2,133 People Came to My Front Porch. Almost None of Them Made It Past the Doormat.

I pulled my own numbers this week and they hurt.

Not the traffic. The traffic is fine. What hurts is what people did once they got here.

From July 14 to August 4, the front page of this site was loaded 2,133 times.

The average person scrolled one percent of it.

One percent. That is not a typo. Out of those 2,133 loads, 2,087 of them never got past five percent of the page. That is 97.8 percent of everybody who walked up to my front door and turned around before they saw anything.

I have been telling myself I have a traffic problem. I do not have a traffic problem.

I have a door problem.

Here is the part that turns it from a gut punch into a map.

The same three weeks, same site, same visitors. Look at what happens when people land somewhere that is not my homepage.

Average scroll depth by page, July 14 to August 4, 2026

Source: RealRyanNichols.com internal analytics, page_views table

Read that chart twice.

When somebody lands on the Evidence Nexus, they read sixty four percent of it. The story page, fifty six. My articles, fifty five. The about page, fifty three.

Every one of those is a real read. People are not skimming. They are staying.

Then they hit the homepage and they are gone in a blink.

So the problem was never the writing. The writing holds people. The problem is the room I built in front of the writing.

I built that homepage the way most people build one. Here is who I am. Here is my story. Here is a little of everything.

And a little of everything is another way of saying nothing in particular.

Somebody comes to this site because they searched a name in the J6 archive, or a neighbor sent them a local piece, or they wanted to know if the guy building websites is any good. Three different people with three different reasons. I met all three of them with the same wall of me.

The pages that work are the pages that answer one question fast.

The page that fails is the one that tries to answer all of them.

Now here is why I am publishing this instead of quietly fixing it.

Because your site is doing the same thing, and nobody has shown you.

Most business owners have never once looked at scroll depth. They look at views. Views feel like progress. Views got me feeling pretty good about a page that 97.8 percent of people were abandoning in under five seconds.

So go find out. You do not need a consultant to do this. Almost every analytics tool will show you scroll depth if you turn it on. Pull your homepage. Pull your top three other pages. Compare them.

If your homepage is your worst performing page, you already know what to do next, and it is not more traffic.

Three things I am changing here, in order.

First, the top of the homepage stops being about me and starts being a fork in the road. Are you here for the case, for East Texas, or because you need something built. Pick one and go. Nothing else above the fold.

Second, the services page gets rebuilt. Eight percent scroll depth on the page that is supposed to pay for all of this is embarrassing, and it is mine to fix.

Third, I keep publishing the number. In three weeks I will pull the same query and show you whether any of it worked. If it did not work, I will say that too.

That is the whole reason I own this thing instead of renting space on somebody else's platform. Nobody can take the data away from me, and nobody gets to decide whether I am allowed to talk about it.

Go pull your scroll depth today.

Then look at the number and be honest about what it is telling you.

Mine told me I built a beautiful porch and forgot to open the door.