What I found checking 1,089 business websites
In July and August 2026 I ran the same technical check on 1,089 Dutch business websites. Fifty six did not answer at all. Of the 1,033 that did, more than half were slow before a single image loaded. Here is every fault I found, how often, and how to check your own.
The short version
- 1,089 websites, all Dutch local businesses and small stores, checked between July and August 2026. 56 did not respond at all.
- Of the 1,033 that responded, 546 were slow to answer, 280 had no structured data and 278 had no meta description. 79% had at least one of the four faults below.
- Only 53 sites, 5.1% of them, had nothing wrong at the technical level.
- Almost every fault here is an hour of work, not a redesign. None of them produce a complaint, which is why they sit there for years.
I do not publish this to make anybody look bad. No business is named here and none will be. I ran these checks because I was looking for companies to write to, and the same faults kept coming up so often that the pattern was worth more than the list of names.
The thing that stayed with me is that none of this is hard to fix, and none of it is visible to the owner. A visitor who leaves because the page took five seconds does not write in to say so. The owner opens the site on their own machine, on their own connection, with everything already cached, and it looks fine.
Want the same check on your own site? It is free and comes back in two working days. Get the site check
How the check was run
So you can judge the numbers, or repeat them. I requested each homepage once, the way a first time visitor arrives, and recorded what came back. The check is automated and it looks only at the homepage. It measures what a machine can measure.
- Who. 1,089 Dutch businesses: physiotherapy practices, car garages, dental and veterinary practices, chiropractors, skin clinics, dietitians, midwives and similar trades, across Amsterdam, Breda, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Utrecht and other towns.
- When. 5 July 2026 to 20 August 2026.
- What counts as slow. The server took 2.5 seconds or more to return the HTML. That is before images, fonts or scripts. It is the floor under every other speed number.
- One site, one row. Where a site turned up in more than one round, only the most recent check counts. That is why the total here is 1,089 and not the 1,175 rows in my files.
- Not a random sample. These are small businesses I could have written to. They are not a sample of the whole web, and the findings should be read as what small local businesses look like, not what every website looks like.
More than half were slow before anything loaded
546 of the 1,033 sites that answered, 52.9%, took 2.5 seconds or more just to return the page. The middle of that group sat at 4.4 seconds. The slowest took 15 seconds, which is long enough that most people would have gone back to the results page and picked somebody else.
The reason this matters more than it sounds: this is the wait before the browser has anything at all to draw. Every image, every font and every script is queued behind it. A designer cannot fix it and a faster theme will not fix it. It is nearly always the hosting, and hosting is the cheapest thing on this page to change.
Everything that was wrong, in order
Twelve faults, counted across the 1,033 sites that responded. A site can carry several, and most did.
had no structured data
No markup telling Google it is a business, so the opening hours, the address and the phone number had to be guessed from the page text. For a business people find on a map, that is the difference between a complete result and a bare blue link.
It is an hour of work, it is free, and it was missing on more than a quarter of sites.
had no meta description
So Google writes the snippet itself from whatever text it finds first. Often that is a cookie notice or a menu. The one line that decides whether somebody clicks was left to a machine.
Fifteen minutes a page, and nobody had done it.
had no main heading
The words at the top were styled to look like a heading without being one, usually because a page builder made it look right without making it mean anything. Google reads the structure, not the font size. A further 17.2% had more than one main heading, which causes the opposite problem: nothing stands out as the subject.
Both are a one line change in the template.
Most sites carry more than one
Faults cluster. Across the 1,033 sites that responded I counted 3,339 faults in all, an average of 3.2 each. Only 53 sites came back clean.
That clustering is the useful part. A site that is slow is usually also missing its markup and its description, because all three come from the same thing: nobody has been responsible for the site since it launched.
