What I found auditing 1,060 websites.
Over the past months I ran the same technical audit across 1,137 real business websites. Seventy seven would not load. Here is what was wrong with the 1,060 that did, with the percentages, and how to check your own in about ten minutes.
About this data, before the numbers
- 1,137 websites of Dutch local service businesses and small online stores: physiotherapy, dental, veterinary, garages, chiropractic, skin clinics and similar, across Breda, Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Tilburg, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and other cities.
- The audit is automated and technical. It finds what a machine can measure: speed, headings, markup, security. It says nothing about whether the copy is any good or whether the design sells, which are usually the bigger problems.
- No business is named here and none will be. The percentages are the useful part.
Two things surprised me. The first is how little of this is difficult. Almost every fault below is an hour of work by someone who knows where to look, not a redesign. The second is that the businesses have no way of knowing. None of these problems produce a complaint. The visitor who leaves because a page took four seconds does not write in to say so, and the owner sees a site that looks fine on their own machine, on their own connection, with everything cached.
That gap is the whole reason this list is worth publishing.
Want your own site checked against the same list? It is free and takes me two working days. Get the site check
The findings, in order of how often they appeared
responded slowly
The single most common fault, and the one owners are least aware of. A slow first response happens before a single image loads, so no amount of design work hides it. Most were on shared hosting that costs a few euro a month and behaves like it.
Fixing this is usually a hosting decision rather than a development project, which makes it the cheapest big win on this list.
had no structured data at all
No LocalBusiness markup, so Google had to guess the opening hours, the address and the phone number from the page text. For a business people find on a map, this is the difference between appearing complete in results and appearing as a bare blue link.
It is an hour of work and it is free. It was missing on more than a quarter of sites.
had no meta description
Which means Google writes the snippet itself, pulling whatever text it finds first. Often that is a cookie notice or a navigation menu. The one line that decides whether someone clicks was left to an algorithm.
Roughly fifteen minutes per page, and nobody had done it.
had no H1 heading on the homepage
The main heading was styled text rather than a heading, usually because a page builder made it look right without making it mean anything. Google reads structure, not font size.
A further 17.4% had more than one H1, which creates the opposite problem: nothing is the main heading because everything is.
loaded insecure resources on a secure page
The padlock is there, but images or scripts are still being pulled over plain http. Browsers flag this, and on some it silently blocks the resource, so parts of the page simply do not appear for some visitors.
Almost always a leftover from a migration nobody finished.
did not load at all
Seventy seven of the 1,137 sites failed to respond or timed out entirely when checked. These are trading businesses with a website that was not answering.
Nobody had told them, because the people who find a dead site do not send an email about it.
What the platform mix tells you
A third of the sites ran WordPress, seventeen per cent WooCommerce and fifteen per cent Magento. That matters because the faults above are not platform problems. WordPress is not slow; WordPress on two euro hosting with twenty eight plugins is slow. The platform gets blamed for a decision nobody revisited after launch.
It also means most of these sites can be fixed rather than replaced, which is the cheaper answer and the one an agency selling rebuilds has an incentive not to mention.
How to check your own site in ten minutes
Every finding above is something you can verify yourself, free, without hiring anyone.
Speed
Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile score and at Time to First Byte specifically. If the server takes more than about half a second to respond before anything renders, that is the fault half these sites had.
Meta description and title
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and read what appears under each result.
If it is a fragment of a menu or a cookie banner, no description is set and Google is
improvising.
Headings
Right click the homepage, View Page Source, and search for <h1. You want
exactly one, and it should say what the business does rather than the company name.
Structured data
Paste your URL into Google's Rich Results Test. If you are a local business and nothing comes back, you are in the 27%.
Insecure resources
Open the page, press F12, and look at the Console tab for mixed content warnings. That is the 11.4%.
What this list does not cover
Everything that actually decides whether someone contacts you. Whether the page says what you do in the first five seconds. Whether the offer is clear. Whether there is a reason to choose you over the practice down the road. Whether the contact form asks for nine things when four would do.
A machine cannot measure any of that, which is why the automated audit is the start of the free check rather than the whole of it. The technical faults are simply the ones that are provable, common, and cheap to fix, so they are the honest place to begin.
Find out which of these apply to you.
Send your web address and you get the same audit, run by hand rather than in bulk, plus the parts a machine cannot check. Written, in two working days, free, and yours to hand to any provider you like.