Every Alberta house has the same wear pattern, and it starts at the door. Salt and gravel arrive on boots, get walked ten feet down the hall, and then spend the winter being ground into whatever finish is unlucky enough to be there.
Most people fight this at the far end: mopping the hallway, re-mopping the hallway, wondering why the hallway never looks right. The hallway is not the problem.
Salt does not sweep
Dry salt crystals are the easy half. The half that ruins floors is the brine: salt that has dissolved in melted snow, wicked into grout and unsealed stone, and then dried again as a white bloom. Sweeping moves the crystals and leaves the brine behind.
Warm water and a neutral cleaner, twice, with a rinse between, is what actually lifts it. On tile, that means getting into the grout lines with something stiffer than a mop head.
A boot tray is a piece of cleaning equipment
Not a doormat: a tray with a lip, deep enough to hold meltwater. It works because it changes where the water stops. Everything that would have travelled down your hall is now sitting in four square feet you can lift and rinse in a sink.
The good ones are ugly. Buy the ugly one.
What we actually do at the threshold
Our cleaners start at the entry on every visit, before anything else, because a clean entry stops re-contaminating the rooms behind it for the rest of the clean. It is the least glamorous part of the visit and it decides how the rest of it goes.