Website Audit · August 2026
Everything I found, what I already fixed along the way, and exactly what to do next. Every number in here was measured, not guessed.
Prepared for Joy Sherman by Dez Darville
Overview
Your Connecticut business is healthy and climbing. The softness sits on the international side, and it is not a demand problem. Google showed your international booking page 302 times in four weeks and fewer than one in a hundred of those people clicked through. Connecticut took 42 inquiries in sixty days and is rising. International took 10 in the same period, and that is the side where, in your own words, the revenue is.
The audit traced why. The guests most likely to book were being routed in circles. Your Facebook page and your Instagram bio both funnel through one link page, and its INTERNATIONAL SAILING button sent people back to your homepage instead of your trips. Five sold out 2024 and 2025 trip pages were still live and still being found in Google. An email signup popup opens on top of your inquiry form and covers the submit button on a phone. And underneath all of it, a guest who fills in either form hears nothing at all afterward.
| The INTERNATIONAL SAILING button on your link page, the page behind both your Facebook and Instagram profiles, now takes guests to your By the Cabin trips instead of back to your homepage | Live |
| A dead link inside your Privacy Policy, where the words "clicking here" went nowhere when clicked, now works | Live |
| Five old trip pages from 2024 and 2025, all sold out trips, deleted so a guest searching Google can no longer land on a trip that no longer exists | Live |
| Forwarding set up for those five deleted pages, explained just below | Waiting on Wix |
Those five deleted trip pages still show up in Google, and people still click them. Forwarding means anyone who clicks one of those old links gets carried automatically to the right current page, your Greece or Croatia trips, instead of hitting a dead end. I set this up inside your Wix account and confirmed it is saved correctly, but a fault on Wix's side is stopping their forwarding tool from switching anything on, and I have escalated it with their support. I did not stop there. I dug into the platform and found a second route that bypasses their broken tool entirely, using the developer layer your site already has, and I have verified the method against Wix's own documentation. Building it is a small piece of work, and it is the first thing I would do in the implementation phase, so your old links forward properly whether Wix fixes their tool or not. Until then, those old links show a standard "page not found," which is already better than showing a sold out 2025 trip.
The SAIL THE WORLD button on your homepage was on my fix list, and I briefly pointed it at By the Cabin. On a closer look I put it back the way you had it. Your homepage already is your international page, and the BY THE CABIN button sits directly beside SAIL THE WORLD, so my change only duplicated its neighbour. That button was never broken. It is redundant, which is a layout question, and rather than leave you hanging, my recommended direction is laid out in the trip template section below.
Priorities
In the order I would fix them, and what each one is costing while it waits.
The problemI filled in and submitted your forms four times, on a computer and on an iPhone, using three different email addresses, exactly as a guest would. Every one arrived safely in your records, and not one produced any reply to the guest, not even a receipt. Meanwhile the text directly above both forms promises that Joy will get back to you within 2 hours or sooner.
What it costs youThat promise rests entirely on you personally seeing the notification. On a charter day, a guest who inquires at ten in the morning has no signal anything happened until you are back on land. The guests most likely to fill in a form and keep shopping other companies are exactly the international travelers you most want.
In your numbers: one Croatia cabin is worth $4,000 to $5,000, your own pricing. If silence costs you even one cabin booking a season, this single gap costs more than every other item in this audit combined.
The fixAn instant automatic reply on both forms, built with tools already inside the Wix account you pay for today, with no new software and no added monthly cost. It confirms what the guest asked about, tells them when to expect you, and gives them your phone number in the meantime.
What changesYour 2 hour promise stops depending on your attention. Every guest gets an answer within seconds, even when you are on the water.
The problemFacebook offers guests exactly one link, and Instagram offers exactly one link, and both point at the same little four button page. Until this week, the button on that page marked INTERNATIONAL SAILING sent people back to your homepage. A guest who saw your Croatia post, tapped your only link, and pressed the button that said international, started over at the top of your site.
What it costs youOver four weeks Google showed your international booking page 302 times and fewer than one in a hundred clicked through. Both of your busiest social channels were pouring your most interested visitors into a loop, while Croatia sits with open cabins at $4,000 to $5,000 each.
