Denver Came Second Out of 24 Cities and I Ran It Three Times

You reckon your website is fine.

Not good. Fine. It exists, your phone number is on it, someone built it a few years ago and nobody has ever complained about it to your face.

That’s the mood most Denver owners are in when a stranger turns up with a report card on their websites, and it’s the hardest mood in the world to argue anybody out of, because nothing is visibly broken.

When did you last look at it properly, as opposed to logging in to change the opening hours?

So I won’t argue. Get your phone out instead and we’ll go through it together, five things, about five minutes.

I’ve been auditing small business websites across 24 cities, and Denver finished on 74 out of 100, second of the 24, a result I ran three times because I assumed I’d broken something. To get there I sampled 6,607 businesses inside the city and audited 5,103 websites between them.

Ten weighted checks build the grade, and you can run half of them yourself before your coffee’s cool enough to drink.

Every one of the ten can also be read from the pavement. My report card walks up to the front of your building, reads the sign, peers through the window and never once comes inside, which is worth knowing before anybody takes too much comfort from a good mark.

One. Search your own name

Type your business name into Google on your phone, the way a stranger would, and then look at what comes back instead of tapping it.

Two lines matter. The blue one you’d tap, and the grey one sitting underneath it.

Someone wrote that grey line, or nobody did and Google went hunting through your page for anything usable. It’s the chalkboard you’d drag onto the sidewalk in the morning, one sentence in your own hand, aimed at a stranger who hasn’t decided anything yet.

82.1% of Denver sites have one written against 77.9% nationally, which puts it second of the 24.

Does yours read like a sentence a person wrote on purpose? If it trails off mid-word, or opens with the word Home, you’ve found your first job of the evening.

Two. Count out loud

Stay on your phone, and get off your wifi first, because your wifi has been lying to you for years.

Open your own homepage on cell data and count out loud until something readable turns up on the screen.

Denver as a whole scores 56 out of 100 on that same test against 58 nationally, 21st of 24, and the one check where the second best city of the lot has nothing to say for itself.

It’s the city’s worst habit by a distance, and the one a customer feels before she has read a word of your page.

What did you get to out there? Six? Eleven?

Whatever you counted to is your real number. The one you get at your desk is a courtesy your own browser extends to you, and no customer will ever see it.

Three. Ask about your photographs

This one needs another person, so it can wait until the morning.

Email whoever looks after your site and ask what the alt text says on your homepage pictures. Do you already know the answer, or are you about to find out along with me?

If nobody has that job at the moment, the work of looking after a website is a shorter and duller list than most owners expect, and it can sit with someone in your own building.

Raised lettering under a room number is there for the one visitor in the building who needs it. Everybody else walks past without a thought. Alt text is your version of that lettering, and each photograph on your site gets its own.

Denver describes 58.1% of its pictures against 54.9% nationally, the best of the 24 cities I lined up.

That result surprised me enough that I pulled it a second time to be sure, and you can go and do the same, because the explorer on the report takes one city with the industry box left empty and prints every rate next to the number of sites behind it. Someone up there is sitting down on a Thursday afternoon to write those descriptions, and I’d love to know which agency taught them the habit.

Four. Try to contact yourself

Open your homepage as though you’d never met you, and count the taps it takes to send a message without dialing a number.

A contact form is the mail slot cut into your front door. Without one, the only way in is to knock and hope someone’s home, which people will do for a plumber at midnight and for hardly anybody at half past nine on a Tuesday morning.

29.4% of Denver homepages have one, a shade over the national 28%, and sixth of 24.

Sixth place, and still under a third of the city. Who builds a website in 2026 and then makes a curious stranger pick up a telephone just to say hello?

Five. Ask who’s counting

The last one is a question for whoever looks after the site rather than something you tap.

Is anything counting the people who arrive, and can it tell you which page they quietly leave from?

62.5% of Denver sites can answer that against 58% nationally, second of 24 again.

Can you answer it about your own? Most owners I ask can’t, and when we do go and look it’s almost never the page they’d have guessed.

Veterinary practices sit near the top of my rankings on this one and it saves them nothing, because the counting was switched on and nobody ever held the phone.

What five minutes can’t see

You’ve now graded the outside of your building. So has my report.

Ten checks can tell you a website is technically healthy. They can’t tell you it’s persuasive, and those two qualities have very little to do with one another.

My grade has no idea whether your writing is any good, whether the phone rang on Tuesday, or whether you’ve been booked solid since April on word of mouth alone.

Clearing all ten of my checks does not make a website good, and I’ve met plenty of owners with no website at all who are having the best year of their working lives.

So please don’t read Denver’s mark as “the websites here are great”. Read it as a city doing the outside of the job better than nearly every other city I audited, and still leaving points lying on the pavement.

If yours is one of the ones propping that average up, good on you. If it’s one of the ones dragging it down, Denver keeps me in rebuilds, and yours would not be the worst one this month.

Do the grey line tonight

If the five minutes went badly and you’d rather hand the rest of it to someone else, my audit form takes it from here.

But do the grey line yourself first, this evening, before you do anything else about any of it.

Nothing dramatic will happen. No flood of inquiries, no phone ringing off the hook by Friday afternoon.

The next stranger who searches your name will read a sentence you wrote instead of one a machine scraped out of your footer, and a few of those strangers will stop for it. Small promise, and the only sort I can keep from here.