A Toronto Contractor Asked Me What a Rebuild Costs

The email came in on a Sunday night, which is when the honest ones come in.

A Toronto contractor I’d never met, and three sentences with no hello on the front of them.

“Pat, when I text my website to a customer it comes through looking like nothing. My competitor’s comes through with a picture and his name on it. What am I looking at, price wise, to get mine redone?”

He had a figure in his head before he hit send. Everyone does, and it’s never a small one.

Emails like that arrive with the diagnosis already attached, and the diagnosis is nearly always expensive, because a replacement is the only repair anybody in my business ever gets offered.

I wrote back and asked for both addresses, his and the competitor’s, plus one line on what he thought the difference was.

“Mine’s older. His is one of those modern ones.”

His site went up in 2021. The competitor’s went up in 2019, and I told him so, and he didn’t write back for a day.

They bought the same thing

Both sites ran on the same software. Not similar software. The same, down to the page builder and a theme sold by the same shop. There’s a fair chance yours is on it too.

41.2% of the sites I audited in this city run on WordPress, so two competitors ending up on the same tools is the least surprising thing in this whole story.

I’d run that same check across every city the week before, which is the only reason I could answer him on a Sunday at all: 71.5% of the sites I audited here go out looking like his competitor’s rather than his, and Toronto comes to rest at the bottom, 24 of 24.

Two owners, two budgets, two different designers, and an identical set of tools sitting under the paint, which is the reason the difference he kept staring at was never going to be about money.

“So why does his look like that and mine look like garbage?”

Because a few lines are filled in on his page and blank on yours, and neither of you chose either way.

The client who phoned people back

A client of mine runs a small operation with a front desk, and her staff text quotes to customers all day.

For the first year I worked with her, every one of those texts landed as a plain address. Nothing above the words. Nothing to say who it came from.

Her customers, plenty of them older, started phoning the desk to ask whether the message was really from her. Others didn’t tap at all, and she’d chase them two days later and find they’d been waiting for her to call.

Open Graph tags are the answers a page keeps ready for a question no visitor ever asks out loud: what should I look like when someone sends me on to a friend? Hers had no answers saved, so it went out with nothing to say for itself.

She had spent that year believing her customers were slow to reply, when a message from a business they already trusted was arriving anonymous enough to leave sitting there until someone confirmed it.

We fixed it in an afternoon. The phone calls asking if it was really her stopped inside a month, and she noticed before I did.

Your customers are doing a version of the same thing right now, and not one of them will ever tell you they sat on your message for two days because it looked odd on the screen.

”Is that a Toronto thing?”

He asked me that next, and I liked the question, because it’s the one every owner asks and almost nobody asks about themselves.

Across every site I audit anywhere, the same check comes back at 75.7%. This city sits underneath that, which surprised me the first time I looked, because so much else around here is in decent shape.

85.0% of the businesses I sampled in Toronto have a website. The sites are up, they’re modern enough, and they’re mostly built on tools that handle this in a settings screen.

Your own site is either in that group or it isn’t, and your laptop will never tell you which, because a page never shows you the half of itself that other people’s phones read.

Manufacturers came out much the same, and that trade inspects every part that leaves the building. The web address is the one thing nobody signs off on.

So no, it isn’t the city. Something else is going on, and he found it himself two emails later without meaning to.

”So who was supposed to do it?”

Whoever built the site, if anyone had asked for it. Nobody asked.

I put a question back to him. Who looks after the website now, today, this month?

He listed three people. The guy who built it, a cousin who took the photos, and the company he pays for hosting.

Not one of those three thinks the site is theirs. Ask any of them what happened on it last year and you’d get a shrug and a phone number for one of the others.

That’s the real answer to his Sunday email. His website has been live for five years and unowned for four of them, and empty tags are exactly the sort of thing that goes missing when a job belongs to nobody.

A website with three part time caretakers behaves exactly like a website with none, because every person who touches it assumes the important decisions were handled by whoever came before them.

The jobs a live website quietly needs are ordinary enough. Every one of them still needs a name written beside it.

Who owns yours? Not who built it. Who would notice this week if it quietly stopped doing something it used to do?

What it costs

“Right. What am I in for?”

An hour of someone’s time, and less than that if the person already knows where the settings live.

There’s no rebuild in this. There’s no new website, no new photos, no migration, no meeting about colors.

If your own page is missing the same thing, your version of the job costs what his did, whoever you get to sit down and do it.

He asked me twice more in different words, because a fix that cheap sounds like a trick when you’ve spent a week bracing to spend money. I’ve watched owners argue themselves into a bigger project rather than accept a small one, and I’ve stopped trying to talk anyone out of that mood on the first call.

I looked at his for nothing, the same way I look at anyone’s who sends me the address, and the whole check took me four minutes.

He had it sorted by the Tuesday, by the same guy who built the site, who filled the fields in without charging him and then admitted he’d never checked that particular thing on anything he’d delivered that year.

What he had already earned

He’s got a wall of reviews, all of them earned with his hands in other people’s houses over about a decade.

Word of mouth is still the engine of a business like his, and the difference now is that a recommendation travels as an address rather than a phone number, which quietly makes his website part of his reputation.

I spent a week on that one question here, watching what happens to the link a happy customer vouches for after she pastes it into a group chat.

None of that reaches the customer on the other end if his address turns up in her messages looking like something a stranger forwarded her by mistake.

He didn’t need a better website. He needed the one he owns to introduce itself when it travels.

Most of the emails I get from businesses around this city are like his, and they almost never end in a rebuild. They end in a list of small things nobody was ever assigned.

Ignore everything else I said

Do one thing this week.

Ask whoever holds your login to fill in the tags that decide how your address arrives when a customer sends it to a friend, then ask them to show you it working before they close the laptop.

Nothing else on your list gets touched this week. Not the software, not the design, not the photos, not the five year old theme, and none of the rest of what you’ve just read.

If anyone quotes you a rebuild for this, ask what the hour would cost instead, and watch how they answer.