The free check tells you which of these apply to your own site, in writing. Get the site check
What they were built on
Platform was detectable on 815 of the 1,089 sites.
| Platform | Sites | Share | Average faults |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 380 | 34.9% | 2.8 |
| Could not tell | 274 | 25.2% | none known |
| WooCommerce | 193 | 17.7% | 3.0 |
| Magento | 166 | 15.2% | 3.8 |
| Something else | 68 | 6.2% | 6.5 |
| Squarespace | 4 | 0.4% | none known |
| Wix | 3 | 0.3% | none known |
| Shopify | 1 | 0.1% | none known |
The platform matters less than people think, and the numbers say so. 380 WordPress sites averaged 2.8 faults. 166 Magento sites averaged 3.8. The gap between them is smaller than the gap between a site somebody maintains and a site nobody has opened since launch.
The same list, trade by trade
Only trades with at least twenty sites are shown, so a couple of bad examples cannot swing a row.
| Trade | Sites | Slow | No structured data | Average faults |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physiotherapy | 254 | 69% | 22% | 3.2 |
| Car garages | 222 | 63% | 33% | 3.5 |
| Dentists | 121 | 49% | 32% | 2.8 |
| Vets | 57 | 42% | 19% | 4.8 |
| Chiropractors | 43 | 49% | 23% | 2.6 |
| Skin clinics | 27 | 48% | 11% | 2.5 |
| Orthodontists | 27 | 22% | 41% | 3.0 |
| Speech therapy | 26 | 19% | 42% | 3.3 |
| Dietitians | 24 | 33% | 38% | 4.0 |
| Midwives | 23 | 17% | 26% | 2.7 |
| Osteopaths | 21 | 29% | 14% | 2.4 |
Physiotherapy practices were the slowest group I checked, and car garages were close behind. Speech therapists and orthodontists were the fastest, but they were the most likely to be missing their structured data. Nobody is good at all of it.
What none of this measures
Being straight about the limits, because they are large.
- Only the homepage. The pages that sell, the service pages, were not checked. In my experience they are usually worse.
- Nothing about the writing. Whether the page explains what the business does, whether the prices are clear, whether there is a reason to get in touch. That is almost always the bigger problem, and no machine can score it.
- One request, one moment. A site that was slow on the afternoon I checked it might be quick now. The pattern across 1,089 sites is sturdier than any single row.
- No rankings. I did not look at what any of these sites rank for, so nothing here says a fault cost anyone a position.
How to check your own site
All of this is visible from the outside, so you can do it yourself in about ten minutes.
- The wait before anything appears. Open your homepage on a phone on mobile data, not on the office wifi. If the screen is blank past a slow count of three, that is the fault 52.9% of these sites had.
- The snippet. Search for your business name. If the description under your name reads like a menu or a cookie notice, you have no meta description.
- The markup. Paste your homepage into Google's Rich Results Test. If it finds nothing, you are in the 27.1%.
- The heading. Right click the big words at the top of your homepage and choose Inspect. If it does not say h1, it is decoration.
- The padlock. If the address bar shows a warning on a page that should be secure, something on it is still loading over http. That was 117 sites.
Common questions
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes, and I would rather you did than repeat something from a survey nobody can check. Please say they come from 1,089 Dutch small business websites checked between July and August 2026, and link back so a reader can see the method. If you want a cut of the data that is not on this page, ask me and I will run it.
Why are the businesses not named?
Because they did not ask to be in a study. The percentages are the useful part, and naming a local practice for having a slow website would be a cheap way to make a point. It would also be a strange thing to do on a site that sells privacy work.
Why only Dutch businesses?
That is where I was looking for clients when I ran the checks. I would expect the same pattern in any European market, because the causes are the same: a site built once, handed over, and never opened again. I have not measured that, so I am not claiming it.
Does a fault here mean the business is losing money?
Not on its own. A slow site with no competition may be fine. It matters when somebody is choosing between you and two others, which is the moment most of these businesses are found in. What I can say is that these are the cheapest things to fix on any site, and they are fixed the same way whoever does them.
Will you check my site against this list?
Yes, free, in writing, within two working days. It is the same check, run by hand, with the faults ranked by what they are worth fixing rather than by what is easy for me. You keep the report whether or not you ever reply.
Find out which of these apply to your site
Send your web address and you get the same check, run by hand, written up within two working days. Free, and yours to hand to whoever does the work, even if that is not me.
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