He Was Right About the Padlock on His Funeral Home Site

Funeral homes build the best defended websites of any trade I audit.

Best defended is doing far more work in that sentence than I can back up, so let me take some of it away before the paragraph ends. One column out of the ten I check, and it happens to be the column that costs the least to win.

But they do win it, and the call I want to tell you about started there. When did anyone last tell you your website was good at something?

“It’s secure, though”

He runs a third generation home in a town of eleven thousand people, and he called me because the website “doesn’t do anything.” His words. He’d been paying for it for two years.

I’d already opened his file before we spoke, which is a habit of mine, so I knew something he didn’t.

“Look, the site’s fine. My guy built it properly. It’s secure and everything.”

He was right. I told him so, and I wasn’t being polite about it.

Then I told him the part he didn’t know, which is that his site does something almost no small business site bothers with. Type his address the old way, without the letters on the front, and the browser gets handed straight over to the locked copy before a single pixel appears.

“That’s the padlock thing.”

Sort of. The padlock is one job and the handover is a completely separate job, and plenty of otherwise respectable sites have the first without ever arranging the second.

Plenty of others never manage the first one either, which is how a new chiropractic patient meets the words Not Secure before she meets the chiropractor.

What the handover looks like on my screen

My log prints two lines for that check.

The address I asked for goes on top. The address I actually ended up on goes underneath it, and when the second line has the extra letter and the lock on it, the site passes.

His passed. 94.3% of the funeral home websites I audited pass it, where 88% of small business sites do.

I ranked all 47 trades on that check, top to bottom, and funeral homes came out first.

Plumbers sit down at the other end of the same list, where typing your own name without the s brings back a warning instead of a lock.

So his web guy was not a cowboy. Whoever arranged that either understood the problem or chose a hosting company that understood it for him, and I get to deliver that verdict to an owner more rarely than you’d imagine.

Winning a check like that with a quiet phone is an odd feeling, and this trade has form for it. Funeral homes run analytics more than any trade I audit and link social profiles less than any trade I audit, which is a hard pair of facts to hold at the same time.

“So why is the phone quiet?”

The question that ended the argument

I asked him where he was standing.

He was at his desk, in the office, on the office wifi, on a computer he’d owned since before the site existed. Everybody looks at their own website from the best seat in the building.

So I asked him to walk out to the parking lot with his phone, turn the wifi off, and open it there.

“Okay. It’s coming.”

“Still coming.”

“There it is.”

I asked him how long that took, honestly, and he said maybe five seconds. Then he said something I’ve never forgotten, which was that he’d assumed it was his phone.

It wasn’t his phone. It was the photographs, and the photographs were the best thing about the entire website.

Beautiful, and enormous

The homepage had a photograph of the chapel at sunrise, a second of the grounds, and a third of the family standing on the steps. All lovely, all shot properly, and all uploaded at the size the camera made them.

Each individual photograph was heavier than everything else on the page put together, which is ordinary, and which is invisible from a desk. How big are the pictures on your homepage? You don’t know, I don’t know mine either, and neither of us has ever had a reason to find out.

The speed number comes from a test that loads a homepage on a simulated phone over a middling connection and grades what a person sits and watches while nothing is there yet. Google’s own scale calls anything from 0 to 49 poor and 50 to 89 needs improvement.

Funeral homes average 52 out of 100 on that test, against 58 across every site I ran it on.

The layout was never the problem, either. 81.2% of these sites pass Google’s basic mobile checks, a bit better than the 78% I get nationally, and his was one of them.

His site fit the screen. It just made her wait to see it.

Yours probably fits the screen too. The question underneath that one is how long your visitor stares at a white rectangle before your building appears on it, and you’ve never once experienced it yourself.

Who is actually on the other end

“Five seconds isn’t that long.”

It isn’t, at a desk, on a Tuesday, when you’re not in any particular state.

Now put the same five seconds in a hospital parking lot at half past ten at night. She has one bar of signal, a phone that’s nearly dead, three names from a nurse, and a brother on the other line asking what she’s found out.

Which of those three names do you think she gives up on first?

He went quiet for a while. Then he told me his own daughter had complained about the site being slow on her phone, and that he’d told her to go and buy a better phone.

What we did, and what we didn’t

We didn’t rebuild anything. There was nothing wrong with the design and I told him so twice, because owners hear “it’s slow” and immediately start pricing a redesign. Would you rather buy a new website or an afternoon of someone resizing your pictures?

The photographs came down to a sensible size and got saved in a modern format, which took an afternoon. The video on the second page stopped loading itself before anyone pressed play. Two fonts came off entirely because nobody could tell they were there.

The padlock and the handover we left completely alone. They were already better than his competition’s, and I’d rather spend the money on the part that’s actually costing him something.

Both of them sit near the top of my own list for keeping a website out of trouble, and he had cleared them without ever knowing he was being graded.

If you want to see the difference between a heavy page and a light one that looks identical, the funeral home sites I keep as examples are all the light kind, and none of them look cheap for it.

Being fast isn’t a style. It’s a decision someone makes about file sizes, usually once, and afterwards the website behaves itself for a decade without anybody thinking about it again.

It’s the same reasoning behind everything I put into a funeral home website, and it’s why the lock and the handover are usually the two things I leave exactly as I found them in this trade.

The small promise

Go and stand in your own parking lot tonight with the wifi switched off, open your homepage, and count out loud while you wait for it. How far do you get?

Then let me promise you something, and I’ve made it small on purpose.

Get your photographs down to a reasonable weight and nothing dramatic happens. Your phone will not ring more this week. No one will email to say the site feels quicker, because nobody has ever done that in the history of the internet.

One thing changes: the daughter in that parking lot is still on your page after five seconds, instead of back in the search results with your name already behind her.

She won’t remember your website at all. She’ll remember that she found what she needed and stopped hunting, and no website in this trade has a bigger job than that one.