Her New Orleans Bakery Site Was Quick. Nobody Could Get In.

For most of last year I opened New Orleans websites expecting every one of them to be slow.

I had a whole theory ready for it. Old city, old buildings, businesses run by hand and run beautifully, so naturally the websites would be handmade too, carrying twenty photographs of a courtyard on their backs.

A bakery owner I’ll call Denise is the one who took that theory off me.

What she called about

Her nephew had told her the site was slow. She’d heard it enough times to believe it, and by the time she rang me she’d decided that slowness was the reason her wedding cake inquiries had gone quiet over the summer.

She wanted a rebuild. She’d put money aside for one, which is the part that still bothers me.

Have you ever had a customer turn up with the diagnosis already written? I love it and I dread it, because half the time they’re right, and the other half I have to spend an entire phone call taking something away from them that they were rather looking forward to.

What the test said

I ran the speed check before I quoted her anything. I’ve stopped quoting for work I haven’t looked at.

Speed reaches me as a score out of 100 with a strip of screenshots underneath it, the page assembling itself frame by frame on a phone I’ve told my software to slow down on purpose. Denise’s strip filled in early. By the fourth picture you could read the name of the bakery and the line about king cakes underneath it.

My theory didn’t survive the week I spent pooling every New Orleans site I’d opened, because phone speed came back at 58 out of 100, 10 of 24 when I lined the cities up, and the strongest showing this place makes on anything I check.

Average, if you want the honest word for it. That result sits level with what I get across every site I run the same test on, so New Orleans isn’t quick. It just isn’t slow, and I’d spent a year telling people otherwise.

Tampa owners get those same emails about their load times, and nobody there is waiting on a homepage either.

So I went looking for the real problem

Her page was fine and her trouble was real, which leaves a person nowhere at all. A boat yard owner put me through an identical week, and his site was never the slow part either.

So I did the only other thing I know how to do. I pretended to be a customer with a real question, and I watched how far I got before I gave up.

Outside her shop, on my phone, I went looking for a way to ask about a cake for an October wedding. I couldn’t use her number, because a stranger wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t ask for her by name, because a stranger wouldn’t know it.

I scrolled the entire page looking for the boxes you type a question into. There weren’t any.

Her only way in was a phone number sitting inside a photograph at the top. So a bride comparing three bakeries at eleven at night could either ring a bakery at eleven at night or give up and go to sleep.

Which one would you have done? She gave up. They all did, quietly, for two summers.

A gym lost a membership to the same silence, and she never got as far as the class schedule.

How many people have given up on your website this month without leaving you the faintest trace of it?

Only 24.6% of the homepages I audited in this city carry a form, and the country at large is barely better, which is why I’ve stopped reading a missing one as carelessness. It’s an unglamorous afternoon of work that never got assigned to anybody in particular.

The second thing missing

Then I asked whether anything on her site had been keeping a record.

Analytics is the name for that, and the services doing the job leave their names inside the page where my software can find them. I write down whichever ones turn up, and plenty of sites read like a shopping list.

Hers was empty, and it had been empty for as long as the site had existed.

So she had no way of knowing that her wedding cake page got opened most on Sunday nights. She had no way of knowing whether the quiet summer was even quiet at all.

She had a feeling. Feelings are what people spend rebuild money on.

Do you know which page on your own website got opened the most last month, or are you working from the same feeling Denise brought me?

54.0% of the sites I audited here run anything of the kind, one of the softest results this city has, and it explains why so many owners I meet can only describe an entire year as busy or slow.

What we did instead

No rebuild. I talked her out of the thing she’d saved for, which is a strange way to run a business, and I’ve never once regretted doing it.

Three afternoons of work:

• A form on the homepage, four boxes and a send button, delivered to the inbox she actually opens.
• A record turned on, so the two of us could argue about real Sundays instead of remembered ones.
• The wedding cake page pulled out from underneath two menus and put one tap from the front.

None of that is design. Nobody picked a color, and nobody photographed anything.

I’m not asking you to take the city numbers on trust either. Set the city control on the explorer in my report to New Orleans, leave the other control alone, and the card that comes back prints every check with the number of sites behind it: 5,091 businesses sampled, 3,031 sites opened, 2,550 of them put through the speed test. That’s the card I had in front of me during her call, and it’s the reason I never wrote the quote.

Six weeks later

Nineteen inquiries came through the form.

Four of them arrived after ten at night, which was the part that annoyed her, because she’d been losing those particular customers for years without ever knowing they existed.

Two turned into cakes. One turned into a wedding, then a christening, then a first birthday, which is how a bakery actually grows when you let it.

Her page did not get one single bit faster.

Where speed actually sits

Phone speed is one of the ten checks I weight, and in this city it’s holding the total up rather than dragging it down. Almost everything else is doing the opposite.

That matters if you own something here, because it changes what you ought to buy next. I build websites in New Orleans, and the speed test is close to the last thing I run now, mostly to rule it out before anybody starts blaming it. When it does turn out to be the trouble, the handful of things that really shift a load time starts with photographs and gets dull quickly after that.

The pages load. What’s missing is a way in, and a way to tell whether anyone tried.

So how much of the money you’ve spent on your website went on the part a customer has to touch before she can reach you?

Go and do this tonight

Pick up your phone and find your own business the way a stranger would. Search for it. Don’t type the address in, and don’t use the bookmark you’ve had since 2019.

Open whatever comes back, and try to ask a question. Not a phone call. An actual question, typed into a box, sent by a thumb at ten at night.

Nothing to type into? Then you’ve just found your own two quiet summers, and finding them cost you nothing.

If you’d rather not go hunting on your own, hand me the address and I’ll run my checks on it myself. No charge, and no phone call unless you want one.

But run the search first. Would you rather hear this from me, or watch it happen on your own phone?