What WordPress Hands a Cleaning Company, and What It Doesn’t
Cleaning companies run WordPress on 43.4% of their sites, against 36.4% nationally. I walked my audit in the order I actually run it, and the platform explained more than I expected.
You read the lockbox code off a text message, sitting in the van with the heater going and the coffee in the cup holder already going cold.
The vacuum’s in the back. One cleaning job fell off Thursday, and the person you were counting on this morning is running twenty minutes behind.
Your website is not in your first hundred thoughts. It isn’t most days, and I’ve never once held that against an owner in your trade.
It’s in mine, though, because I spent a long stretch of this summer opening cleaning company websites one after another and writing down what I found. 2,780 businesses in the sample, and 1,803 sites I could actually open and read.
I run the audit in the same order every time. Not because the order is clever, but because I’m forgetful and a routine covers for that.
Three stops surprised me on this trade, and two of them pleasantly.
The first thing I write down
Before I properly look at a page I note what the site is built on.
Website tools leave fingerprints all over the code. A file path, a name buried in a stylesheet, a folder that could only have come from one place, and after a few hundred sites you stop having to check carefully.
I note it down before anything else, and cleaning companies came back leaning harder on WordPress than the country does.
43.4% of the cleaning sites I audited run WordPress, against 36.4% of small business sites in general.
Those shares never add up to a hundred, by the way, because a site can match two tools at once and my fingerprinting comes up empty on a fair number of them. Don’t read anything into the leftovers.
Why does it matter what your site is built on? Because it decides whether your missing pieces are a rebuild or a settings box, and those are very different conversations to have with your bank. The builders differ more than their sales pages let on, and the difference shows up in what you can fix without hiring anyone.
The half the software already did
WordPress is a website tool you install once and then bolt extra bits onto. The bolted-on bits are called plugins, and most sites I open are carrying more of them than anyone there remembers installing.
That pile is why the plainest checks come back clean in this trade. Naming the page in the browser tab, keeping the list a search engine reads to find your other pages, tidying up your addresses so the same page doesn’t answer to four of them.
The software does all of that on its own, quietly, without anybody being asked to care. You paid for it in a way, but you never saw the bill and you never made a decision.
Which is lovely, right up until you assume the same thing is true of everything else on your site.
Do you know who last logged in to yours? For a lot of owners I talk to the honest answer is a nephew, a former employee, or an agency that stopped replying in about 2019.
The phone test
Every site gets run through a speed test set up like a phone on an ordinary connection, rather than the wifi in my office, which flatters absolutely everybody.
I expected this to be grim. Plugins are heavy, old themes are heavier, and I’ve opened plenty of cleaning sites carrying a photo gallery nobody ever shrank. Those same photographs are the softest check your trade owns, though the reason has nothing to do with their size.
Instead, these sites average 63 out of 100 against 58 across everything I ran, and Google’s own scale doesn’t call a score good until it reaches 90.
So it’s a decent showing rather than a victory lap. Did you expect your trade to be the fast one? I didn’t, and I’ve been doing this long enough to be embarrassed about guessing wrong.
I think the reason is that your sites are small.
There’s no booking engine, no product catalog, no four hundred room photos, no reservation system arguing with a payment system. A cleaning site is usually six pages and a form, and six pages load fast almost by accident.
The half nobody ever switched on
Then two checks came back low, one after the other, and they have the same cause behind them.
58.5% of these sites link a social profile, where 66% do nationally.
That one stung, because your trade lives on Facebook. Local groups, before and after photos, a neighborhood page where someone asks at nine at night who to call about a carpet.
The page exists. The website just doesn’t point at it.
What breaks when that link is missing is small and permanent. A stranger reads your homepage, wants a second opinion before she lets you have a key to her house, and has no way of getting from you to the people already saying nice things about you in a group she’s a member of.
Your star rating is doing the same work from the other direction, and the page it points her at has to hold up once she lands there.
She isn’t going to go hunting. She’s going to tap back.
How many posts have you put on Facebook this year that nobody arriving from a search engine will ever see? That’s the cost, and it’s been quietly running the whole time.
The one I put near the end on purpose
53.9% of these sites run analytics, against 58% of small business sites.
Nothing on your page breaks when that’s missing, which is exactly why it stays missing. Your site looks fine, loads fine, and takes calls.
The breakage turns up in March, when you’re deciding whether to run the winter ad again, and the honest answer to did it work is that nobody wrote anything down while it was happening.
You end up making next year’s money decisions out of a feeling. How much did you spend last year on things you couldn’t check?
Both of those, the social link and the little bit of tracking code, are a settings box on a WordPress site. Someone types into it, presses save, and goes back to their day.
So why does neither one get done? My honest guess is that nobody who touches your website has ever been the person waiting on the phone to ring.
Why the platform mattered after all
Running WordPress doesn’t make a website good, and I’d never sell it to you as a reason to feel comfortable. I spent a week trying to make the platform explain the gap between two gaming rooms having opposite years, and the platform explained none of it.
But it changes the price of everything I’ve just listed.
If your site were hand built by a guy who has since stopped answering emails, every check it fails would be a rebuild, and I’d be writing you a quote instead of an article. On the thing most of your trade is actually sitting on, the same fixes are an evening and a cup of tea.
I build websites for cleaning companies for a living, so saying most of this doesn’t need me is not my sharpest commercial instinct.
A small promise
Fill in the social link and drop in the tracking code this week. Two boxes, one evening, no invoice from anybody.
Nothing happens on Monday. Your phone won’t ring more, and I’m not going to insult you by suggesting it will.
What you get is March. You’ll know whether the winter ad was worth it, you’ll know which page the people who called you had been reading, and the woman who wanted a second opinion will land on your Facebook page instead of closing the tab.
That’s a modest return for about ninety minutes of your life. I’ve yet to meet an owner who wanted those ninety minutes back.
And if you’d rather someone else opened the hood and told you which boxes are sitting empty, that’s what my free audit is for.
