Fix Your Jewelry Shop’s Door Before You Touch the Labels

A stranger with a spreadsheet has decided your jewelry shop’s website is what’s wrong with your year. He has never seen your window, your cases, or a single slow Tuesday behind your counter.

Every couple of months an agency emails you a report with red bars in it and a subject line hinting that your business is in some kind of danger. You open it, you follow almost none of it, and you close it again, because nothing in there explains why July was so quiet.

Fair. I’d close it too.

So I’m not handing you a list of forty things. You’ve got one Saturday you’re willing to give this, and I’d rather you spent it on the corner that’s actually rotten than spread it thin across everything.

Two of the three jobs below aren’t design work. One of them isn’t even on your website.

What turned up when I ranked the trades

I sampled 2,676 jewelry businesses across 24 cities and audited the 1,741 websites they listed.

Then I started ranking the trades check by check, and jewelers kept landing at both ends at once.

You know what an appraisal looks like. Metal, weight, stone, setting, cut, every answer in a fixed box, so an insurance company that never held the ring can act on the paperwork without ever ringing you up about it. Schema markup does that same job for the shop itself, and Google is the stranger reading the paperwork.

Your trade hands those details over more reliably than nearly anyone I audit. Ranked on that one, jewelers came sixth of the 47 trades I keep, 77.4% of these sites carrying it, well clear of the 70.5% I get across everything.

Owners tell me a line of code never sold a ring, and I took that objection seriously enough to write out where I think it comes from.

Then I ranked them on the check sitting right beside it, and the trade fell through the floor.

74.3% of jewelry businesses have a website for any of that to sit on, 43rd of the same 47, where 83% of small businesses list one.

Perfect paperwork on a shop with no door.

So which one are you? The shop with no page, or the shop with a page that nobody has opened since the week it went up?

You can go and check all of it, which I’d honestly rather you did than take my word for any of it. Pick Jewelers in the industry box of my explorer, leave the city box exactly where it is, and the whole trade rolls up into one card with the sample size printed under every rate. I do that to myself whenever a result comes out looking better than the trade deserves, and this one did.

So, the order I’d work in on my own Saturday.

1) Somewhere for her to land

If you haven’t got a page at all, this section is your entire Saturday and you can skip the rest of the article.

A jeweler with no website isn’t hiding. You’re on the map, you’ve got the stars, and the telephone still rings most afternoons.

I used to think that made a shop backward, and the jewelers doing fine without one changed my mind about why.

But think about what a telephone can’t do at half past nine on a Tuesday night.

A woman inherited her grandmother’s ring last month. The shank is worn thin and one of the small stones is missing, and she has no idea whether that’s an afternoon of work or a small fortune.

What she wants to know, before she carries something irreplaceable across town on a bus, is whether you’d even take a repair like that on.

She can’t ask you. She can ask the shop two streets over, because they wrote it down.

Where do you suppose she takes the ring in the morning?

Almost none of the work I do on a jeweler’s site is design. It’s opening hours, repairs, what you’ll pay for old gold, and a way to ask a question without standing at your counter to ask it.

How many of those questions do you answer out loud every week, one customer at a time, for free?

2) The phone in her hand

Google wants a single instruction sitting in your page that tells a phone how wide to draw everything. Leave it out and the phone has to guess, and it guesses by building the desktop version and then squashing it until a fingertip covers three links at once.

73.4% of jewelry sites clear that check, under the 78% I get across every trade I test, and the ones failing it are nearly always sitting on a template older than the phone in your pocket.

Clearing it doesn’t make a page pleasant, mind you. A site can pass and still be a chore, usually because of the photographs, which in a jewelry shop are the one thing nobody is willing to compromise on.

Pool companies pass it at 80.8%, better than almost anybody, and the woman holding the phone still runs out of things she can do on their pages.

Big shiny things on a desktop in your studio are the reason a stranger stops scrolling. On a four year old Android in a supermarket car park they’re a grey rectangle and a spinning circle.

Ask whoever looks after the site to compress the homepage images, then to open the result on an actual phone rather than a laptop window squeezed narrow. It’s an afternoon of someone’s time, once.

Every job in that afternoon is a question about how the page feels to use rather than how it looks.

Stand out on the sidewalk at noon with your own phone and load your homepage in the glare. Would those photographs sell a ring to anyone out there?

3) Whether any of it worked

Google will do the counting for you and charge you nothing at all for it. A shop that switched the tracking on can name the page a visitor was reading when she changed her mind, and the one she was on when she reached for the phone.

49.9% of these sites run analytics of any kind, so most of this trade is buying advertising, printing cards and rebuilding pages on a hunch, while 58% of the sites in my sample can go and check.

You already do this with stock, and you’d never dream of doing it any other way. You know what moved in December and what sat in the case untouched all year, because you count it.

Your website is the only part of the shop you don’t count.

Which page brought you last month’s custom commission? Any idea at all?

What I’d leave alone

The labels. Your trade already writes them better than nearly every trade I audit, and nobody should be selling you a repair for the one column you’re already ahead on.

The padlock too, and the handoff behind it. 91.2% of these sites walk a visitor off the unprotected version of the address and onto the safe copy, better than the 88% I find across my whole sample, and that job belongs to your hosting company rather than to a designer.

If a quote turns up in your inbox that opens with security and schema markup, it’s charging you for two pieces of work your trade quietly finished years ago.

When did anyone last send you a proposal that began with the things you were already doing right?

Add my ten checks up and jewelers land on 73 out of 100, a middling and entirely survivable place to sit. The middle isn’t where your money is leaking, though. It’s leaking out the front, in the two hours a week you spend answering the same four questions on the telephone.

Do one of the three

Not all three. One, this Saturday.

I’m not promising you a queue at the door, because I have never once watched a website do that for anybody. What changes is much smaller than that, which is exactly why I believe it.

A woman who found you at ten at night goes to bed already knowing your Saturday hours. A repair question lands in your inbox instead of dying in a voicemail. And come March, you can name the page that brought her in.

An ordinary month with three fewer holes in it.

Send me your address and I’ll put the whole site under the loupe, then tell you which job earns your Saturday and which one you can forget about.

You’ll know it worked the day a stranger walks in already knowing what you charge to size a ring.