I Used to Skip Ahead When a Plumber Ran WordPress

For years I treated the platform as a shortcut, plumbers included.

Spot WordPress in the code, tick the first few checks off in my head, and jump ahead to the parts of an audit I actually enjoyed. The software handles the basics, I told myself, so why sit there confirming it?

I was comfortably wrong about that, and plumbing is the trade that finally broke the habit.

The order I work in

Every audit I run goes the same way, because changing the order is how I start missing things.

First, what the website is built on. Then the checks a piece of software can fill in without anyone thinking about them. Then the checks that need a human being to sit down and decide something. Then I add it all up.

Plumbing stopped me three times, and only one of those was anywhere I expected. Care to guess which? Most owners guess the platform, and the platform turned out to be the least interesting part of the whole audit.

Stop one: what it’s built on

Someone was paid to build most of these.

45.8% of the plumbing websites I opened run on WordPress. Across every small business website I audit the figure is 36.4%, and the difference matters more than a platform argument normally deserves, because WordPress rarely turns up by accident.

Nobody starts a free trial on a Sunday evening and lands on it. A theme got chosen, a host got paid, a person was involved. A Sunday evening trial ends up on something simpler, and the gap between those easier builders and WordPress is mostly about how much of the work you are expected to do yourself.

Which is worth sitting with, because the ordinary complaint about this trade is that plumbers can’t be bothered with a website. The numbers say the opposite, and they say it before I’ve read a single page.

It only takes you so far, mind. Assisted living homes run an even bigger share of WordPress than you do and the platform settles almost nothing about them.

Don’t expect those percentages to tally. A website can match two platforms at once, and a fair number match nothing my fingerprinting can put a name to, which I would rather say plainly than dress the remainder up as something it isn’t.

None of it earns you anything from me, either. Not one of the ten checks I score asks what a page was built with, and Google gets handed the finished page exactly the way your customer does.

Stop two: the boxes the software fills

Title tags. Canonical tags. Schema. Meta descriptions.

A decent theme with one plugin bolted onto it fills most of those in the background while you’re occupied with something that pays.

Take that last one. Google treats yours as a suggestion rather than an instruction, and it will cheerfully write its own line off your page instead whenever yours suits the search badly.

My first surprise landed right there. 83.0% of plumbing websites write one, which is 10 of 47, and I did not expect a trade I mostly meet in a van to finish near the front of anything I score for writing.

That’s the plugin, mostly. The box was already sitting on the screen and someone typed a sentence into it, probably in one evening, probably annoyed about it.

Which is the entire argument for professional software, and I’ll happily make it. Would you have filled in a single one of those boxes if the software hadn’t put them in front of you?

Stop three: the boxes nothing fills for you

Then I reach the checks where software cannot help anybody, and the character of the audit changes completely. I walked the same line through cleaning companies afterwards, watching where the platform stops handing things over, and the audit turned the same corner in the same place.

55.4% of these websites link out to a social profile, 43 of 47, and no plugin ever invented has done that job on behalf of a business.

Someone has to open the footer, paste in two addresses and press save. Eleven minutes, once, forever. When did anybody last look at yours?

A stranger looking you up wants one thing your homepage physically cannot give her, which is proof that you were working last week rather than in 2021. 66% of the websites I audit hand her that link.

I watched a homeowner do this from her kitchen table last spring. She had a plumber’s website open on the laptop and his name typed into Facebook on her phone, checking one against the other, and his website never once helped her get from the first to the second.

It surprised me because you already have the accounts. The photographs are already on the phone in your pocket. Someone in the house is already posting them, usually the person who does the invoicing and quietly runs everything else.

When I build a plumbing website, the profile links go in on the first day, because they cost nothing and they’re the only thing on the page that proves the business is still alive this morning.

Stop four: adding it up

Plumbing comes out at 74 out of 100 across all ten checks, 12 of 47, which is a better result than the trade gets credit for and a worse one than that platform share promised me.

The software did its half beautifully. The code is tidy, the tags are present, the pages have proper names, and none of that required a decision from anybody. It doesn’t always get all the way through that half, and the web address a plumber never types by hand is where I catch it out most often.

Then it stopped. It stopped exactly where a person would have had to pick the job up and carry it, which is also where I used to stop looking.

What I do differently now

I run the boring checks first these days, in order, on every single audit, including the ones I’m certain will be fine.

Because a website can appear professionally built right up until the moment the remaining work needs hands, and the platform tells you nothing whatsoever about the hands.

Yours is probably the same. Tidy code, boxes filled in, and a footer with no mention of the account where photographs of your work have been piling up for three years.

How long has it been since you read your own website the whole way down?

So open the footer this weekend and paste two links into it. Nothing dramatic happens afterwards, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

The next person who lands on your website wondering whether you’re still working gets her answer in one tap instead of closing the tab and trying the next name. You’ll never find out which job that was. I’d still take it.

Not sure which of your boxes are empty? Send me the address and I’ll go through the whole list in order, the boring ones included.