The Warning Only Your Pool Company’s Regulars See

I once stood in a room full of pool builders and talked for forty minutes about keeping a website safe, while a browser warning sat on my own homepage the entire time.

Nobody in the room checked. I found it three weeks later, in a parking lot, because I typed my own address in by hand instead of tapping the bookmark like a normal person.

Would you have caught that on your own site, or would you have carried on tapping the bookmark the way I had been doing for months?

The number coming up is the weakest one pool companies own anywhere I looked, and you should hear it from a man who has been on the wrong end of it himself.

Two companies, and I would have bet on the wrong one

I opened 1,197 pool company websites this summer, and two of them have been sitting in a tab on my screen since June.

Same trade. Same size. Both run by men who have been at it about twenty years, both with a wrapped van that gets waved at in traffic, both sites built for about the same money and looking about the same when they load.

One of them takes calls from people who typed his name into a phone. The other one gets those people too, and shows them a full screen of warning text before they reach a single word he wrote.

Which would you rather be? Easy question.

The hard question is which one you already are, because you would never find out from inside your own business.

What my client paid for, and what he didn’t

He had the certificate. He’d bought it, it worked, and every link Google handed out pointed at the secure copy of his site, so as far as he knew the matter was closed.

What he didn’t have was the forwarding. Someone types his address the plain way, without the secure part on the front, and nothing at his end carries that person across to the copy with the lock on it.

His regulars typed his name in from the side of the van. They got the warning, with his business name printed at the top of it.

Strangers clicking his listing in Google never saw anything wrong at all.

So the people who liked him most were the only ones his website frightened. It took me about ten minutes to put right, it cost him nothing, and it had been sitting there like that for two years.

How long do you suppose yours has been the way it is?

Where the trade lands

84.9% of the pool company sites I audited forward a visitor to the secure copy, which is 42 of 47 among the trades I audited, the softest number this trade owns.

Nothing else I checked sits that low for you. Not the phone stuff, not the photographs, not the writing, not the reviews.

Your trade is near the top on phones, in fact, and the trouble there is what she can actually do once the page has loaded.

88% of the sites I audit do the forwarding, so pool companies are behind on the one repair a competent person could have finished before lunch.

Funeral homes finish first of all 47 trades on that same check, and the owner who called me about his had no idea he was winning anything.

The lock itself is mostly fine, mind you. 91.8% of these sites serve the secure version at all, 41 of 47 when I ranked them, and the distance between those two numbers is where your customers get lost.

You bought the lock. Nobody wired it to the door you never use.

So which of those two men does that make you this morning?

Why nobody ever catches this

You don’t type your own address. You tap a bookmark, or your browser fills it in after two letters, and both of those remember the secure version from the last time you were there.

Your phone does the same favor. Your office computer does it. Your web guy, who visits through a dashboard, does it without thinking about it once.

The only people who ever meet the plain version are the ones typing it fresh.

The woman reading it off your van at a red light. The neighbor copying it from a flyer on a community board. The customer from four summers ago who half remembers your name.

Those are the warmest leads you get all year, and they’re the exact people getting the scary screen.

Do you know what your site does when your name gets typed in with nothing in front of it?

Check my work

I don’t expect you to take a stranger’s numbers on faith, and you shouldn’t. Set the industry menu in my explorer to Pool Companies, leave the city menu on all, and back comes a card listing each check on its own line with the number of sites I took it from sitting right beside it, which is more detail than most people want and exactly what I’d want if a salesman quoted a figure at me.

I built it that way because I got tired of reading confident claims from people who wouldn’t show their sample. Argue with the number if you like. The sample is right there under it.

The other thing that separated those two

Money didn’t separate them, and neither did skill. Both men are good at pools.

One of them pays someone to open the website every few weeks and tidy up whatever got left. The other site has been exactly as it was on the morning it went live, and that morning was four summers ago.

Electricians sit in the same spot on the lock, and four ordinary habits separate the ones whose sites never break from the ones I keep finding open.

I had a client like the second one who ran two whole summers without a counter of any kind on his site. When I asked how the spring had gone, he told me it felt busy, and neither of us could do a single thing with that sentence.

58.1% of these sites run analytics, so a fair number of pool companies are steering by the same feeling he was.

How did your spring go? Do you actually know that, or does it just feel like an answer you could defend?

What I’d do about it this week

Nothing on this list is a rebuild, and I’d say so plainly if it were, because rebuilds are how my trade turns a ten minute repair into a season of invoices.

1. Type your own address into a phone without the secure part on the front and see what appears. Do it on cell service, not the office wifi.

2. If a warning shows up, send the screenshot to whoever hosts your site and ask them to force the forwarding. Most hosts have a switch for it.

3. Then check it again tomorrow, from a different phone, because “I’ve done it” and “it’s done” have never been the same sentence in my experience.

I build websites for pool companies most weeks now, and the forwarding gets sorted out before I touch a single thing a customer would ever notice.

Tell me your trade is different

Some of you are going to say pool work doesn’t behave like this. Every job comes from a neighbor, a referral, or the same three builders you’ve worked with since 2009, and no warning screen has ever cost you a Saturday.

You might be right. A trade has proven me wrong before, and the owner who did it had better records than I did.

So argue with me properly. Send me your address and the reason, let me type it in the lazy way on my own phone, and I’ll tell you what your regulars have been looking at.