The Door I Keep Finding Unlocked on Roofing Sites
83.2% of roofing sites move a plain address across to the locked one, which is 45 of 47 trades. I ran my audit in its usual order and stopped at the second check.
When did you last type your own web address the way a customer types it, off the side of your own roofing truck, with no https on the front of it?
You haven’t. Your browser finishes it for you after two letters, and it has behaved beautifully every morning for years.
I type it the other way on purpose, because that’s the version a stranger gets, and on roofing sites it’s where I stopped and went back to check my own work.
The order I go in
The order isn’t clever. I just run it the same way every time so the dull checks don’t get skipped on a Friday afternoon when I want my dinner.
Address first. Then the phone. Then what a stranger can do once she’s on the page. Reviews and listings come last, which puts me out of step with nearly everyone else who does this for a living.
Roofing handed me one bad surprise, one good one, and one I’m still annoyed about.
First stop: the two doors
Your address exists in two versions whether anyone has ever mentioned it to you or not. There’s the plain one and the locked one, and both of them open into the same shop.
One of those doors has a warning taped to the glass. Your browser writes it, not you, and it tells your customer that the place she’s about to walk into might not be safe.
A redirect is the member of staff who meets her at that door and walks her round to the good one before she’s finished reading. It’s a setting, it lives wherever your site is hosted, and nobody has ever sent me a bill for switching it on.
94.9% of the roofing sites I audited hand over a locked page when I ask for one, so the lock has been bought and fitted almost everywhere in this trade.
The walking round is the part that’s missing. 83.2% of them catch a plain visitor and move her across to the locked copy, which is 45 of 47 trades.
Across every small business site I’ve audited, 88% do it, and I’ve never found a trade where that gap came from anything other than nobody having looked.
Who types a plain address anyway
Someone reading it off a yard sign in a front garden. Off a truck door at a red light. Off an invoice from 2019 that got filed in a drawer with the warranty paperwork and the receipt for the gutters.
Your trade prints its address on more physical objects than almost any other one I audit, from signs and magnets to hats and the side of a dumpster parked in a driveway for a week.
Every one of those is a person typing by hand. Hands don’t type https.
How many of your customers do you reckon have your address on paper somewhere, in a drawer or a glovebox or a folder with the insurance in it?
I had a client find this out the expensive way, and only because his neighbor was blunt with him. She’d typed the address off the sign on his own front lawn, got the warning, assumed he’d been hacked, and told him so at a barbecue.
He’d had the certificate for four years. What he didn’t have was the one setting that sends the plain address to the locked copy.
The warning she got isn’t dramatic, either, and I think that’s exactly why it works on people. When I open the plain version of a site like his, the top of my screen reads Not Secure in the spot where every competitor she opened that same evening was showing a small closed lock instead.
She doesn’t know what any of that means, and she doesn’t need to, because what she took away from it is that two of those roofers looked normal and the third one looked like a problem she didn’t need on a Tuesday evening.
How many of the polite ones do you think mentioned it to him? None of them did, because people don’t tell you they left.
Second stop: the phone
Two different checks live here and owners mix them up every time. Whether the page fits a phone at all, and how long the thing takes to turn up once she’s tapped it.
81.8% of these sites behave themselves at phone width, 9 of 47. That was the good surprise, and I’d have bet money against it before I started. Would you have guessed it about your own trade? I wouldn’t have.
Speed came out better than I expected too. The trade averages 61 out of 100 on my phone test, 8 of 47, which is quick going for an industry whose pages are stuffed with photographs of houses. Marine businesses have the same pair pointing the other way, quick pages that don’t fit the screen, and I ranked every excuse I’ve been given for it.
Google doesn’t call a speed score good until it reaches 90, so nobody’s getting a parade. But slow pages are not this trade’s problem, and I’ve been paid twice this year to fix one that was never there.
Nobody quotes for the phone side of it either. I read three quotes written for a Houston owner last year and not one of them mentioned what happens on a phone.
Third stop: what she can do when she arrives
I check what the page offers a stranger, and then I check what it points her at.
Roofing does better on the first half than any other check I run on it, which is why I won’t move a roofer’s contact form off the homepage when someone asks me to tidy it away.
58.1% of roofing sites link a social profile, 42 of 47, and that’s the one I’m still annoyed about.
Your trade lives in local groups on Facebook. Someone posts a photo of a brown ring on a ceiling at nine at night, and four neighbors tag a roofer in the replies before anybody has typed a search into anything.
She reads your website and finds no way back to any of that. She isn’t going to go hunting for it, and she isn’t short of other roofers to ask about.
How many of this year’s jobs started with a neighbor naming you in a comment? You can’t know, and your website is doing nothing to help you find out.
The check that takes a minute
Type your address four ways: with the www on the front and without, with the s and without.
All four should land on the same locked page with no warning showing anywhere. You can do the whole thing standing in the yard with a coffee, and it costs you nothing but the minute.
If one of them drops you somewhere ugly, the fix isn’t a rebuild and it isn’t a purchase. It’s a person with your hosting login and about two minutes of their afternoon.
Every roofing site I build has that switched on before the client ever sees the thing, and no client has ever once thanked me for it. I’ve made my peace with that.
Send me the printed one
If you’d rather not do the typing yourself, send me your address and I’ll try all four versions and tell you which of them hands your customer a warning.
Send the printed one, though. The one off the sign, off the truck, off the invoice, the version your customer is holding rather than the version you have bookmarked.
That’s the address I want. It’s the only one she’s got.
