Five New Orleans Excuses for Not Having a Website, and One I Believe
73.0% of New Orleans businesses list a website, where the count across all 24 cities is 83%. I spent a week opening those addresses, then ranked the reasons owners give me for the gap.
Last Tuesday I sat down with a list of 5,091 New Orleans businesses and started opening web addresses, one after another, for most of the week.
3,031 websites came back and got audited. Every one of those had ten checks run against it, and 2,550 went through a phone speed test on top of that.
By Thursday I could tell which block a shop sat on from the photograph on its front page. I wouldn’t recommend the exercise as a hobby.
Then I put the city beside the rest of the country.
A stranger searching for something here runs into a name with nothing to click far more often than she would almost anywhere else, because 73.0% of the businesses I sampled in New Orleans list a website where the count across all 24 cities is 83%.
Only Corpus Christi came out under it. Scottsdale sat at the very top.
I’ve been collecting the reasons for years, on calls, at counters, and once in a parking lot in the rain. Five of them come up again and again, and I’ve put the one I believe first.
1) “This neighborhood already knows us”
True, and I think it explains most of the gap on its own.
A neighborhood in this city can carry a business for thirty years. I’ve eaten dinner in places that never bothered with a sign out front, let alone an address on the internet.
But knowing you and finding you are two separate jobs. The people who know you aren’t the ones typing your trade into a phone at nine at night, and every year a few more of the ones who did know you move away, or retire, or hand the house over to a nephew who orders everything on an app.
So who is arriving new this year, and how did they hear your name? That’s the only version of the question that matters.
The excuse holds up completely. It’s also a slow leak, and nobody notices a slow leak for about a decade.
Asked straight out whether a business here needs a site, my honest answer still starts with no before it gets complicated, and the leak is the reason it gets complicated.
It’s the only one of the five I’d defend in an argument, because it describes something real about this city rather than something convenient about the owner.
2) “I’d never keep it updated”
Probably true, and it matters far less than the person saying it believes.
Google isn’t sitting there waiting for you to post. It reads the words already on the page to work out what you sell, and a page nobody has touched since 2022 still answers the question a stranger typed, as long as the answer is somewhere on it.
33.4% of the sites I opened here publish anything at all, a little under what I get nationally, and I have never once diagnosed a struggling business as a business that failed to blog.
Your hours, your prices and your service area don’t change every week. Write them once properly, and the page carries on doing its job long after you’ve forgotten which afternoon you spent building it.
How many businesses have you decided against this year because their website looked abandoned? I’d guess none, because you were never looking at the date. You were looking for an answer.
So the excuse is true and completely beside the point. Nobody is asking you to become a writer.
The upkeep a site actually needs is a shorter list than the phrase suggests, and I’ve written out what looking after one involves month to month if you want to see how short.
3) “My customers are visitors, and they all use the map”
Half right, which is better than the next two manage.
A map listing is where most visitors start, and Google will happily show your hours, your stars and your photographs without you owning a single thing.
What a listing can’t do is answer a question you never gave it anywhere to find. Google takes the basics off the listing and everything else off a page someone sat down and built, and when there’s no page it fills the space with reviews, other people’s photographs, and whatever a directory decided about you in 2018.
Would you want that particular committee describing your business to a stranger?
The map walks her to your door. Then she gets to the door and there isn’t one.
Half of it stands, then. Visitors really do start on the map, and the map really does run out of things to say about you.
4) “I can’t afford one”
The excuse I hear most often and believe least, and I say that as a man who charges money for this work.
WordPress runs 32.1% of the sites I opened in this city, with Squarespace on 11.2% and Wix on 9.2%, and nobody had to hire me to buy any of the three.
Cost stopped being the wall a long time ago. What’s left is that starting is miserable, the first afternoon is boring, and there is nobody in your building whose job it is.
A baker across town had money set aside for a rebuild she didn’t need, and I spent an hour talking her out of spending it.
I’d rather an owner just told me that. “I don’t want to spend a Sunday on it” is an answer I can work with, and I’ve got an enormous amount of sympathy for it, because I don’t want to spend a Sunday on my own paperwork either.
Which is it for you, honestly, the money or the Sunday?
That one doesn’t survive contact with my own numbers.
5) “I’ve got a Facebook page”
The weakest of the five, and the way I counted was generous to it.
Both of those still landed inside my website total when I added it up. So the New Orleans share is the kind reading of the situation, not the harsh one.
Google will find your profile, of course it will. But it reads a profile as a link worth following, not as the place your prices and your service area live, and the answers a customer wants are the ones it can’t get at.
A link only helps if it runs both ways, and five minutes tonight will tell you whether your profiles point back at anything you own.
You don’t set the rules there either. Twice in five years a client of mine has opened her page in the morning and found it laid out differently, because a company she has never spoken to decided it should be.
So where would a customer of yours go tonight to read your prices, if the only address you have is one that someone else designed and can redesign again on a whim?
That one doesn’t hold up at all, and I think it costs the most of the five.
The number that leaves all of them out
Add my ten checks up and New Orleans lands on 71 out of 100, a middling score on a middling day.
That total gets built out of the sites that exist. The businesses from my first paragraph, the ones with nothing to open at all, aren’t in it anywhere.
They didn’t score badly. They didn’t score.
That’s the part no audit can hold, and it’s the part I think about on the drive home. An audit is a generous instrument, because it only ever grades the people who turned up.
Would you rather be a low score on that list, or missing from it altogether?
So which one is yours
I build these things in this city for a living, so read all of that knowing exactly what I do for money.
Four of the five excuses have something real in them. One of them I’d defend in front of anybody, and I’ve used a version of it myself about the accounting software I still haven’t set up.
Which one did you recognize? Don’t send it to me. Answer it on the walk home, when there’s nobody standing in front of you trying to sell you anything.
