Wineries Link the Feed. The Proof Is Three Screens Down.

How does a stranger find out, tonight, whether you’re pouring tomorrow?

Not from your homepage. I’ve opened a great many winery homepages this year, and the majority still repeat whatever they were saying in 2019, in a nicer font.

She finds out from your feed. If she can get to it.

77.3% of the winery sites I audited link out to a social profile, which is 7 of 47 among the trades I rank, better than wineries manage anywhere else and still not the top of the list.

Wine is a business people follow rather than buy from once, so the habit turned up without anyone selling it to you. The figure across everything else I audit is 66%, and I have spent years nagging other trades about it.

So owning the link stopped being an advantage a while back. Charleston puts those icons on more homepages than any city I count, and I still argue with owners there about where they belong.

What the busy ones do with it hasn’t.

You’re not the only one with a website either

One more number and then I’ll stop counting things at you for a bit.

89.8% of the wineries in my sample have a site I could open, 10 of 47 on the industry rankings.

You aren’t up against a competitor with no website. You’re up against eleven who have one, and most of them look perfectly nice.

Twenty years ago the website itself was the advantage, and a business could win a customer purely by owning one. That stopped being true so long ago that arguing about it feels rude, and yet almost every quote I see is still priced as though a stranger will be impressed that you exist online.

Which is why the four habits below decide it. Not one of them costs money, and not one of them would ever go in a portfolio.

1) The link sits where her thumb already is

Almost every site I open buries the icons in the footer, three screens down, in grey, at about the size of a shirt button. Pest control links out less than any trade I check, and even there the footer was never the hard part of the job.

She never gets there, because she’s sitting in a car on one bar of signal, deciding between your tasting room and the place another twenty minutes up the road.

82.0% of these pages pass Google’s phone checks, so the page will behave itself when she opens it. Behaving is not the same as helping.

Move the link up beside your opening hours, on the first screen she sees, because the hours are what she arrived for and your feed is the only thing on the entire website capable of proving them.

I did this to one of my own builds in a car park last summer and it took me four flicks to reach her feed. I made that site. I chose that footer.

Go and count the flicks on yours right now. How many did it take you?

2) One account, and it’s awake

Four icons where three go nowhere is worse than one icon that works.

I opened a site in the spring with a Twitter bird, a Pinterest board last touched in 2018, and a Facebook link that landed on a login screen.

All three of them told a stranger the same thing about that business, and none of them meant to.

An abandoned profile is evidence, and it’s evidence against you. A visitor who taps through and finds nothing since 2018 stops wondering whether you’re worth the drive and starts wondering whether you’re open at all.

I picked a heating company myself last winter because it had posted a photo the week before, and I never opened the other one’s site at all.

Which of the icons in your footer still leads somewhere alive? Be honest, and go and check rather than guessing.

Pick the account you actually post to. Delete the others off the page.

Nobody has ever chosen a winery because its footer had five icons in it. Plenty of people have closed the tab because the newest thing anywhere on the site was four years old.

3) The feed carries what the page can’t

Your homepage can’t tell her the patio is open, that the rosé landed on Thursday, or that the food truck is parked out front until six.

That isn’t the homepage’s fault, particularly. Pages get built once, carefully, and afterwards they get edited whenever someone happens to remember. Keeping the permanent half current is a small job nobody in the building is ever handed.

The busy ones stopped fighting it. The site holds the things that don’t move, where you are, what you make, how to book a table. The feed holds today.

I used to argue with owners about this, because I wanted the website to be the whole answer and I was being paid to think so. I lost every one of those arguments, and I was wrong to start them.

Once you’ve seen the split it’s obvious. Permanent information belongs on the website, perishable information belongs on the feed, and one obvious link joins the two so a stranger never has to work out which of them is current.

On the winery sites I build, that link goes above the fold before anybody writes a word of the About page.

The estates that have this sorted put the link and the hours on the same screen, where one proves the other. I keep a few winery examples over here.

4) What your link looks like once she sends it

Your best customer does your marketing for you, in a group chat, on a Wednesday night, and you never see it happen.

She pastes your address into a message to four friends who are trying to agree on a Saturday. What lands on their phones is either a photograph with a headline under it, or a bare web address that looks like something you shouldn’t tap.

Kelly, a florist I built a site for, used to screenshot her own homepage rather than paste the link into a message, and it took me several months to understand why she was doing it.

Her page had no Open Graph tags. Those are a second copy of your headline and your best photo, kept in the code for apps instead of for browsers, and nobody had ever filled hers in.

79.6% of these sites carry them, which is another quiet win your trade never asked for. The rest are sending out links that look like a warning.

So what does your address turn into when it lands in a group chat on a Wednesday night? Send your own homepage to yourself in a text message and you’ll know inside a second which of those two groups you belong to.

The reason all of this pays

You’ve already got the stars, and I check them before anything else on an audit, because they tell me straight away what kind of problem I’m looking at.

93.7% of these businesses hold at least one Google review, better than the 88% I find across every trade I check, so a stranger tends to arrive at your site half convinced already.

What she still doesn’t know is whether you’re open, what’s pouring, and whether the place looks anything like the photos.

Your feed answers all three of those questions in about four seconds, whereas your homepage has been attempting them since 2019 without success, because it has no idea what day it is.

The link exists to do that one job. Not decoration in a footer. A door out of the part of your marketing that never changes, into the part that changed this morning.

Four jobs, none of them a website

Move the link up. Kill the dead accounts. Post the thing that changed this week.

Then text yourself your own address and look hard at whatever turns up on the screen. Would that make you want to drive out there on a Saturday?

An afternoon, at most. Probably less.

Not sure which one is broken on yours? Send me the address and I’ll tell you how many taps a stranger needs to get from your homepage to your last post.

If it were my winery? I’d move that link above the fold tonight, then go and photograph whatever’s open tomorrow.