The fixAlready done and live. That button now goes straight to your By the Cabin trips. The bigger version of this fix is collapsing the whole path so every trip page carries its own inquiry button, instead of sending guests through a page that asks them to choose again.
What changesThe distance between seeing a trip and asking about it drops from three clicks to one.
The problemI measured every key page the standard way Google does, on a simulated mobile connection, five separate runs each, keeping the middle result so no lucky or unlucky run skews it. Your homepage takes 27 seconds for its main content to appear and weighs 17.3 megabytes. For scale, a healthy page weighs 2 to 3 megabytes. The single largest item is your background video. The file on your account is 42.3 megabytes, and even the smaller version Wix serves visitors is about 7.5 megabytes, downloaded on every single visit.
What it costs youGuests on a phone at a marina, on hotel wifi, or on any slower connection wait the longest, and they are the likeliest to give up. A slow site is also the most common reason a website feels unprofessional to someone who cannot say why.
The fixThe fix is not to remove the moving water, which is part of the look you own and I promised to keep. I would replace the source file with a short, properly compressed loop a fraction of the size, with a still photo that appears instantly while it loads. Then deal with the Instagram feed, which pulls 3 more megabytes from Instagram's servers on every visit, and compress the oversized photos.
What changesSame feel, a fraction of the weight. The realistic target is moving your speed scores from the low 50s into the 70s, and I would show you the before and after side by side.
The walk through
I walked your website the way a real guest does, starting from Facebook, Instagram, and Google, all the way through to submitting your forms on a computer and on an iPhone.
Instagram, 1,559 followers, sends everyone to one four button link page, and the button fix I made there is live and verified. Facebook, 1,300 followers with 96 percent recommending you across 25 reviews, offers exactly one link, and as of this weekend that link goes straight to the homepage rather than the button page, so Facebook guests skip the buttons entirely and land on the general front door. One thing worth knowing. Those 25 glowing reviews sit buried in a tab where no guest will ever find them.
Google is more awkward. On a bare "Joyride Charters" search, who shows up first depends on where the searcher is standing. From Connecticut your listing leads the map results, while a searcher farther away can be shown a Florida business with the same name first, because Google's map results favor whatever is nearby. Your listing itself is healthy, 4.7 stars from 15 reviews with a working website button, but the Florida namesake carries 50 reviews to your 15, and review count is the one lever here that is fully in your hands. Your listing on Bing, the other major search engine, shows a perfect 5 stars from 16 reviews but lists a different street address than Google does, which is why I asked you which address is correct.
From any trip page, a guest reaching an actual inquiry form takes 2 to 3 clicks. Trip page, then the Choose Your Sail page that asks them to pick a side, then finally the form. Guests coming from social media add another step before that. Every extra step loses a share of people, and travelers in their fifties and sixties are the least patient with a maze.
Both forms work correctly. Every submission I made arrived intact in your records, on computer and on iPhone. Two pieces of friction sit around them. On the Connecticut form, one instruction asks the guest to reason about a completely different product mid form, worth rewording. And both forms end with a "confirm you are human" security check, which is legitimate protection but one more hurdle for older guests.
Then there is the popup. An email newsletter signup window opens on top of your pages, and it is not only a phone problem, it appears on desktop too. On the iPhone it opened directly over the inquiry form and covered the SUBMIT button. It does have a clear X and closes easily, so it is friction rather than a wall, and it is exactly the mobile form problem you described to me. The form was never broken. The popup lands on top of it, at the precise moment a guest is already typing their email address into your inquiry form, which makes a second email request confusing. The fix is a settings change, not a rebuild: stop it appearing on the two inquiry pages, and show it once per visitor instead of every visit.
One quiet discovery from the testing, included for honesty: when a submission looks robotic enough to trip Wix's spam filter, it is discarded silently while the guest still sees the thank you message. It took three deliberately artificial test entries to trigger this, so a real guest will rarely hit it, but when it happens nobody is told and there is nowhere to look for what was lost. It is a limitation of the form system worth knowing about, and one more reason the instant reply matters: a guest who gets no email knows to call.
| Form | June | July, to the 27th | 60 day total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connecticut inquiry | 15 | 27 | 42 |
| International inquiry | 6 | 3 | 10 |
| Waiver | 8 | 1 | 9 |
| Registration | 9 | 2 | 11 |
The sixty day window opens in late May, so the international total includes one inquiry from the last days of May that sits before the June column.
