Salons Finish Last of 47 on Having a Website at All

“Everybody who needs me already knows where I am.”

She’s rented the same salon chair beside a dry cleaner for nineteen years, and she said that to me on a Tuesday afternoon in a tone that dared me to argue with her about it.

I didn’t argue with her. She’s right about all of it, and I told her so before she’d finished the sentence.

Her appointment book is full most weeks, her clients bring their daughters in now, and two of them drive past three other salons to sit in that chair. No website on earth arranged any of that for her.

So why was I still sitting there on the telephone, twenty minutes into an unpaid conversation, refusing to let the subject go?

The one thing her trade comes last on

Salons come last of all 47 trades on whether a business has a website at all. 62.6% of the ones I sampled have one, where 83% of small businesses do.

She wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear it, which told me plenty on its own. Her trade isn’t alone down there either, because dentists skip the website more than almost any trade I check.

“Good. So it doesn’t matter.”

Three of the busiest salons she knows haven’t got a page either, and one of them has a two week wait for a Saturday. That’s a stronger argument than most people hand me, and I’ve been handed some beauties. Hers sits at the top of the excuses owners give me for skipping a website.

Jewelers talked me round on a version of it, because the shops doing fine without a page share four habits that cost nothing.

I should tell you what I counted as having a website, because it’s generous to a fault. A listing that points at a Facebook page counts, and so does a listing pointing at a domain that didn’t load when I tried it.

So the real gap is wider than the number makes it look. She listened to that, then asked what exactly I wanted her to do about it, which was a perfectly reasonable question.

“Tell me about your last new client”

Not the category, and not “word of mouth”. The actual woman, with a name and an appointment on a particular Tuesday.

She thought about it for a second and told me the whole story. Someone had moved onto the next street in March and asked at the coffee place, and the coffee place gave out her name.

And then what happened, exactly?

She typed the name into her phone, found the listing with the stars on it, and called the salon, and she got voicemail, because a salon telephone reliably rings at the exact moment the owner has both hands buried in someone else’s color.

Then she called back two days later and booked. Two entire days, on a booking that everybody involved would describe as word of mouth.

Those two days are not dead time

I’ve been watching that gap from the other side for about a decade, and it’s the busiest part of the entire story.

She’s still looking. The listing under yours has a booking button on it, and the one under that has a price list she can read at eleven at night without asking a stranger about money.

Your new client came back to you anyway. How many didn’t come back? You’ll never find out, and that’s the part of this business I’ve never quite been able to let go of.

Her trade isn’t invisible. It’s unanswerable.

92.5% of these businesses hold at least one Google review, and the average rating across the ones I checked sits at 4.7 stars.

The finding part is handled, then, and it got handled without her ever paying me a cent for it. A stranger already gets the name, the stars, a map pin and a telephone number.

What that stranger can’t do is anything else.

She can’t find out whether you take walk-ins on a Thursday afternoon. She can’t see what a full head of foils costs before she has to call up and ask about money in front of whoever’s in the room with her.

And she can’t do any of it at nine at night, which is when people make decisions about their hair.

Every one of those turns into another call you have to take, or another client who never makes it as far as your chair. Which of the two do you suppose happens more often?

What I was really asking her

Not whether she wanted a website, which is a question I already knew the answer to. Whether she had any idea what her telephone was costing her every single week.

So I asked how many voicemails she’d cleared that morning before opening. Eleven.

How many of the eleven turned into appointments? She had no idea, and neither does anyone else I’ve ever put that question to.

A telephone keeps no record whatsoever of the woman who listened to the recording and hung up.

“And what would even be on it?”

Fair question, and she asked it in the voice of a woman who has been sold a five page website before.

Prices, opening hours, a way to ask for a Saturday appointment, and photographs of actual haircuts taken this calendar year. That’s the entire list.

A contact form is an afternoon of work and it isn’t a design job at all. Whoever hosts your website keeps one in a menu, you pick which questions it asks, you email yourself a test, and then it’s finished for years at a time.

14.3% of these homepages have one, against 28% of small business homepages.

So even the salons who did go and build a website tend to leave a visitor with nothing whatsoever to press.

Where the conversation actually landed

About forty minutes in, she stopped defending the no-website position and asked me something else entirely.

“If I did one, who keeps it right?”

Now we were finally talking about the real objection, the one underneath the confident one.

A friend of hers paid for a website back in 2019, got handed a login she never once used, and let it sit there until the prices on it were wrong. Clients turned up expecting the old rate and she ate the difference all summer.

That isn’t a fear of technology. It’s a fear of owning one more thing that can go wrong while you’re busy, and it’s the correct fear to have.

My answer to her was disappointingly boring. Someone has to own the page the way someone has to order color and clean the sinks, and if nobody’s going to own it, then honestly, don’t build it.

She’s thinking about it. I’m fine either way, and I made sure she knew that before we hung up.

If you’re her

You’re not behind because you haven’t got a website. You’re behind because the only door into your business is a telephone that rings while your hands are wet.

I sampled 4,065 salons for this and audited 1,966 of their websites, which means I’ve spent more evenings looking at salon homepages than any sensible man should ever admit to in public.

Almost none of the work I do on a salon website is design. It’s getting the prices, the opening hours and a way to ask for Saturday somewhere a stranger can reach them without having to talk to you first.

I learned that by selling an owner a rebuild she didn’t need, and her site had already passed the check I sold her on.

Have you ever opened your own listing the way she would? On a phone, standing up, at nine at night, with a two year old shouting in the next room?

Send me whatever you’ve got and I’ll open it on my own phone and tell you what a stranger can actually accomplish with it in forty seconds.

And if you haven’t got a page at all, send me the Google listing instead. I’ll tell you what it already answers on your behalf, and what it’s quietly leaving on the table every single week.