His Boat Yard Site Was Never the Slow Part

You’re tired of being told your boat yard’s website is the problem.

Some company you’ve never heard of emails you a report. Your nephew has opinions about it at Thanksgiving. An ad follows you around the internet for a week, and every one of them says the same soft, unhelpful thing.

Not one of them ever says which part. So which part is it? None of them have seen your books, your phone log, or the four months of the year when nothing you own goes anywhere near the water.

I build websites for marine businesses, so that call reaches me a lot. And speed, which is what those emails almost always mean, is the part this trade is already best at: marine businesses average 58 out of 100 for how fast a page turns up on a phone, which lands 24 of 47.

Let me tell you about one of them, start to finish.

What he came to me with

Call the place Lakeside Marine. Family owned, two mechanics on the payroll, winter storage, seasonal commissioning, and the occasional repower for a customer who has finally admitted the old engine is finished.

He rang me in March, before the ice was properly off, holding a report a stranger had emailed him. Red bars down one side. A score on the front page inside a big angry circle.

His question was how much it would cost to make his website fast.

I asked him one back. Fast for who, and doing what?

He didn’t have an answer, and that isn’t a criticism. Nobody has an answer to that the first time it gets asked.

The report he was holding

Some company’s software had opened his homepage once, from a data center in another country, and printed a number on the front of a document.

I don’t hate those reports, and I’ve generated versions of them myself for people who asked. They catch real faults, and a fault is a fault whoever finds it.

What they can’t tell you is whether the fault matters for your business, in your season, with your particular customers. That happens to be the only question worth paying anybody to answer.

He’d had it riding around in the truck for three weeks. There was a phone number on the last page and a monthly figure printed next to it. Have you got one of those in a drawer somewhere?

What I found when I looked

I ran it myself on a phone, on cell data, standing at the end of my own driveway where the signal generally gives up on me.

It came up quick, quicker than most of what I open in an average week, and quick enough that I checked my own connection twice before I believed it.

So I went and checked his whole trade against everything else I’d audited, because one website on its own tells you nothing at all about what’s normal. Speed beat their padlocks, their headlines, their page titles, their forms and their tags. No other check this trade runs gets anywhere close to it.

The check underneath it is the one worth worrying about, because only 72.2% of these pages are comfortable to read once they land, 44 of 47.

I had a client years ago who sold docks, and his homepage led with a photograph the size of a bedsheet. On a phone at the lake it never quite finished arriving, and that wait is exactly what the speed number is counting. Lakeside wasn’t doing it.

Compressing that one photograph would have fixed him, and the list of things that actually move a load time is shorter than anyone selling a rebuild lets on.

So I told him not to spend a dollar on it, which cost me a job I could have had that week and a retainer I could have had after it.

A plumber had me on the same call the year before, and I ended up rewriting every part of his site except the speed.

He didn’t take my word for the trade numbers either, and he was right not to. On the report page there’s a dropdown where you pick one trade, leave the city box on all, and get back a card printing every check with the count of sites behind it, 538 marine websites in his case. He went hunting for the number that would prove me wrong, which is the correct instinct, and came back annoyed that I was right about the next part.

The thing he actually didn’t have

There was nowhere on his homepage for a stranger to leave a name.

His phone number was up in the header, sitting inside an image, so a thumb landing on it selected a picture instead of starting a call. His email address was typed out with the word “at” in the middle of it to dodge spam robots.

That was the lot. No form.

So how does a stranger reach you at nine at night, when the phone in your office rings out and the answering machine is the one your father bought?

A form is what turns a nine o’clock problem into a Tuesday morning job. Only 21.4% of the marine websites I audited carry one on the homepage, which means most of this trade is quietly asking a man with a dead engine to hold that thought until the office opens.

Nobody comes out of this looking clever, mind you. Across every small business site I’ve opened the figure is 28%, and marine work is simply the trade where the customer’s bad evening happens furthest from a desk.

What changed

I built him a form with three boxes in it and nothing else. Name, phone, and one line asking what the boat is and where it sits.

Those are the two facts he asks for on every single call he takes. Do you know yours? He’d been asking his out loud for eleven years without ever writing them down anywhere a customer could get at them.

The phone number became a proper tappable link instead of a photograph of some digits, and the email address got un-mangled so a customer could copy it without decoding it first.

Then I sent him a few marine sites I’d already built, so he could see how little of a homepage this actually takes up.

Nothing got redesigned. His photos stayed, his colors stayed, and the logo his daughter drew in high school stayed exactly where it was.

What happened after

He emailed me in the second week of May with three messages pasted into the body of it, all of them sent between nine at night and midnight.

One was a guy whose outboard wouldn’t start, writing from a dock, that evening.

Would he have called in the morning? Maybe. Or he’d have found the yard across the bay that answered him at eleven o’clock at night.

By August the form was bringing in more storage bookings than the phone was, and Lakeside still hasn’t spent a cent on speed.

Do this one thing

His website was never the slow part. Slow was the story he’d been sold, because slow is simple to describe and simple to invoice for, while a missing door is neither of those things.

So ignore the report sitting in your inbox and ask whoever looks after your website to put a form on the homepage this week. Make sure it asks for the boat and the slip, because those two lines are what turn a message sent at midnight into a booking on Tuesday.