Connecticut nearly doubled month over month. International runs at roughly a quarter of Connecticut's volume and declined inside the window, while Google was showing your international page 302 times with almost nobody clicking. So the softness you felt is real, it sits on the international side, and it sat there while the path into that form had a button sending guests in circles and a popup covering the submit button. That is why I treat these fixes as revenue work, not housekeeping.
One more thing this table shows, and it may be the most valuable sentence in this report. Sixty days produced 42 Connecticut inquiries but only 9 waivers and 11 registrations. Some drop off is natural, not every inquiry can book. But that spread means roughly three out of four people who raised their hand received no second touch once the first conversation stalled or was missed. The instant reply in the findings above is the floor. A simple follow up note to inquiries that go quiet is the ceiling, and against cabins worth $4,000 to $5,000 it would outearn every speed fix in this report.
Performance
Every number below is the middle result of five separate test runs per page, using Google's standard mobile test. A guest on strong wifi sees better than this. A guest on cellular at a marina sees worse.
| Page | Score out of 100 | Main content appears in | Page weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 52 | 27.1 seconds | 17.3 megabytes |
| Connecticut Sailing | 54 | 25.2 seconds | 10.1 megabytes |
| By the Cabin | 38 | 7.5 seconds | 10.3 megabytes |
| Croatia | 37 | 13.9 seconds | 10.3 megabytes |
| Contact | 55 | 3.1 seconds | 10.1 megabytes |
For scale: a healthy score is 70 or better, and a good mobile page weighs 2 to 3 megabytes. Yours carry 10 to 17.
Three causes are fixable and one is not. The background video is the largest single item, covered above. The Instagram feed embedded on your homepage pulls 3 or more megabytes from Instagram's servers on every visit, and can be replaced with a static grid of your best photos or set to load only when a guest scrolls down to it. And several photos on the site are 8 to 12 megabyte originals that can be compressed with no visible difference. What cannot be fixed is roughly 1 megabyte of Wix's own platform code, which every Wix site carries. I tell you that so the target stays honest: the aim is the 70s, not a perfect score.
Housekeeping note: your media library also holds several large raw video uploads, one of 321 megabytes, that do not appear on any page. They do not slow the site down, but they eat the storage space your plan pays for.
Visibility
From your own site analytics, with Google's search data connected inside it, plus live checks I ran on Google and Bing. These are baseline numbers, the property is too new for trend claims.
In 28 days: 757 people visited across 1,152 sessions. Google search showed your pages 1,299 times across 264 different searches and delivered 40 clicks. Of those 40 clicks, 34 were people who searched your name. In other words, search currently brings you people who already know you. Almost nobody finds you by searching for the thing you sell, like "boat charter Connecticut," and that is the growth lane.
The earlier report you were shown put your AI visibility at zero. Your own data disagrees. Your analytics show roughly 20 visitors arriving from AI assistants in 28 days, and your Wix panel has logged 309 questions asked about your business through AI. Small numbers, but not zero, and they are measured on your own account rather than asserted from outside.
I also checked the file on your site that tells automated visitors what they may read. Every major AI system, the ones behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, is currently allowed in. Nothing is locking them out. That matters because none of the content work helps while the door is shut, and yours is open. The work is giving those systems something clean to quote: a proper listing of who you are, where you are, and what you offer, written into the page in the structured format they trust, which your site currently lacks.
Two findings here with money attached. First, guests were landing from Google on your sold out trip pages, one dead 2025 Greece page alone was shown 240 times in 28 days, and those pages are now gone. Second, your international booking page was shown 302 times with fewer than one in a hundred clicking, which tells me its title and description in Google are not earning the click, on top of everything else in this report.
On your listings around the web: your Google profile is correct, though searchers outside Connecticut can see a same-name Florida business first, and that business holds more than three times your review count. Your Bing listing disagrees with Google about your street address. Your LinkedIn page says fourteenth year when the business is 22 years old. And your reviews, 4.7 stars on Google, 5 on Bing, 96 percent recommend on Facebook, appear nowhere on your own website.
