What Happens to Your Solar Site When You Fire Me

The software your solar website is built on has never once won you a job.

Which isn’t quite true, and the part that isn’t true only ever turns up in a single week of your life, usually the worst week you’ve had in years.

The question I get on nearly every call

Somewhere around minute twenty, once the price is out of the way and the owner has decided he probably likes me, I get a version of the same thing.

“And if this doesn’t work out between us, what happens to the site?”

It’s the best question anyone asks me, and I answer it in about thirty seconds, badly, because there’s a quote to finish and a school pickup at three.

Thirty seconds isn’t enough. So I sat down and did it properly, and it starts with a number that surprised me.

Your trade hires people

46.5% of the solar sites I audited run on WordPress, and nobody arrives at WordPress on a Sunday night with a credit card and twenty spare minutes. It doesn’t happen by accident, ever.

Behind that share sits a room full of invoices. A theme someone chose, a host someone paid for, an email address someone used, and a person who was handed actual money to put the three of them together.

Across small business sites in general the share is 36.4%, so your trade buys its websites more often than most of the trades I audit, and it buys them from professionals rather than from a free trial.

Sunday night with a credit card does happen in solar, just not often. 6.9% of the solar sites I opened landed on Wix, 4.5% on Squarespace, 4.3% on GoDaddy and 3.9% on Shopify, and a shopping cart is an odd thing to sell a rooftop from.

Those don’t add up to everything, and they were never going to. A site can match two of them at once, plenty of sites never announce what they’re built on at all, and I’d rather say that out loud than dress the remainder up as a category it isn’t.

Not sure what yours is even built on? Ask me, and you’ll have the answer in writing before lunch.

The good half of my answer

Popularity buys you something real, and it’s the part of my opening line that was wrong.

There’s a person in every town on earth who can open WordPress, find your battery page and change the price on it, without a support ticket and without a phone call to me. If you and I fell out on a Friday, you could have someone else in there by Tuesday.

Try that on a platform nobody within fifty miles of you has ever opened. You’d be hunting for a specialist and paying specialist money to change one paragraph on a page.

So when a caller tells me he wants to be on the same thing as everyone else in his trade, I don’t argue. He’s buying a supply of people who can rescue him, and that’s a sensible thing to buy.

Popular isn’t the same as yours

None of it helps you if the accounts aren’t in your name, and the accounts are where nearly every bad Monday I’ve watched actually began.

Hosting is the rent on the computer your website lives on. One installer of mine learned that word standing in his own office at half past seven in the morning, looking at a page that said his account was suspended, because the hosting had been bought years earlier on the card of a marketing company he’d stopped paying in March.

His domain was worse. The domain is the address itself, the thing people type, and it gets rented a year at a time from a company that has never heard of you. His was registered to a kid who drew his logo in 2018 and has since moved to Halifax and stopped answering email.

He got it back in the end. It cost him most of a summer, two letters from a lawyer and a payment he’d rather I didn’t print, and for the whole of that time the only working part of his business online was a phone number on a Google listing.

How long would it take you to find out whose card that hosting bill lands on? For most of the owners I ask, the honest answer is a week and two uncomfortable phone calls.

Was any of that a WordPress problem? Not for a second. He could have been on anything at all and had exactly the same morning.

The platform argument gets all the airtime because it’s the only part of this a person can hold an opinion about at a barbecue. Nobody has ever had an opinion about a registrar account, which is a shame, because the registrar account is the one that can take your company off the internet by Friday.

The three answers that settle it

When an owner asks me what happens if we stop working together, the honest answer has nothing to do with software. It’s three things, and you can check all three today.

1. The domain is registered in your name, in an account you personally can log into.

2. The hosting bill arrives at an email address that you read. So does the form on your website, and I test where those messages land now instead of taking anyone’s word for it.

3. Someone other than the person who built it has logged in this year and changed something on purpose.

Get those three and you can fire anybody, me included, on a Tuesday afternoon and be running again by Thursday. Miss one and it doesn’t matter what your site is built on, because the thing standing between you and your own website is a person, not a platform.

Which of the three could you prove right now, without ringing anyone?

What the platform never touched

Being on the popular thing didn’t buy this trade a better result either. Solar comes out at 72 out of 100 on my industry ranking, just under the painters and just above the entertainment companies, which is the middle of the pack and a long way off the top of it.

The line that names your page is a fair example. No trade I check finishes lower on it than solar, and the excuses I hear for that line never once mention software.

None of the ten checks behind that score has an opinion about software. A search engine meets the page you shipped, not the tool you shipped it with, and so does the homeowner comparing you against two other quotes on her sofa. Nothing that makes a visitor give up and leave was decided by a platform either. A person chose all of it.

One installer I know put the answers he’d been giving at his kitchen table onto his own website, and his appointments got shorter while his close rate went up.

When someone hands me a solar website that already exists, the first hour goes on paperwork rather than design. Who holds the domain, who holds the hosting, who else still has a key, and when did any of them last use it.

Owners find that first hour a strange thing to pay for. It’s the only hour that decides what your website is worth to you if I get hit by a bus, and I’ve never regretted spending it.

One question, and I’m not answering this one

I’d want this settled before I signed anything with anybody, me very much included.

Whose name is on the bill?

Not the website. The bill. Go and look, and don’t ask the person who sends it.