61.9% of Washington DC Sites Are Counting Visitors. Can You Open Yours?

I went the best part of a year without opening my own visitor numbers.

Most Washington DC owners I put that question to have gone longer.

That’s an embarrassing thing for me to admit, because I set them up for every client in their first week, I give the same little speech about them, and I put the login in a shared document and point at it twice.

Meanwhile my own site sat there writing everything down and I never looked, because looking felt like admin and there was always a client waiting.

When I finally opened it, a page I had been about to delete turned out to be the second most read thing I own. It’s still up. It still brings me work most months.

Washington DC is mostly set up for this. 61.9% of the sites I opened in the city are running something, so the odds are fair that a page of yours has been keeping notes on strangers since before your last redesign.

Whether anybody in your office can open it is a separate matter.

So tonight, five minutes, from the couch. You’ll need your phone and the name of whoever looks after your website.

1. Ask the only question that settles it

Text or email that person now, before you read any further. One line: can you send me the login for the website stats?

Don’t ask whether analytics is installed, because the yes you get back settles nothing at all. Ask who can open it.

A client of mine had a quote form that had been failing on iPhones since the spring, and analytics is the record that knew, because visits kept arriving on that page and stopping dead there like people lining up at a locked door.

He found out in July, from a customer who mentioned it in passing while paying for something else. Four months of people typing their name and their number into a box that did nothing with either.

Who in your business could open that record tomorrow morning? If the honest answer is the fellow who built the site in 2018 and stopped replying to emails in 2021, you have your result already and you haven’t left the couch.

Someone in your building has to own the thing, which is the whole argument behind what a website needs from you after it launches.

2. Walk your own site like a stranger

Turn the wifi off on your phone. Search your own business name, tap your own result, and go where a customer would go.

Homepage, then whatever page explains the thing you actually sell, then the page a person uses to get hold of you.

Send yourself a message while you’re in there. If it hasn’t landed in a real inbox within a minute, you’ve found something bigger than anything else in this post.

Count the taps while you’re in there. Getting from your own name in a search box to a phone number ought to take three, and if yours takes six, you’ve learned something the numbers were going to tell you anyway.

Did that take longer than it should have? Mine took four taps and I was annoyed by two of them.

3. Watch yourself arrive

Now have the person holding the login open the live view while you do it again.

One visitor, moving through the same pages you just moved through, ten seconds behind you. If they can see you, the whole thing works and you have a tool you weren’t using.

If they see nothing, either nothing is installed or it’s installed on a version of the site that got replaced years ago, which I run into more often than I’d like to.

And if nobody can find the login at all, your five minutes just did its job.

What I find when I look across a city

Across small business websites everywhere I audit, the figure is 58%, and DC came out above it, behind only Kelowna, Denver and Scottsdale. Denver came second overall of the twenty four cities, and I ran that result three times before I believed it. New York City and San Francisco both landed lower, which I did not see coming from either of them.

You don’t have to believe any of that from me. Set the city box on my report’s explorer to Washington DC, leave the box beside it alone, and it prints every check with the number of sites behind it, which is also the quickest way to find out how ordinary your own habits are. Then come back to your own site, because a city average has never once fixed anybody’s Tuesday.

Installed is not the same as read

WordPress runs 35.6% of the sites I opened up there, and on a good number of those the tracking arrived inside a plugin that got switched on during the build.

Installed by a stranger, in a hurry, some years ago, and never mentioned again.

So a high number here doesn’t mean a city full of owners reading their numbers on a Monday morning. It means a city full of offices where the thing got installed properly, which is a different achievement and a smaller one.

Telecom companies are the extreme version. They track better than nearly any trade I check, and not one owner tells me the numbers ever sold him a thing.

How would you know which of the two you are? You’d know because you could name the page most people arrive on. Can you?

Most owners I ask can’t, and when we go and look together it’s almost never the page they’d have bet on. It’s usually something they wrote in an afternoon and forgot, or a page about parking.

The two numbers worth your ten minutes

Which page do people arrive on, and which page do they leave from. Everything else in there is decoration.

The first tells you what strangers think you sell, which is often not what you think you sell at all. The second tells you where the conversation dies, and it’s normally one specific page doing most of the damage.

So open the page people leave from and read it out loud, all the way to the bottom, in the voice you’d use with a customer standing in front of you. Would you have stayed?

I’ve watched owners answer that honestly and then rewrite the page the same night, for nothing, with no designer involved anywhere.

When I take on a new client in the city, the first thing I ask for isn’t the logo files or the old design. It’s that login, because I’d rather rebuild the two pages that matter than all forty of them.

A rebuild moves less than owners hope anyway. I rebuilt a page here last winter and the star rating underneath it never budged.

If your builder has gone quiet and nobody can find anything at all, my audit form checks what your site shows from the outside and mails you the list. It can’t see your visitor numbers. Nothing from out here can.