Miami Is Third of 24 at Asking for the Job

What would you have to do, right now, to send yourself a message through your own homepage?

Go and try it on your phone. I’ll wait.

Most Miami owners get as far as a phone number in the header, then a link called Contact, then a page holding an email address and a map and nothing at all you can type a word into.

I’ve spent this year running the same audit across whole cities, one city at a time. Miami came up last month: 6,596 businesses sampled across 47 trades, and 4,234 of their websites opened and checked one by one.

Ten checks, always in the same order, because the order is the only thing that stops me skipping the dull ones when I’m tired and the coffee has worn off.

Miami made me stop three times.

Stop one: how long the page takes to show up

I had this city down as slow before I opened a single site. Big town, big photographs, homepages that load a video of the water before they load a sentence about what the business actually sells.

Wrong. Sites here average 59 out of 100 for speed on a phone, a hair over the 58 I get across everything I’ve tested.

That number isn’t my opinion, by the way. Google’s tool opens your page on a mid-range phone, counts the seconds a visitor spends staring at a blank screen, and turns those seconds into a score.

So the upgrade this city gets sold most often, the rebuild that will finally make everything quick, is a cure for a complaint it mostly doesn’t have.

I’d rather you spent that money on the next two checks.

And if your own site happens to be one of the slow ones, you know already. You avoid opening it on your phone when other people are watching.

Stop two: nobody is watching the door

Then I got to the one I’d care about most if it were my money, and Miami handed some of it back.

54.5% of the sites I audited here run analytics, where 58% do across my whole sample.

Nothing breaks when it’s missing. That’s the trouble with it.

An owner spends on ads, on a rebuild, on a guy down the road who promises monthly reporting, and at the end of the quarter the only evidence anywhere in the building is a feeling about how busy it’s been.

Nothing can tell you why a visitor left the page she landed on if nothing was counting her arriving.

Whenever I inherit a site, one of the first things I go looking for is whether the counting survived the last redesign. More often than I’d like, what I find is a tag that quietly stopped reporting in a year nobody in the building remembers.

Ask whoever looks after your site for the login. Not a report, the login, and see how long the answer takes to come back.

When the person who built your site tells you it’s working, what are they reading that off?

Stop three: the box a stranger can type into

And then the check that made me sit up and go back over my own numbers.

30.1% of Miami homepages carry a contact form, against 28% of every small business site I’ve opened.

Only Toronto and Scottsdale do it more often than that. Houston is the next name after them.

Seattle sits at the other end, the city where I hear every excuse for leaving the box off, including the one I still accept.

I would have bet against this city on that check, and I’d have lost.

The people who use a form are not the people who were ever going to phone you. They’re at work. The baby’s asleep. It’s eleven at night, they’ve already decided, and they want the job off their mind before they forget about it entirely.

Realtors tell me theirs has never once produced a client, and I take that apart every time I hear it, because the box is rarely the part that failed.

Take the box away and you don’t lose that person to a competitor with a prettier website. You lose her to whoever answers first tomorrow.

Which is why a form on the first screen is the cheapest useful change I make for anybody. An afternoon of work, no redesign, and it doesn’t need you to write a single word of anything.

So go and look at your own first screen, before you scroll. Does it ask your visitor for anything, or does it only introduce you and then leave her to work out the next move on her own?

Miami is one of the cities I take work in, and when a business here hires me that box goes on before the photos do. Ten years ago I had to argue for it in every meeting. Nobody argues now.

The bit I can’t explain

Look at those last two stops together, because they don’t fit each other at all.

A city that invites a stranger to get in touch is a city thinking about the customer. A city that leaves the tracking switched off is a city that never asks what happened to her afterwards.

Miami does both at once, and I don’t have a tidy theory about why.

My best guess is that a form is something an owner can ask for out loud. You can see it sitting on your own homepage, you can fill it in yourself and watch the email land, and every builder in my trade keeps one in a menu, ready to drop into a page in about four minutes.

Tracking has no shape at all. No client has ever opened a new site and told me the tracking looks great, so it waits for someone in the building to want it on purpose, and it will happily wait for years.

Is yours switched on? Are you sure, or are you fairly sure?

What the ten checks add up to

None of this rescues the average. Miami lands on 71 out of 100 across the ten, and the score leans on some of them a good deal harder than others, so one strong habit can only carry a city so far.

Anaheim, Corpus Christi, New Orleans and Toronto all came out on 71 as well.

Five cities, one number, and you could not tell them apart by opening their websites. What separates them is a short list of habits that cost nothing, which is the least satisfying finding I have ever had to write down.

I keep waiting for this data to hand me a villain. It keeps handing me a to-do list instead.

Back to where we started

You went and looked at your own homepage a few minutes ago, and I would love to know what you found.

So picture the woman at eleven tonight who has read your reviews, decided you’re the one she wants, and now wants to type her name, her number and one messy sentence about her problem into a box on your site.

Where does that land? And who opens it on a Saturday?

I can tell you what a whole city does. Only one of us can answer that one.