.1%, Shopify at 6.0% and GoDaddy’s builder at 3.3%.

Those shares don’t add up to a hundred, and they were never going to. A site can match two of these at once, and my fingerprinting misses a good deal of what’s out there.

It’s the same handful of tools as every other city in my report, so the software isn’t what parked this one in the middle of the table.

How much time have you spent blaming your platform for something a rewritten paragraph would have fixed in an afternoon?

“Then it’s me.”

Not quite. It’s that nothing on his website is bad enough to embarrass him into making a decision about it.

Your customer has never heard of the national average

She’s got three tabs open on her phone and she’s about to pick one of you.

The comparison happening in her hand is you against the shop two miles up the road, not you against a national average I keep in a spreadsheet.

Being a point ahead of the country buys you nothing on that street. Loading in two seconds instead of six buys you something. A form sitting on the first screen buys you something.

So when an owner tells me his site is “about average”, I don’t hear reassurance in it. I hear a business that’s invisible for boring reasons rather than dramatic ones.

The businesses I work with in and around Dallas that grow are never the ones beating the country by a point on every check in a row. They’re the ones who got obviously, visibly better at two things everyone else in their trade is lazy about.

In this city I’d pick from the line Google prints under your name, a form on the first screen, and whether anything counted last Tuesday, because Dallas finishes one of those three and leaves the other two alone.

One thing I owe you before you quote any of this at someone. A city figure pools every kind of business in town into a single number, which is a blunt way to treat any individual trade, and what’s true of the law firms here has almost nothing to do with what’s true of the taco shops.

Go and time it tonight

After you lock up this evening, walk out your own front door and stand on the sidewalk with your phone in your hand.

Turn the wifi off first, so you’re running on the same signal your customer is running on. Then load your homepage and count the seconds until there’s something on the screen worth reading.

Whatever number you reach is the number she reaches, standing in the same spot, deciding whether she can be bothered to wait for you.

Ray counted to nine. He went quiet after that, and he didn’t need to say anything else.