Nobody Buys a Case of Wine Because of WordPress

I won’t move a working winery website onto a different platform. Not for money, not as a favor, not because a man with a nicer logo told you it was overdue.

I did it twice, early on, for people who asked me kindly. Both times I spent a client’s whole budget rebuilding something that already worked, and neither of them got one extra customer out of it.

One of them lost her opening hours in the move. She found out in August.

So when a quote lands in your inbox and the first line item is a rebuild, I get grouchy. You should probably get suspicious.

Rebuilt into what, though? And judged against what, afterwards?

The pushback, and it’s a fair one

“Everybody serious is on WordPress.”

I hear some version of that most weeks, usually secondhand, usually from a nephew who fixed a website once and enjoyed it.

Salon owners get the same speech. Nobody has ever booked a haircut because of the software either.

And the person telling you isn’t lying. WordPress is real software with two decades behind it, it does things the drag-and-drop builders still can’t do, and I’ve built plenty on it and will build more.

I’ve also watched the same argument run in reverse, on owners who were talked onto WordPress by someone enthusiastic and then discovered that a platform capable of doing absolutely anything requires a person who knows how to do absolutely anything.

The argument only falls over when I sit down and count the winery sites one by one.

What your trade actually runs on

WordPress runs 25.1% of the winery sites I audited, against 36.4% of small business sites in general, so if the software were the thing dividing a busy cellar door from a quiet one, your whole trade would be in real trouble by now.

It isn’t. It’s doing fine.

Squarespace takes 17.7% of these sites and Shopify 14.8%, which makes sense for a business selling cases in one direction and booking tastings in the other.

One caution on those shares before anyone does sums with them. They don’t add up the way you’d expect, because a site can match two of them at once and plenty of sites match nothing my fingerprinting knows about. The leftovers are not a platform.

What decides it instead

The same short list decides it on every platform I’ve ever opened, which is why the trade comes to rest at 25 of 47 among the trades I audit rather than at either end of it.

Right in the middle. Nice pages, unfinished jobs.

The biggest line on a winery homepage is often one of them, set in a lovely font and saying nothing at all.

And the biggest unfinished job in your trade has nothing to do with who hosts you.

These pages average 54 out of 100 on Google’s phone test, under the 58 I get across every site I run it through, and it’s the one check where your trade quietly loses people who were already interested.

That mark isn’t a mark to your customer. It’s the wait between tapping your name and being able to read a word, while she stands in a gravel lot on one bar of signal with two friends in the car asking whether this place is even open.

The cause is sitting in your gallery. Twenty photographs of the vines at golden hour, each one straight off a camera, each one heavier than the entire rest of the page put together.

When did you last open your own gallery on a phone, standing outside, away from your own wifi?

Those photographs are the whole reason anybody opens a winery website, so nobody enjoys being told they’re also the reason it arrives so slowly. Resizing them is dull, unglamorous work that has never gone into anybody’s portfolio, and it does more for a visitor on a phone than a year of arguing about software.

Charities arrive at the same place from another direction. Eleven plugins stacked behind one donate button slow a homepage down as well as any gallery.

Move that gallery to WordPress and it’s the same gallery. Same weight, new login screen, and your hours page missing.

The objection underneath the objection

Sometimes what an owner means by “I should be on WordPress” is something else entirely, and it took me a while to hear it.

She means she can’t change anything herself.

That one is real, and I take it seriously, because a website you have to email someone about is a website that slowly stops being true. Your hours drift. Your events page still has the spring thing on it in October.

It goes wrong one small fact at a time, so nothing ever looks broken enough to phone about, and by the second summer your homepage is telling strangers things that stopped being accurate a year ago.

But the fix for that is not a rebuild. It’s twenty minutes with whoever holds the keys, and a password that belongs to you.

If you are picking a platform from scratch, the honest comparison is about who does the editing, not about which name sounds more serious.

Could you change your own opening hours this afternoon, without emailing anyone about it? Ask whoever built the site that question and time the answer. If it runs longer than a sentence, you’ve found the actual problem, and it’s a training problem or a login problem wearing a software costume.

On the winery builds I take on, the first hour goes on who can edit what. The software conversation comes later, and it’s short.

What I’d want you to compare instead

If someone hands you a quote and the case for it rests on the platform, ask what the page will do afterwards that it can’t do now.

Not what it’ll be built with. What it will do.

Will a stranger on a phone be able to read something inside two seconds? Will she be able to book without ringing anyone? Will your hours be right in November?

Those are the questions my whole audit is built out of, and you can score the ten checks I use against any site on earth without knowing what it was built with.

I’ve never once opened a website and worked out the platform from the front of it, and neither has your customer. She knows whether the thing was quick, whether it answered her question, and whether she could do the thing she arrived to do.

Everything else in that quote is a conversation between two suppliers about their own convenience, conducted in front of you, using your money.

Nobody has ever bought a case of wine because of the software the pages were typed into.

If you want a second opinion before you sign anything, send me the address and I’ll tell you which parts of the list your page is failing today.

Do this one thing

Open the quote in your inbox and find the word migration, or replatform, or rebuild. Ask what breaks if you delete that line and spend the money on the rest of the list, and then listen very carefully to the answer.