The work
Everything found, sorted by who should do it. Some of these are genuinely yours and take five minutes. The rest is the work I would take off your plate.
| Fix the "Worldwinde" typo in your Facebook page bio | 1 min |
| Update LinkedIn from "14th year" to 22 years | 1 min |
| Tell me which street address is correct, and I align Bing with Google | 1 answer |
| Reclaim ownership of your Google Search Console. This is the tool where Google reports how people find you: the exact searches, the clicks, and any problems Google finds with your site. Right now it is verified under an outside account, likely a previous designer called Swell Design, which means your search history lives in someone else's hands and Google's warnings about your site go to them, not you. Two ways to fix it: email them and ask to be added as owner, or skip them entirely and I verify ownership fresh through your own domain and remove the stale account for you | 1 email, or I handle it |
| The second Instagram handle I spotted in July, @joyridechartersbda, has since disappeared from Instagram, so I only need to confirm that was your doing | 1 answer |
| Action | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Instant automatic reply on both inquiry forms. Today a guest who inquires hears nothing until you personally answer, even though your site promises a reply within 2 hours. A traveler comparing three operators usually books with whoever responds first, so the instant reply keeps you first in line every time, at any hour, on any day. At 4 to 5 thousand dollars a cabin, one saved inquiry pays for this many times over | The highest value item in this audit |
| Stop the signup popup opening on the two inquiry pages, and show it once per visitor | Removes the friction sitting on your money pages |
| Replace the background video file with a compressed loop plus an instant still image | The single biggest speed win, keeps the look |
| Replace or defer the Instagram feed, and compress oversized photos site wide | The rest of the speed picture |
| Write your business details into the pages in the structured format Google and AI systems trust | You currently have almost none of this |
| Rename the eight identical LEARN MORE buttons so each says which trip it opens | Guests and Google both stop guessing |
| Give the homepage one job. Right now it tries to speak to two different guests at once, the Connecticut day sailor and the international traveler, and neither gets a clear path. The homepage becomes a simple front door with one obvious door for each journey, and By the Cabin becomes the page every international guest lands on, the way the trip template section lays out | Settles the SAIL THE WORLD question for good |
| Tidy the page headings so each page declares one clear subject instead of three | Helps every search and AI system read you |
| Add descriptions to the 6 photos missing them, of 76 on the homepage. The six: the overhead shot of your sailboat on the water, the three catamarans rafted together in a blue Greek bay, the sunset harbor in Croatia, the small pink Meetup logo, and two images inside the Instagram feed widget, which fix themselves when that widget is replaced | You are already at 92 percent, finish the job |
| Put your reviews on your own website | Your best trust asset, currently invisible |
| Show Connecticut pricing on the page | Guests stop phoning you to ask |
| Carefully resolve the half installed language translation app. Your site carries a Wix add-on built to translate pages into other languages. It was never finished being set up: English is its only language and nothing was ever translated, so it does nothing for guests, but it sits wired into the same machinery that controls the link forwarding below | It is the likely reason the forwarding will not switch on, and removing it wrongly would destroy work, so it gets handled with care |
| Straighten the old forwarding chains. Web addresses from past seasons still float around the internet, in old emails, old posts, and Google's memory, and forwarding is what carries a guest who clicks one to the right current page. Some of yours forward in a chain: one old Abaco link hops through four retired pages before it finally lands. Every hop slows the guest, and Google trusts the final page a little less with each jump. The fix points each old address straight at its destination in one hop | Waiting on the same Wix fix |
| Repair the two broken blog links and the contact page button that links to itself | Loose ends from the link sweep |
| Connect your site to Bing's webmaster tools | Bing feeds ChatGPT and Copilot, part of the AI answer |
One thing I would refer out rather than do: filming new footage, if you ever want a fresh hero video. Compressing the beautiful footage you already have needs no filming at all.
