Mobile-Friendly Was Never Calgary’s Finish Line

Mobile-friendly used to be my entire sales pitch.

If a site folded itself onto a phone without anyone pinching or dragging, I called that a win, wrote it into the proposal and went looking for the next build. I believed it. I said it on sales calls in Calgary with a straight face.

I checked it by dragging a browser window narrow on a big monitor, too. Vet clinics got that faked phone test from me for three years.

Then I started grading small business websites across 24 cities, and one number took the confidence right off me.

I ran the phone speed numbers, walked away, came back and ran them again, because Calgary averages 56 out of 100 there where the country manages 58, 20 of 24.

Same city, same sample, same phone in the same hand. 78.0% of the sites I opened here pass Google’s mobile checks, which lands right on the national 78%.

Two questions about phones. Opposite answers.

So which of the two is your customer running, out in a parking lot, deciding whether you’re worth the trouble?

The one that gets answered once

A mobile check asks whether the page redraws itself for a small screen instead of shrinking the desktop version down to postage stamp size. Pass or fail. It’s about shape, and it says nothing at all about time.

Someone settled that for you years ago. Whoever picked your theme answered it on a Tuesday afternoon, and it has stayed answered since without one person going back to look.

I’ve been asked to prove a site was mobile-friendly in maybe forty sales meetings. I’ve been asked what it weighed in about four.

Passing is a floor, not a prize. Your site is usable on a phone, which is worth something. Whether anybody stayed on it long enough to discover that is a completely separate question, and the speed numbers answer it differently.

The one that gets answered every time

Speed gets scored out of 100 by Google’s own performance test, run the way a phone would run it, and the question underneath is ruder. How long is she looking at nothing?

Not “does it fit”. How long.

Waiting is part of how a page feels to use, and it’s the part nobody designs.

When did you last watch your own homepage come up on a phone that wasn’t yours?

Nothing in the fifties earns the word good on Google’s scale, and that’s where this city sits, and the country with it.

The answer also keeps changing. It changed the week someone uploaded a photo straight off a camera, and it’ll change again the next time a plugin gets switched on.

Every single visit re-runs the test. A customer opening your homepage downtown at nine in the morning gets one answer, the same customer opening it on a train out past the ring road gets another, and neither of them will ever tell you which one they got.

Nobody sits down and decides to be slow

Your layout was one decision. Your load time is two hundred of them, made by different people, across years, not one of them standing outside on cell data at the time.

I open these sites for a living and it’s the same short list nearly every time.

A logo saved at print size. A homepage slider nobody has clicked since it went up. Three fonts pulled in from three different places.

A video header that plays by itself, added by someone on office wifi who thought it looked great, and who was right, on office wifi.

Every one of those took under ten minutes. Nobody has ever been paid to go and take one back off.

Each addition was reasonable on the day it happened, requested by a reasonable owner and installed by a reasonable contractor who had no idea what the other four were already doing to the page.

That’s the part I had wrong. I treated a website like something you finish, and it’s something that accumulates.

What this city is quietly good at

Look at where Calgary does well and a pattern shows up fast. Someone flipped a switch once, years ago, and the switch stayed flipped.

The lock in the address bar? Your host handled that one, probably before you were given a password.

The line in your code that names the business for search results? Your theme wrote it the day it went in, and I doubt anyone has read it since.

To build the picture I pulled 6,507 businesses into the sample here, opened 5,017 of their websites and put 3,443 of them through a full speed run.

Calgary lands on 72 out of 100 overall, a decent middling grade, and most of what built it arrived that way. Switched on by a stranger. Never touched again.

None of that is nothing, and I’m not sneering at it. It’s just that none of it was ever yours, and not one of those checks needed a single owner in this city to make a decision about anything.

A city can clear the layout question at the national rate and still sit at 56 out of 100 the moment a clock starts, which is what I found about this place and phones, in one sentence.

Speed is the only item on my list nobody hands you. It’s also the only one your customer performs herself, in public, thumb resting on the back button.

If it were mine, I’d start by taking things away

Owners always want to know what to add. I get asked that in every first meeting, and it’s the wrong end of the problem.

Ask instead what sits on the page that nobody uses.

The slider. The second tracking script from an agency you fired. The chat widget nobody has answered since spring.

What went onto your site last year that you have never once gone back and looked at? I ask every client that in the first meeting, and I get the same guilty face every time.

Slow sites almost never need a rebuild. They need a clear-out, and a clear-out is an afternoon of my time or yours.

I have sold the rebuild anyway. A salon owner paid me for one when the thing I was worried about was already fine on her site.

Who would you even ask to do that? For most of the owners I meet the honest answer is nobody, which is how the weight got there.

Deletion is the unglamorous half of website work, which is exactly why nobody has ever sold you a redesign by promising it.

Clear one out and you’ll have done the thing nobody has done for your site since launch day, which is take weight off it instead of putting more on.

If you’d rather hand the clear-out to someone in town, that’s most of my week, and it’s a cheaper conversation than the redesign you were bracing for.

Two or three of you can close this now

A city average stirs every kind of business in town into one number, so it can’t tell you a single thing about your site in particular. Some of you already know which side of it you’re on.

Two businesses here can own equally tidy websites and only one of them ever gets the phone call.

Not for you if your website is one page, a phone number and a photograph. You’re faster than most of this city already, and you got there by refusing to add things.

Not for you if there’s a person you pay every month to look after the site, and that person could tell you your load time tonight without going to check first.

And not for you if the phone rings all day off a name your family spent thirty years building, where the website is a courtesy and everybody knows it.

If you can’t picture that person, then you’re the one I wrote it for, and I’d rather you heard it from me than kept guessing. Your customer is already holding the stopwatch. She has never once told anybody what her number was, and she isn’t going to start with you.