The data

We audited 2,732 small business websites. Only 5% were in good shape.

5%

of the small business websites we audited are in good shape.

We run a free audit for any business that asks, and we kept every result. This is what 2,732 of them look like under the hood, through October 2026.

2,732
websites audited
58.9
average score of 100
60
median score
289
never loaded at all

Almost nobody is in good shape

Of the 2,413 sites we could score, 109 came back at 80 or better. That is 5 percent. The median site scores 60, which is the polite way of saying most small business websites are half broken and their owners have no idea.

  • 10%Under 40243 sites
  • 37%40 to 59885 sites
  • 49%60 to 791,176 sites
  • 5%80 and over109 sites

Where would yours land?

Drag the slider. Every position is measured against the real spread of the 2,413 sites we scored, not a curve we invented.

60about average
050100

A site scoring 60 does better than 47% of the ones we tested.

Find your real score

What is actually wrong

Each audit reports one headline problem: the single thing costing that business the most. Across the 2,443 sites that responded, this is how often each one came first.

  1. 1

    The page takes too long to appear

    38%920 sites

    Most people will not wait. The visit is paid for, by an ad or by a search ranking, and then thrown away before anything loads.

  2. 2

    Images have no text description

    27%661 sites

    Google cannot read a picture. Every product photo without a description is a page that image search will never show, and a customer using a screen reader cannot use.

  3. 3

    No main headline on the page

    15%373 sites

    Google leans on the headline to work out what a business does. Without one it has to guess, and it usually guesses in favour of a competitor.

  4. 4

    Built for a desktop, opened on a phone

    6%147 sites

    The visitor lands on a page they have to pinch and drag to read. Most of these businesses get more than half their traffic from phones.

  5. 5

    Pages ship uncompressed

    5%110 sites

    Every visitor downloads several times more than they need to. It is a server setting, it takes minutes to turn on, and almost nobody has.

  6. 6

    The robots file is blocking crawlers

    4%103 sites

    A single line in a file most owners have never opened can keep parts of a site out of search entirely.

  7. 7

    The site tells Google not to list it

    2%40 sites

    Usually left over from when the site was being built. The business is paying for a website that is invisible on purpose.

The 11 percent that never answered

289 of the 2,732 sites we tried could not be loaded at all when the audit ran. Not slow. Not badly built. Unreachable. Some were gone for good, some were down that afternoon, and in almost every case the owner had no idea.

How we measured

Every number here comes from the same automated audit anyone can run on this site. It loads the homepage the way a visitor would, measures how long the main content takes to appear, and checks what decides whether Google can read and rank a page: headline structure, image descriptions, mobile layout, compression, the robots file and indexing directives. Sites that never responded are counted separately instead of scored as zero, so they do not drag the average down. These figures update as new audits come in.

Free audit

Check your own

It is free, takes about a minute, and you get the same report we used to build this page. You will find out which of the problems above is the one costing you most.

Run a free audit on your site

No signup required · Instant results