With the heat out in January, a slow page reads exactly like a business that has closed.
Nobody in this situation is browsing
The boiler will not fire and the house is going down a degree an hour. Water is coming up through the basement floor drain. A pipe let go in an unheated back room overnight.
They are not assessing your workmanship. Three things, fast: you handle steam boilers, you come to Corktown, this is the number.
No heat in January is a real emergency
A house losing heat in a cold snap becomes dangerous within hours, and pipes start splitting not long after. The people searching are frightened rather than curious.
Put your response time high on the page in plain words. That one line wins more calls than any design decision on the site.
Assume everything is against you
Everyone rings at once in a cold snap, basements swallow reception, and a cold phone throttles itself. Those three arrive together every winter.
Build for the customer out on a Detroit basement and the comfortable one takes care of itself. Words first, images after, nothing standing between the caller and your number.
Buttons that work with gloves on
January, standing in an unheated house, phone in one gloved hand. Links the size of a pencil eraser packed together do not get hit.
Make the call button genuinely large, keep it on screen as the page scrolls, and leave empty space around it so nothing else takes the tap from a hand that has been dealing with a steam boiler for an hour.
Put a stopwatch on it
Next call out on a Detroit basement, try to book yourself through your own form and time it.
The number usually lands badly. What you approved on a monitor is not what a customer meets standing next to a dead boiler.