The field
Six real by the cabin operators, scored 1 to 10 on the things that decide whether a guest books. These are my judgments applied to evidence I captured from each of their websites in July 2026.
| What guests look for | Joyride | Dream Yacht | Moorings | Festiva | Seafarer | AdventureWomen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prices visible before asking | 3 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 8 |
| Ease of booking | 4 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 9 |
| Trust proof on their site | 2 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 10 | 8 |
| Trip page clarity | 5 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 9 |
| Fit for solo travelers 50 plus | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 10 |
| Destination pages structure | 4 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 7 |
| Average | 4.0 | 6.7 | 7.2 | 7.3 | 6.7 | 8.5 |
What the strong ones do: The Moorings shows single and double cabin prices side by side. Festiva has a live calendar and near instant booking. Seafarer leads with 622 verified reviews and accreditation badges right on the homepage, and even they leak, their solo travelers page currently returns an error. AdventureWomen is the closest match to your audience: a named testimonial from a widow, roommate matching so solo travelers pay no single supplement, a live "only 4 spots left" counter, and full self serve booking.
One of those is worth copying as an offer rather than as a website feature. Roommate matching, where a solo traveler shares a cabin instead of paying for both beds, is the strongest lever there is for the solo women who are your best audience. You already do this informally. Two of your own recent international inquiries asked for exactly it in their messages, one writing that she would share a room with another female traveler. Saying it plainly on your trip pages, in those words, costs nothing to build.
Here is what none of them can say. A woman captain, USCG Master since 2004, who hosts every trip herself, with a sold out track record. Dream Yacht and The Moorings sell fleets. You sell Joy.
Nothing in this table asks you to become them. Your lowest score, trust at 2, is also the most fixable number on the board, because the proof already exists. It just is not on your website yet.
The template
The answer to the template you asked for. Every trip page carries the same nine blocks in the same order, and eventually you publish a new trip by filling in a form instead of building a page.
Today every trip page on your site is built by hand, and behind the scenes there is no organized trip data at all. The implementation work builds you a simple trip catalog, destination, dates, price, cabins left, itinerary, photos, plus one master page design wired to it. After that, launching a new trip means typing its details into your dashboard, and updating "cabins left" is a thirty second edit from your phone on the dock. That is the piece that makes all of this sustainable without me.
Your website also splits naturally into two lanes, Connecticut day sails and international trips, and every guest should be sorted into their lane within one click. The Connecticut lane already works, 42 inquiries in sixty days and climbing. Protect it, and answer its one known complaint by putting prices on the page. The international lane is where the blueprint above earns its keep.
The SAIL THE WORLD reversal earlier in this report deserves a real answer, not a shrug. The confusion exists because your homepage is doing two jobs at once: the front door for everyone, and the landing page for international charters. My recommended direction is to let By the Cabin become the true international landing page, point the menu's INTERNATIONAL CHARTERS entry there, and give the homepage one job, greeting every guest and sorting them into their lane within one click. The five card strip in the middle of your homepage already wants to be that sorter. Once that is true, SAIL THE WORLD either points somewhere meaningful or retires, and no button duplicates its neighbour. Because that change touches design, menus and copy together it belongs in the implementation work, but the destination is decided, and I would bring you two or three mocked up options to choose between rather than asking you to imagine it.
The road ahead
Ordered by money at stake, not by size of task. Croatia has open cabins now, so everything touching the international path comes first.
What to watch: international inquiries per week, against the current baseline of 10 in sixty days versus Connecticut's 42. The signal these fixes are working is that gap narrowing while Croatia still has cabins to sell.
What to watch: people finding you by searching for what you sell rather than your name, and how long it takes you to launch a trip page yourself. The target is under an hour, on your own.
Audience messaging, a content to booking map, and an analytics tracking plan, each deferred at your request. The Croatia email campaign, which I can quote separately while those cabins are open. And video production, which I would refer out. A few pages also sat outside this audit's tested path: your deposit page, the guest portal, the call scheduling page, and a travel protection form I found late in your records with 14 submissions. A review of the payment and paperwork flow is the first thing I would put on the implementation list.
Two more assets surfaced while I worked, and they belong on that same list. Your waiver and registration records hold several hundred past guests with email addresses, people who already paid, already sailed, and already trust you, which is the warmest possible audience for open Croatia cabins. And the same automation tool that will send your instant reply can also ask happy guests for a Google review a few days after their sail, which is how 15 reviews in 22 years becomes a number that matches how good the trips actually are. Everything in this pack is yours to keep, and it works whether the person implementing it is me or anyone else.