OPEN DATA · UPDATES ITSELF
What is actually broken on small business websites
A live count of what the free website health check finds. Every run adds to it anonymously: no addresses are kept, no page contents, nothing identifying — only which checks passed and which did not. Free to quote with a link.
THE NUMBERS
Every check, ranked by how often it fails
The list below is ordered by how often a check comes back as a problem rather than a pass. It is a live count, not a survey — it moves whenever somebody uses the tool.
How the sample was built, plainly. The starting set was seeded deliberately: I ran the check across a batch of real West Valley service businesses — plumbers, dentists, locksmiths, pest control, auto repair — plus a handful of the web agencies who sell maintenance, so the baseline was not an empty table. Everything after that is whoever uses the tool. It is a small sample and a self-selected one, and people tend to check sites they already suspect are unhealthy, so read it as “what tends to be wrong when somebody bothers to look”, not “what is wrong with every website”. The site count above is the honest denominator.
Every run of the free check adds to these numbers. Nothing identifying is stored — no addresses, no page contents, just which checks passed and which did not.
| What was checked | Share of checks where it was a problem |
|---|---|
| Images with width and height set | 100% |
| HTML document size | 76% |
| Render-blocking scripts in the head | 69% |
| Page title length | 40% |
| Link preview tags (Open Graph) | 40% |
| Link to a Google Maps listing | 37% |
| LocalBusiness structured data | 35% |
| Meta description | 33% |
| One clear H1 heading | 29% |
| Insecure resources on a secure page | 20% |
| Opening hours published | 20% |
| Image alt text | 18% |
| Server response time | 17% |
| Structured data present | 15% |
| Postal address published | 15% |
| Canonical URL declared | 13% |
| Tappable phone number | 13% |
| robots.txt present and sane | 7% |
| Page language declared | 7% |
| Text compression enabled | 4% |
| Redirect chains (two or more hops, among sites that redirect) | 4% |
| Page returns a clean 200 | 2% |
| XML sitemap found and working | 2% |
| Mobile viewport declared | 1% |
| Served over HTTPS | 0% |
| Page is indexable | 0% |
Updated automatically. Last change 2026-09-13. Free to quote with a link back.
Next step: run the check on your own site and add to it, or read how to tell whether your web guy is actually doing anything. Or read the write-up: what is wrong with most small business websites, the findings from the first 29 sites explained one by one.
License: free to reproduce with attribution and a link to this page.