Raleigh Builds Solid Websites. Then You Open One on a Phone.

There’s one thing I won’t do at the end of a Raleigh build, and it costs me the best moment of the whole job.

I won’t show you your new website on my monitor.

No wide screen, no dimmed room, no cursor gliding down the page while I talk over the top of it. I hand you your own phone instead, and I ask you to go find the thing a customer in a hurry would want.

Big screens flatter everything, and nobody I have ever met carries one around in their pocket.

An owner here argued with me about that for a solid ten minutes last spring. I’ve put the conversation back together as close as my memory allows.

“The site looks great on my computer.”

It did look terrific, and that was exactly the problem.

“Your customers aren’t sitting at your computer.”

“Mine are. Half of them are my age.”

So we stood out in his parking lot and he pulled the site up on his own phone.

Ninety seconds of pinching and zooming and dragging the page sideways, hunting for a button that kept sliding off the edge of the screen.

“Is this thing broken?”

Nope. Works great. On a laptop.

What I showed him next

I pulled 4,649 Raleigh businesses across 46 markets into my small business web audit.

The city came out at 73 out of 100, which is the top third of everywhere I looked and nothing whatsoever to apologize for.

Having a website at all is not this city’s problem. 85.3% of the businesses I sampled here have one, where nationally I found 83%.

Then I sorted the cities by what happens on a phone.

“Go on, then.”

77.3% of Raleigh sites pass my mobile checks, which puts this city 21st down my own list of twenty-four.

It also sits under my national average of 78%, and it is the softest number Raleigh posts anywhere in my audit.

“What’s a mobile check?”

Google loads the page on a phone-sized screen and puts three questions to it. Can she read the text without pinching? Can her thumb land on one button without catching the one next to it? Does the page stay inside the screen while she scrolls, or slide out sideways under her finger?

“So that’s a rebuild.”

An afternoon, for whoever built the site, and less than that if they still have the project open on their laptop. Nobody has to be hired and nothing has to be bought, which is the part of it that stings.

Google is holding a phone too

“Does any of this matter if I rank fine now?”

Google says it straight out. It uses the mobile version of your site when it decides what to show people in search results.

Your desktop site has quietly turned into a courtesy copy. The phone version is the one being graded, and it happens to be the same version a woman is squinting at in her truck at a red light while she decides whether to call you or the next name down the list.

She isn’t going to email you about the experience, she’s going to call the other guy instead, and you will never know she was there.

Passing isn’t the same as pleasant

A website can clear every mobile check I throw at it and still be a chore to use, because “fits on the screen” and “pleasant to use” are two different standards.

Pool companies clear those checks better than almost any trade I audit, and the woman holding the phone still runs out of things she can do about halfway down the page.

I ran 2,705 phone speed tests on Raleigh sites, and the average came back at 57 out of 100, a hair under my national average of 58.

Google doesn’t call a speed score good until it reaches 90, and anything under 50 drops into the bucket they label poor.

“So I’m average.”

Average means the page fits the screen and then makes a paying customer sit and wait while it works out what to show her.

When did you last open your own homepage on your own phone? Not the bookmark on the office desktop, where everything is already cached and looks lovely, but the phone in your pocket, off wifi, standing outside in the sun.

Nobody chose this

I have never once met an owner in this city who did any of it on purpose, not a single one.

Websites get built on a big monitor by a person sitting still, in good light, on the fastest internet connection in the building.

Then they get opened one-handed in a gravel parking lot with a kid yelling in the back seat, which makes two completely different products, and only one of them ever gets tested.

The menu folds up into three little lines and nobody taps them to check the thing still opens. The phone number turns out to be a picture of digits rather than a link. The main photo is four thousand pixels wide because it came off a camera that way and nobody shrank it.

Every one of those is a twenty minute job that never got handed to anyone. Raleigh rebuilds land on my desk most weeks and it is the same three, over and over, which is why I stopped being surprised by any of it.

Whose job is it at your place? If you can’t name the person, you have your answer.

Five things, one thumb, and me saying nothing

He wanted a list. I gave him five and then shut up, which is most of the trick.

“Fine. What am I doing?”

Open your homepage and count out loud while it loads, because anything past four seconds is money walking.

Tap your own phone number. Does it dial, or is it a picture of some digits?

Fill in your own contact form with one thumb, all the way through to the send button.

Read the smallest text on the page without zooming in, then scroll to the bottom and back up again, watching whether the page ever slides sideways underneath you.

“I flunked two of those.”

Most owners do, and that is exactly the group my audit flags, which is not a small group at all.

“Your test doesn’t know we fixed that menu last Tuesday.”

It doesn’t know anything about that, because my audit is one homepage, one visit, from the outside, with no login and no second look. It can’t tell me whether the rest of your site behaves better than the front page, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Winston-Salem clears these checks better than any city I sampled, and the excuses over there start the moment the test comes back green. A pass is a floor, not a finish line.

Where this city is already ahead

Raleigh’s mobile number sits just under my national average, not miles under it.

The plumbing underneath your sites is sound. 94.8% of the Raleigh sites I checked load over a secure connection, against 94% nationally, so this city is already doing the invisible work.

The visible work is the bit happening in the parking lot. Sites here get built to be found rather than to be called, which is where the lead usually goes missing around here.

What I’d fix first

Give me one afternoon and your website and I’d start with the thumb.

Make the phone number tappable, put it where a thumb naturally rests, and stop burying it behind a menu that takes two taps and a guess to open.

Then shrink the photos, because a hero image straight off a camera can weigh more than everything else on the page put together, and shrinking it is the cheapest speed fix I know of.

Then hand your site to three people who don’t work for you, watch their faces while they poke at it, and say absolutely nothing at all while they do it, with no hints, no explaining and no reaching over to help.

You’ll learn more in those six awkward minutes than in a year of staring at your own reports.

What you’re watching for, the handful of things that decide whether a page is a pleasure or a chore, is a shorter list than anyone selling a rebuild wants you to believe.

Your turn on the phone

I won’t do the big reveal on my monitor, and I’m not going to do it for you here either.

So don’t go and open your website on the machine where it looks its best. Stand up, walk outside, get yourself off wifi, and use the hand you don’t write with.

Ninety seconds is all the owner in that parking lot needed, and he wasn’t even trying to break it.

Whatever turns up in yours is what your last customer found, and she never said a word about it either.

My free website audit is the same walk, done by me, one site at a time.