Windsor Beats the Country at One Thing, and It Wasn’t Your Idea

For years I told clients that if the site worked properly on a phone, they were most of the way home.

I said it in meetings and I said it on sales calls, and I believed it every time, because a site that failed on a phone in 2015 was properly broken.

Then I spent a few weeks with Windsor’s numbers in front of me, and I had to go back and unsay it. Boat yards took a matching rule off me a year earlier, turning up quickly and then being a chore to read.

78.9% of Windsor small business websites pass Google’s mobile checks, eighth of twenty four, and the only check where the city finishes in front of the country’s 78%.

Take the win and take it seriously, because Windsor doesn’t have many others like it.

Then let me show you what a win like that is actually worth on its own, which turns out to be surprisingly little.

The measurements behind a mobile pass

Google starts with a line of code telling the phone that the page was built for a phone. Skip that instruction and Google serves your customer a shrunken desktop layout, so she has to pinch and zoom just to read your hours.

Then it takes two measurements off the page itself: how large the type renders, and how much room sits around anything a finger is supposed to press.

Google settles both of those with a ruler rather than an opinion, which is why a page can look perfectly nice to you and still come back failed. Clearing it is the floor of what makes a page easy to use and nowhere near the ceiling.

Clear all three and you’ve built for the phone, which is the version of your site Google actually reads. When did you last open your own website on a phone you weren’t already proud of? It’s a low bar and it’s meant to be a low bar, because every site I’ve watched fail it was a chore to use on the phone in my hand.

So who do you think did that work?

The software did it, not the web guy

Look at what the city is actually building on, because the answer explains the compliment I just handed out.

Of the Windsor sites I audited, 36.1% run on WordPress, 9.0% on Wix, 7.2% on Squarespace, 5.0% on Shopify and 3.0% on GoDaddy’s builder.

Every one of those platforms has shipped mobile-ready layouts as standard for years now. You didn’t choose a phone layout. You chose a theme, and the phone layout came bolted to the inside of it.

I’m not sneering at that. I build on some of the same tools and I’m delighted the floor got raised for everybody.

But a win that arrives in the box tells you nothing about the person who opened the box.

Which raises an uncomfortable question about the rest of the report. If Windsor wins the check that software handles by itself, how does Windsor do on the checks where a human being has to decide something?

Every check that needed a person

Badly. The pattern is so tidy it made me sit back in my chair.

Start with speed, because Google turns your loading time into a score out of 100 and files anything in the middle band as needing improvement. Windsor’s average is 56 out of 100 against 58 nationally, twenty third out of twenty four cities on that one.

Your theme handled the layout. No theme on earth resizes the six megapixel photo you uploaded of the new truck, or removes the plugin you installed in 2021 and forgot about.

Then analytics, which is the difference between Google sending you visitors and you knowing which ones showed up. 54.2% of Windsor sites run it, against 58% nationally.

Someone has to sit down and connect that deliberately, and in Windsor rather fewer people did.

So how would you know today which half of your marketing is bringing anybody in?

A blog, and links out to the places you already post, both land under the national line too. Writing is work, and no template has ever written a word for anybody. Windsor finishes last of the twenty four cities on title tags as well, which is the other line of text a person has to sit down and type.

And the one that costs the most money. 24.8% of Windsor homepages have a contact form on them, against 28% nationally.

Read that one again with an actual customer in mind, because your site fits her phone beautifully and then takes its sweet time showing up on it.

When she finally gets there and decides she likes the look of you, most of Windsor hands her a screen with nothing on it to fill in.

What exactly is she meant to do next, go hunting through a footer for a phone number?

The layout was automatic. The invitation never was.

Why I don’t think this is laziness

Effort isn’t what’s missing here. Nothing in this pattern was ever decided at all.

The mobile layout happened because it was the default. The contact form didn’t happen because it wasn’t.

How many of your own business decisions were quietly made by whoever wrote your theme?

Defaults are enormously powerful and almost invisible. Your site does whatever the software decided on your behalf, right up until the afternoon someone opens it with a purpose and changes something.

So which of your defaults have you actually looked at? I’d bet the answer is one or two, and I’d bet the rest were set by a stranger who has never met a single one of your customers.

Before you take any of this personally

A pass rate in the high seventies still leaves a solid slice of Windsor failing a check that a modern site builder gives away for nothing. Are you certain yours isn’t sitting in that group?

If it is, you’ve got an older problem on your hands than anything else in this post.

And the win doesn’t rescue the scorecard. Windsor still sits at the foot of the whole ranking, 24th of 24 cities on 70 out of 100, so being eighth at one thing and last overall is a fair summary of the place. I ran that whole ranking twice before I published it, and the fix list came back small both times.

Three minutes, one phone

Put the laptop away and get your phone out. Then do these three, in order, on your own website.

1. Read your opening paragraph at arm’s length. If you squinted, your text is too small.

2. Count how long the homepage takes to show you something on your data connection, not the office wifi.

3. Try to contact yourself from the first screen using only your thumb, without scrolling and without hunting through a menu.

Most Windsor owners pass the first one. My data says the second and third are where it falls apart, and neither of those is a design problem so much as a decision nobody got around to making.

If you’d like a hand making them, that happens to be the job I do all day. I work with businesses across Windsor and Essex County, though I’d honestly rather you sorted all three out yourself this afternoon than left them sitting there another year.

Or just send me the address of the page and I’ll go through the whole thing and tell you what I find. Free, and I’ll lead with whatever’s worst, because the compliment can wait until the contact form works.