What the Fastest Small Business Websites in New York Left Out

For years I told clients that a big city like New York meant a slow website.

It made sense to me at the time. Bigger budgets on the block, more agencies with a slider to sell, more owners talked into a video header when all they ever wanted was the menu online.

So when I lined the cities up by speed, I expected this one to be sitting near the floor. It came out top of the 24 cities I audit, at 60 out of 100 for how quickly a page turns up on a phone.

I ran the whole thing again. Same answer.

Nobody up there is lapping the field, mind you. Small business sites average 58 on the same test, and Google files everything from 50 to 89 as needs improvement.

But I had the reason backwards, and the reason is worth more to you than the ranking ever will be.

The quick pages in this city aren’t the ones with the most money spent on them. They’re the ones with the least done to them.

What the score stands for

3,569 New York pages sat through a full timing run instead of a glance at the homepage.

The test opens your site on a stand-in for an ordinary phone on an ordinary connection, then scores the wait before anything readable turns up.

Your customer never sees that score. She sees a white rectangle in her hand on a wet corner, and she gets to decide how long she keeps holding it.

A minute later she’s through someone else’s door, and you never knew she was outside yours.

That gap costs more here than in any city I audit. Nobody in New York is sitting at a desk on office wifi when they need a locksmith or a lunch spot.

They’re walking, one block from deciding, with two bars of signal and somewhere else to be.

When did you last open your own site out there, off your wifi, standing up? Your desk has been flattering you for years, because a laptop on a fat connection hides the exact wait your customer is standing through.

I faked that test on vet websites for three years, squeezing a laptop window narrow and calling it a phone.

They aren’t running secret software

I keep expecting the quick cities to turn out to be on some platform the rest of us have never heard of.

WordPress runs 34.8% of the New York sites I audited, which is also the software behind plenty of the slowest pages I opened.

So what is yours built on? Whatever the answer is, it isn’t the reason your pages are quick or slow.

The software decides what you can change without hiring a developer. Everything after that is decided by what you and whoever designed it agreed to hang on the page.

So none of what follows is a purchase. Four habits kept turning up, and every one of them is a decision to leave something off.

1) One picture at the top, not five

A slideshow is five photographs pretending to be one.

The phone has to go and fetch all five, and it fetches them before your visitor has read a word, because whatever sits at the top of a page gets first call on everything.

The quick homepages I opened up there start with one photograph and a line telling you what the business does.

When did a rotating shot of an empty lobby ever sell anyone anything? I’ve asked a dozen owners that and never once got an answer, and a good few of them had no idea the thing was up there at all.

2) Someone shrank the photographs

A picture straight off a phone camera is huge. Drop eight of them onto a page and your customer downloads a small film before she gets a phone number.

On the quick sites, someone sat down and saved them smaller first. You can tell, because the pictures look the same on a laptop and the page arrives in a different decade.

That job takes an afternoon, once, and whoever looks after your site has done it before.

I did it for a client last spring and changed nothing else on the page. She wrote to me a week later to ask what I’d redesigned.

Has anybody on your side ever opened the folder those images came from? The full list of things that actually move a load time is short, and this one is at the top of it.

3) Nothing jumps in front of the phone number

Chat bubble, newsletter popup, a video that plays itself, a cookie banner that arrives before the words do.

Every one of those is a small program your customer has to wait for while she stands there, and none of them is why she came.

Which of them did you ask for? I’ve never once met an owner who woke up wanting a chat bubble.

The pages that scored well up there were bare in a way I found almost rude the first time I looked. Name, what they do, where they are, a number you can tap.

Then nothing. Nothing at all, until you scroll.

4) They stopped adding to it

A website gets slow the way a garage gets full.

Someone sells you a booking tool, then a review widget, then a tracking script for an ad campaign that ended two summers ago, and every one of them keeps loading for every visitor forever.

Nobody ever takes the old ones out. There’s no invoice for removing things, so it never happens.

What’s still running on your homepage from a campaign you stopped paying for? If you can’t name it without logging in to look, it’s still loading for every visitor who arrives tonight.

The fast sites in New York look like nobody has touched them in a while, and I don’t think that’s neglect. I think it’s the owner saying no four times in a row.

Quick is not the same as finished

77.6% of the sites up there clear Google’s basic mobile checks, a hair under the 78% I get across my whole sample, so arriving fast and being pleasant to use are still two separate results.

Orthodontists are the sharpest version of that split I found, 4th of 47 on the writing and 38th on whether the page works in a hand.

Add up the ten checks I run and New York lands on 72 out of 100, which is an ordinary sort of result. A page can turn up in a blink and still tell a stranger nothing worth knowing.

Does your first line say what you sell and where you are? A page that lands instantly and then keeps its business a secret has only wasted her afternoon faster than the slow ones did.

Owners up there tell me everybody already knows where they are, and that sentence costs them the customer they have never met.

So I wouldn’t go bragging about any of this at dinner. Being first at one thing and ordinary at nine others is a description of most businesses I’ve ever worked with, mine included.

What it does buy you is a starting point that costs nothing. The habits are already in the city, on the same software everyone else uses, kept by owners who, as far as I can tell, got there mostly by refusing things.

Most of what I get called into in this city is a rebuild that would quietly undo all four habits above, and the owner would be paying for the privilege.

If you’d rather have someone else go and look at what loads before your phone number does, my audit form starts there.

The small promise

Take the slideshow off the top of your homepage this month. One job, one afternoon, and you can stop there.

The next stranger who taps your name from a corner in the rain gets your number before the light changes, instead of watching a lobby fade into a staircase.

Your Tuesday will look exactly the same. Hers won’t, and I’ll take that trade every time.