Las Vegas Forgot to Link Its Own Social Profiles

For about six years I thought the footer was decoration, and I left it that way on every Las Vegas site I built.

Icons at the bottom of a page, in a row, in grey, because the template had a slot for them and an empty slot looks unfinished. Who scrolls down there on purpose, I thought, and who would bother clicking one if they did?

Owners say that to me constantly, and the four versions of it I hear most all sound sensible right up until you follow one of them to the end.

Then a family upholstery shop taught me otherwise, and it took two years and a phone call to get around to the lesson.

The link I copied without opening it

I rebuilt their site in 2019, and I did the same thing I did on every rebuild. I moved the icons into the new footer and copied the addresses over from the old one.

Copied. Not opened. There’s a difference between those two verbs, and the difference cost him.

One of those addresses pointed at a Facebook page the family had stopped using two years before I got there. The most recent post on it was a photo from a Christmas party, and under the photo sat three comments asking whether they were still open.

So for two years, every curious customer who wanted to check on them clicked my tidy little icon and landed on a page that quietly answered no.

The owner mentioned it to me the way you mention weather. People keep asking if we closed, he said, and I don’t understand where they’re getting that.

I understood immediately, and I did not enjoy the feeling.

What I couldn’t put a number on

I can’t tell you what it cost him, and that’s the part that still bothers me.

There’s no report for the customer who decided you were shut and dialled the shop on the next street instead. She never contacts you, so where would she even show up?

The repair took me four minutes. Two years of quiet damage, four minutes of work, and the only reason it went on that long is that nobody in the arrangement, me included, had the job of reading the bottom of the page.

Every site I hand over now, I click every link in that footer myself and look at where it lands. If the profile behind it has been silent for months, the link doesn’t go on at all, and I say why in the handover.

The whole city does this

64.1% of Las Vegas websites link a social profile, 20th of the 24 cities I checked, against 66% across the country.

That’s the lowest this city places on anything I check. Not the speed. Not the security. The footer.

Money is the obvious explanation, and it falls apart the moment you look at what else this city gets right. 95.2% of Las Vegas sites serve over HTTPS, 7th of 24 when I put the cities in order, against 94% nationally.

That padlock costs real money, or an afternoon of a technician’s time. It also shouts when it goes missing, because the browser drops a warning between a stranger and your homepage until it comes back.

Nobody here is shy about being seen, either. Businesses in this city carry more Google reviews each than anywhere else I counted.

Speed is harder still, and this city holds up there as well. Las Vegas averages 59 out of 100 on a phone speed test, 6th of 24 on the same run, against 58 nationally, and I ran 3,381 of those phone tests here, so it isn’t one lucky page flattering the rest.

I won’t hand you a tidy story about a city that builds beautifully and then neglects the upkeep. How its pages behave on a phone, and how they handle having several addresses, both land 19th of 24, and the city sits at 72 out of 100 overall, which is about as middle as a middle gets.

The padlock, the forwarding and the speed score all got done here. The job that takes a minute and a pair of slippers didn’t.

When did you last actually read the bottom of your own website? Not glance past it on the way somewhere else.

What breaks when the link isn’t there

Two things break, and both of them break in total silence.

A search engine loses the thread first. Google’s documentation on organization markup says you can point it at your profile pages on social and review sites, and without those links there’s nothing tying your Instagram account to your business. An account belonging to an outfit across town with a similar name has just as good a claim on you.

The customer loses something worse. She’s standing on your website trying to work out whether you’re still trading, and how exactly would she tell from the page in front of her?

A site can sit untouched for four years and look identical to one updated this morning. That’s the trouble with the medium, and you can’t design your way around it.

A post from last Thursday can’t be faked that way. It proves there was a person here recently, which is the exact question she came to answer.

I clicked every icon in one Bismarck footer and wrote the page up before and after, because a working link is the cheapest proof you’re still open.

So she hunts for the link, comes up empty, and opens the app to search your name herself. Who do you suppose that search box introduces her to along the way?

“I don’t want to send people away from my site”

I hear this from sharp owners, and I understood it better back when I agreed with them.

She’s leaving either way. The only thing still up for grabs is whether she leaves through a door you built or a search box you don’t control.

Send her out through your own link and she lands on your photos and your happiest customers. Make her go and find you and she lands somewhere that will happily suggest three competitors first.

Charleston links its profiles better than any city I checked, and every one of those icons is still an exit. The question was never whether she leaves.

Which of those two exits would you rather she used?

The upholstery shop is the warning folded inside all that. A link to an account you stopped posting to years ago is worse than no link at all, because a stranger reads a dead profile the way she reads a dark window at nine in the morning.

One thing, and please ignore the rest of this

64.1% still means most of this city does link out, so there’s a decent chance yours is fine and you can go and enjoy your afternoon.

If you’re not sure, go to the bottom of your own site and click every icon down there, one at a time, the way a customer would. Look at the date on the last thing you posted.

Dead profile, dead link, no link at all: pick whichever applies and deal with it this week. Take the link off, or put a photo up, or add the ones you never got around to adding.

Forget everything else in this post. The copyright year, the old address, the phone number you changed, all the rot I usually find when I clean up the bits nobody has looked at in years for businesses around Las Vegas, none of it is urgent next to a customer who thinks you closed.

I got that one wrong for six years. You can fix it before lunch.