Every Excuse I Hear in Winston-Salem After a Phone Test Passes
81.1% of the Winston-Salem sites I opened clear Google’s mobile checks, the best of the twenty four cities I sampled. Then the excuses start. Here they are, ranked.
Do you know what your own website looks like in someone else’s hand?
Not the copy on your desk, the one your big monitor and your office wifi have been flattering for years. Outdoors, one hand, noon, sun coming straight down onto the glass.
I ask some version of that on most of my calls, and in Winston-Salem the answer comes back better than I have any right to expect.
So the compliment is an easy one to hand over here, and I mean every word of it: 81.1% of the small business sites I opened here clear Google’s mobile checks, which puts the town above the 78% the country manages as a whole and ahead of every one of the twenty four cities I sampled.
Nothing beat it. I went back and rebuilt the whole city sample the next morning expecting to find a bug with my name on it, and the number came back exactly where I left it.
What the check is asking
Google puts two small questions to your page, and your customer never hears either one of them. She only ever meets the answer.
On a site that fails, the page arrives with a whole laptop’s worth of layout crammed into her screen, so the words come out at about the size of the small print on a receipt and the right hand edge of everything runs off into nowhere.
She drags it sideways to reach the end of a sentence, does it twice, then goes back to the results and taps the next name down.
Passing means none of that ever happens to her. Low bar, and it was always meant to be a low bar.
Then I read on down the rest of the checks while the owner is still enjoying the good news, and the mood in the room shifts. Winston-Salem lands on 72 out of 100 overall, sixteenth of the twenty four, which is a strange place to sit for a town that wins the phone check outright.
The excuses start about four seconds later. I’ve heard them often enough to keep them in an order, best to worst, so here they are with an honest verdict on each.
1) “It works on a phone, so the hard part’s done”
Verdict: holds up. I collected that number myself and I’m not about to argue with my own numbers in front of a paying customer.
But the check has one narrow job, and the job is to ask whether your page fits her screen.
Can she find your hours on it? Does the photograph she came for ever finish loading? Can she reach a human being without dialing a number?
The check doesn’t ask any of that, and it never will. Fitting the screen is the first thing, and nobody has ever claimed it was the last thing. Calgary passes the very same check and still keeps people waiting while the page loads, which is two opposite answers off one phone.
2) “My guy told me it’s responsive”
Verdict: true, and a far smaller promise than it sounds like when a developer says it in a meeting.
Responsive means the layout rearranges itself as the screen gets narrower, so what sits side by side on your laptop ends up as one thing above another on her phone.
She never sees the rearranging happen. She sees what it left behind, a narrow strip under her thumb, and she has no idea anyone ever made a decision on her behalf.
Responsive describes the shape of the page. It says nothing whatsoever about what’s written on it.
I sold that promise for years. Real estate was where it caught up with me, because I kept polishing the half of the site you can see while the code underneath told a machine almost nothing.
3) “People find me on Google, not on my website”
Verdict: half right, and the wrong half is the half that costs you money.
She does find you on Google. Then she taps through, because she wants a price, or a photograph of work you actually did, or some sign that you’re open on a Sunday.
A baker here posted something every single day and her website never said so, so all that proof stayed somewhere the deciding customer never went.
25.8% of the homepages I opened in this city carry a contact form, under the 28% I find nationally, so most of the time she arrives at a page that reads beautifully at arm’s length and then gives her nothing to do with the moment.
What’s she supposed to do next, memorize your phone number and dial it out of a different app?
4) “I’ll sort it out when things slow down”
Verdict: doesn’t hold, and I say that as a man who used that exact line about his own website for the better part of a year.
Things don’t slow down on a schedule. They slow down in the third week of January, when you’re tired and worried and the last thing on earth you want is a login screen.
How many Januaries has that plan survived at your place?
Every website I’ve ever rebuilt got rebuilt during a busy month, because a busy month is when a missed call finally stings enough to move someone. I take that work all year round, and I’d still rather you did the small version of it yourself on a Tuesday night.
5) “Nobody’s ever complained”
Verdict: the worst of the five, and comfortably the one I hear most.
She doesn’t complain. She taps back, takes the next result on the list, and you never once find out she stopped by.
56.4% of the sites here run analytics, a shade under the 58% I see nationally, which leaves most owners in town with no way of learning who gave up, or when, or on which page.
Would you know? Not guess. Know.
What a pass can’t do for you
Clearing the phone check keeps her on the page for a few more seconds. Those seconds are worth having, and they’re the entire purchase.
Everything after them is a decision a person has to sit down and make on purpose. What the page says first. Whether there’s a way in. Whether anyone’s counting.
Fitting the screen is where the phone check stops, and where the business of making a site usable begins.
Which of those three has anybody chosen on your site this year?
Winston-Salem is better at the automatic half of a website than any city I’ve opened up, and it’s ordinary at the parts where a human being has to pick something.
Both of those can be true about your own site at once, and I’d put money on it being true about yours.
Two minutes and one other person
So, a dare, and it costs you nothing but your dignity.
Tonight, hand your phone to whoever happens to be closest to you. Unlocked, sitting on your own homepage, with no explanation and no coaching from you.
Ask them to send you a message through your website, then say absolutely nothing else and watch their thumb move around the screen.
You’ll learn more in those two minutes than you would from anything I could ever mail you. And if the thumb wanders about and settles on nothing worth pressing, congratulations, you’ve got your first job of the week.
