Marine Websites Are Quick to Load and Hard to Read
Marine business pages land on a phone quicker than almost anything else this trade does, and only 72.2% of them pass Google’s mobile check, 44 of 47. Every excuse I’ve heard for that, ranked, with a verdict on each one.
I used to think a quick website meant someone had thought about phones.
Wrong, and I ran a business on that assumption for about six years.
It wasn’t a daft rule of thumb either. If a boat yard’s page showed up fast on my phone, whoever built the thing had probably been holding a phone while they built it, and everything else I care about tended to come along for the ride.
Boat yards took the rule away from me in a single afternoon of opening one marine website after another.
Marine sites average 58 out of 100 on the phone speed test I run, which comes out 24 of 47. Nothing else this trade does lands that high.
Then I ran the other phone check, watched 72.2% of them scrape a pass, 44 of 47, and spent ten minutes certain I had mixed up the two checks.
Same sites. Same phones. Opposite verdicts.
A yard owner once offered to pay me to make his pages quicker still, and I sent him home instead of taking the job.
Two questions, and they have nothing to do with each other
Speed answers one of them. After she taps your name in the results, how long does she stand there holding a lit screen with nothing on it yet?
The second check she never learns the name of, because she meets it as the moment your whole website turns up at once, every column of it, at about the size of the writing on the back of a battery.
So she pinches. Then she drags the page sideways, hunting for the phone number that disappeared somewhere off the edge.
A website can do the first job beautifully and fail the second one flat, and I have a folder of them going back years.
Which brings me to the reasons owners give me for it. I’ve put them in the order I hear them.
1) “It’s fast, we had that checked”
The one I hear most often, and it doesn’t hold up at all.
Someone ran a speed test, the number came back respectable, and the entire subject got filed under handled. I’ve watched clients do that in front of me, so I know the shape of it well enough to feel bad about it.
Fast and fits are two separate bills of work. One is about weight and the other is about shape.
You checked the easier of the two, and it happens to be the one your hosting company had half finished for you before you woke up. When did anyone last tell you those were two different jobs?
2) “My customers are on the water, not sitting on a couch”
The observation is right. The conclusion is upside down.
A guy standing on a finger dock with a fouled prop and one bar of signal is about the most mobile customer any trade in my sample has going. He isn’t at a desk, and he never will be.
So where do you imagine he looks you up? On the thing in his hand, in the sun, one-handed, with his other arm hooked over a rail.
This excuse argues against itself, and it’s the only one on the list that gets worse the longer you sit with it.
3) “The template takes care of that”
Half true, and I’ll go further than half. Most of the passing marks I count belong to the template rather than to the person paying for it.
Then things get added to your homepage over the seasons, and you probably weren’t the one adding them. A wide gallery of haul-out photos, an embedded map of the marina, the rate card pasted in as a table, a slip chart exported out of some other program.
Each of those arrives at its own fixed width, and a single one is enough to shove the whole page sideways on a phone.
So this excuse partly holds. The template behaved on the day it landed, and the damage turned up later, with good intentions and an embed code.
Corpus Christi clears this check better than any city I audit, and the credit belongs to the themes rather than the owners.
Every marine site I build gets opened at phone width before it goes live, then again every time something new gets bolted onto it. The second half of that sentence is the half everybody skips. Who checks yours after they upload something new?
4) “Nobody’s said a word about it”
Doesn’t hold, and of the five it costs the most.
Nobody says a word because the people who would have said it are already gone, and the complaint you are waiting for is one that never gets filed. Have you ever emailed a company to tell them their website was awkward on your phone?
Me neither. She’s tapped the next yard on the list, and the only trace of her is a line in a log nobody opens.
A marina owner asked me straight out whether any of this costs him work, and he deserved a longer answer than the one I gave him.
5) “We’ll deal with it in the winter”
Holds up, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise so I can sell you something in July.
Your busy season is a terrible time to have anyone poking around inside your website, and I’d rather you were pulling boats than reading email from me. Wait for the snow.
Put a real date on it, though. Winter has a habit of sliding a year to the right when nobody writes it down anywhere.
Nobody has to redraw your website
In most of the failures I open, three or four items are guilty and the rest of the page behaves itself perfectly well.
A table nobody has touched since 2019. A map dropped in at a fixed size. One photograph uploaded at poster dimensions and never resized since.
Pull those out, or let them shrink with the screen, and the page usually falls into line on its own. That’s an afternoon of someone’s time, and none of it involves choosing colors again.
So which excuse is doing the damage?
None of them on their own. The damage comes from the two checks feeling like a single job, so clearing the easy one feels to you like clearing both of them.
Marine businesses come out at 70 out of 100 across the ten checks I run, 37 of 47, which is a middling sort of place to sit and tells you nothing about which check to touch first.
The distance between this trade and the 78% that clear the mobile check across everything I audit isn’t a technical distance at all. It’s a stranger deciding, in about a second, whether your business is worth the effort of two fingers.
The one thing
Open your own website on your own phone, off wifi, and try to book a haul-out without pinching once.
If you can’t manage it, get the page to fit the screen. That’s the job, and it’s the only item on this page I would spend money on today.
Ignore the rest of what I wrote up there, including the excuses I let off the hook. If you’d rather I looked instead of you, send me the address and I’ll tell you which of the two checks you’re failing.
