She Never Got to the Gym’s Class Schedule

It’s twenty to ten on a Tuesday night in January, and a woman four blocks from my client’s gym has finally decided she’s joining.

She isn’t shopping around either. She’s walked past that building twice a week since last spring, and she settled the argument with herself somewhere between the parking lot and her own front door.

She wants one fact. What time does the early class start?

So she’s lying on the couch with the lights already off, one bar of signal, thumb resting on his website.

She never got to the schedule.

The call I got in February

A gym owner I’ll call Wes rang me a few weeks after that, because his front door had been busy the entire month while his website sat there behaving like an abandoned building.

January is the whole year in his business. You know that better than I do, and you know exactly what it feels like to watch one of them go past.

How much of your year turns on four weeks you can’t get back?

He wanted to know whether his site was broken. It wasn’t broken, it was slow, which is considerably worse, because a broken website gets repaired on the Monday and a slow one gets tolerated for six years.

What my screen said

I run the same checks in the same order on every audit, and the phone questions come first, because that’s the machine his customer was actually holding.

His mobile check came back as a single word. Pass.

One word is the entire result, which is why nobody had ever bothered looking past it. The check asks whether the page was built for a small screen at all, his had been, and the answer came back good, so I moved along.

Nothing in that answer says a word about her night.

Do you know what your own front page does on a stranger’s phone at ten at night, on the far side of town, on a network that isn’t yours?

81.8% of the gym sites I audited pass that same check, 10 of 47, against 78% of every site I ran it on.

So the layout was never his problem.

The clock was.

The red ring

A speed report is a different screen entirely. One number sits at the top inside a colored ring, and underneath it runs a list of every last thing the page went off and fetched before it could finish drawing itself.

His ring was red. Google files anything from 0 to 49 as poor, and that was the neighborhood he was living in.

Gyms average 53 out of 100 for mobile speed, 42 of 47, where the average site I test lands on 58.

Nothing else this trade does finishes anywhere near that low, which is the part that keeps surprising me, because the rest of what they do is respectable.

What was on his homepage

A video of the floor at six in the morning, playing on a loop behind the logo.

The class schedule, delivered live from his booking software.

A wall of photographs from last year’s charity workout, every one of them still the enormous size the camera originally saved it at.

A chat bubble. A countdown clock to the next six week challenge.

Every item on that list arrived as someone’s perfectly reasonable idea, and most of them arrived from a person he was paying money to at the time.

Which one would you have argued with?

The schedule was the expensive one, and it was also the piece he was proudest of, which is how these conversations usually go.

On the speed report it wasn’t a single thing at all. It was a long run of files belonging to his booking company, and her telephone had to go and ask for all of them, then wait politely for every answer, before it could draw one pixel of anything underneath.

Borrowed files are the reason nothing I changed made a plumber’s website faster one summer. You can’t compress a stranger’s software.

She was looking at his logo the entire time.

He thought she was looking at his hours.

How many seconds do you figure she gave him? Whatever number you just picked, halve it, because she had two other gyms open in other tabs and no reason on earth to be loyal to any of you yet.

It wasn’t just him

I put 1,830 gym sites through a full speed test on a simulated phone, so Wes wasn’t unlucky. Pick Gyms in the explorer on that page, leave the city dropdown on all cities, and you’ll get every check with the number of sites behind it, which is the only way I know of letting a number like that argue back at me.

Why does a trade full of well run buildings put up some of the slowest pages I open all year?

I think it’s because you sell an experience, and an experience photographs and films beautifully. Nobody has ever been talked into a gym membership by a paragraph.

So the good material goes onto the homepage, all of it, and the homepage gets heavier every single year the business does well. Success is what makes these pages slow, which feels desperately unfair, and it’s still true.

What we took off

The schedule moved onto a page of its own, with a button sitting where the video used to be.

The video became a photograph. The charity wall got saved down to the dimensions the page actually displays, which is the same afternoon med spas need, where I’d shrink the gallery long before I touched the website.

No rebuild. Nothing redesigned. One afternoon.

Everything on the short list of what actually moves a load time is about that dull, and none of it involves a designer.

What happened afterward

In the middle of March he sent me a picture of the early class with two people standing at the back of the room.

I can’t prove the website did that and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. January was long gone by then, and March is an easier month than January in every gym I’ve ever worked with.

He told me something else though, and I believe that part completely. People started arriving already knowing which class they wanted.

They’d read it before they came in. Which is all a homepage has ever been for.

The rest of the job is fine

That’s the part that bothers me about this whole business.

96.3% of gym sites serve over HTTPS, 8 of 47 when I counted, so the padlock in the address bar is handled.

The headlines get written. The profiles get linked. The reviews are there, because asking for one is a habit this trade built at the front desk long before anybody had a website.

The visible half of the job is being done properly in this trade, and it’s being done better than in most of the trades I audit.

Your own homepage has some version of Wes’s list on it, doesn’t it? A video you paid for, a schedule you’re proud of, and a year of photographs nobody has opened since the week they went up.

One number drags the entire thing down, and it happens to be the one you can’t see from inside your own building, because you built the site on your own wifi standing about ten feet from the router.

So when exactly were you going to find out?

Fix one thing

Get the class schedule off your homepage.

Give it a page of its own, and put a button on the front pointing straight at it. Your booking company will tell you their embed is fine. Your booking company has never once watched a stranger waiting on it in a dark bedroom on two bars of signal.

Gym websites are most of what I build now, so I’d honestly rather you didn’t need me for something this small. If you’d like to know what your own homepage does before you touch anything, send me the address and I’ll time it for nothing.

Then forget everything else in this post. Forget the video, the photo wall, the chat bubble, the score, the rank, the lot of it.

I’ve never once watched an owner finish a list of nine repairs. One of them gets done, if you’re lucky. Make it the schedule.