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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.

Share of checks where it was a problem

77%of checks found an oversized HTML document
67%of checks found images published without width and height
67%of checks found render-blocking scripts in the head

Out of 97 checks of 67 separate websites. The full ranking is below.

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.

97checks run, repeats included
67separate websites
84/100average score
What was checkedShare of checks where it was a problem
HTML document size77%
Images with width and height set67%
Render-blocking scripts in the head67%
Link to a Google Maps listing42%
LocalBusiness structured data38%
Page title length37%
Link preview tags (Open Graph)37%
Meta description32%
One clear H1 heading25%
Tappable phone number24%
Opening hours published23%
Postal address published22%
Insecure resources on a secure page19%
Image alt text18%
Server response time14%
Structured data present14%
Canonical URL declared12%
robots.txt present and sane6%
Page language declared6%
Redirect chains (two or more hops, among sites that redirect)4%
Text compression enabled3%
Page returns a clean 2002%
XML sitemap found and working2%
Mobile viewport declared1%
Served over HTTPS0%
Page is indexable0%

Updated automatically. Last change 2026-10-19. Free to quote with a link back.

Rows of server equipment in a rack
Nothing here is a survey. It is a live count.

License: free to reproduce with attribution and a link to this page.

By Bill Belcamino · Last updated

Cite this page: Average Idiot, “What is actually broken on small business websites”, averageidiot.com/data/ (updated ). Research data at averageidiot.com/data/ is licensed CC BY 4.0.