Windsor Finished Last of 24 Cities. I Ran It Twice.

You already know how this feels. Someone from out of town builds a chart, and your city lands on the bottom row of it.

So you’re braced right now. Arms folded, waiting for the bit where a guy with a spreadsheet tells Windsor it isn’t trying hard enough.

Would you keep reading if I told you the fix list is all small things nobody ever got assigned?

That isn’t the post. I like Windsor, I’ve worked with people up and down that stretch of the 401, and what I found is duller and far more fixable than a scolding.

I counted 4,124 Windsor businesses across 44 kinds of work, then audited 2,598 of their websites and ran 2,188 of them through a phone speed test.

Then I sorted my score column from best to worst, and Windsor came to rest on the last row of the twenty four, on 70 out of 100.

I ran the lot again, mostly because I wanted the answer to be a bug in my own code rather than a fact about a real place.

Same answer.

Two shops in the same trade

Picture a pair of them. Same work, same size, ten minutes apart on the same road.

One lands near the top of everything I check. The other sits near the floor. Neither owner has the faintest idea, and that’s the part I keep chewing on.

The good one opened on my phone before I got impatient. Padlock in the address bar, a headline telling me what the business did, and a form on the first screen I could have filled in with a thumb.

The other one gave me a photo of a van at full desktop width, then a menu I couldn’t hit, then grey text. The address bar said “Not secure”, and I scrolled three screens before I turned up a phone number.

Which of those two would you call from a parking lot in the rain?

Same trade, same town, and the same customers googling at nine o’clock on a Sunday night when something breaks.

So what separates them? Not talent, and not budget either, because the difference is a dozen tiny decisions that neither owner remembers making.

I run ten checks on every site, each one weighted, added up out of 100. Does it work on a phone, does it load before an impatient stranger gives up, has anyone ever left a review, is the connection locked, and on down to a page title and a scrap of tracking code.

The first shop clears nearly all of them without ever hearing the word schema. The second one misses nearly all of them the same way.

I went looking for one broken thing

That’s usually how a bottom-of-the-table score happens. A city skips security, or never quite got onto phones, and one terrible column drags the whole average down behind it.

Windsor hasn’t got a terrible column. So where on earth did the points go?

Windsor has a small hole in almost every bucket, and the holes are so ordinary I doubt a single owner in the city has noticed theirs.

Take that padlock. 93.1% of Windsor sites serve over a locked connection, where nationally the figure is 94%.

Windsor does beat the country on one check, and that one arrived switched on without anybody asking.

Then the redirect. Type the bare address with no padlock on the front, and a tidy site bounces you onto the safe copy before the page has finished painting. On a slightly wider slice of Windsor sites than the country manages, nothing bounced me anywhere.

Then schema, which is a lump of code no customer will ever lay eyes on. I only know whether it’s there because I opened the page source and went looking for it, and 65.8% of Windsor sites had it against 70.5% nationally.

Not one of those gaps deserves a headline on its own, and if you brought me any of them in isolation I’d tell you to go and do something considerably more useful with your afternoon.

Some of the ranks are pure noise. The city comes last of the 24 on page titles as well, and almost every site in Windsor has one.

Now stack them up, one check after another. A sliver here, a slightly wider one there, another one after that, and the bottom row of a table ends up with your city’s name sitting in it.

Paper cuts, all the way down.

I find that oddly encouraging. A city with one catastrophic column has a culture problem, and those take years to shift. A city with a scattering of small gaps has a to-do list, and I know which of the two I’d rather be handed.

The gap that isn’t a paper cut

One number in this report isn’t a paper cut, and it never comes up at a chamber breakfast.

77.4% of Windsor businesses have a website at all, where 83% do nationally.

Every other gap on my list costs a business some traffic, or some trust, or a few places in the results. That one costs the entire game before it starts.

If you’re the landscaper with no website, you aren’t ranking badly. You aren’t in the draw.

New Orleans sits in the same spot, and nobody needs a website until the afternoon they suddenly do.

And the competitor who takes that job off you doesn’t have to be better at landscaping. He has to exist on a phone at nine on a Sunday night, which is when people go looking.

I’d move that number before I touched a single tag anywhere in this city, and honestly it isn’t close.

What’s the point of a beautiful headline on a website nobody has bothered to build?

My grade only sees the storefront

Nothing in my scoring ever asked a single customer what they thought of the work.

87.5% of the Windsor businesses I checked hold at least one Google review, and the average one carries 155 reviews at 4.5 stars.

Four and a half stars, across thousands of businesses, in a single city.

Read that beside the 70 and tell me what you make of it, because a city earning satisfaction like that is a city where the actual work is landing beautifully.

So the grade is a verdict on the storefront. The stars are a verdict on the shop, and Windsor’s shop is in very good order.

Which of those two would you rather have to fix from scratch this year?

Nobody has ever won a customer back by adding schema markup, and nobody has ever kept one with a padlock either.

Those are two separate problems that don’t get fixed the same way, and Windsor quietly solved the harder of the two years ago.

Don’t wear a city number that isn’t yours

Look up your own trade before you take the grade personally. What does a restaurant have in common with an electrician once you get past the front page of a website?

Financial firms build careful sites and still finish near the bottom of my industry table. That is a trade story, and no city grade will ever show it to you.

That score pools 44 kinds of business into one figure, and a pooled number will lie to an individual all day long. Every rate I’ve quoted here sits in the explorer on the report with its own sample size beside it, so pick Windsor, find your own line, and check my arithmetic while you’re in there.

Is your trade ahead of the crowd or behind it? Neither of us knows until you look.

And if you want the local version of all this, with the market and the competition attached to it, I keep a page on hiring a web designer in Windsor that goes further into the neighborhood than a national report ever could.

Who I didn’t write this for

Not the owner who already has all ten boxes ticked, because you know who you are and you certainly don’t need me.

Not the person who wants to argue with my scoring either. Throw the whole score out and Windsor still has the same small holes sitting in the same ordinary places.

And definitely not anyone outside the city hunting for a cheap laugh at it, because I’ve seen the reviews and Windsor is beating you at the part that matters most.

I wrote it for the owner who’s good at the job and quietly embarrassed by the website. The one who’s been meaning to sort it out since about 2019.

One of those small gaps has your name on it. Do you already know which, or are you telling yourself you don’t?

Go and prove me right. Then reply and tell me which one you picked, because I want to see how many of you land on the same one.