ORIGINAL RESEARCH · SNAPSHOT OF 29 SITES · SEPTEMBER 13, 2026
What is wrong with most small business websites?
We ran an identical set of 26 checks against 29 real small business websites — plumbers, dentists, locksmiths, pest control, auto repair, and a few of the agencies that build for them. The average score was 84 out of 100, which sounds fine. Every single site failed the same image check. Three quarters were still blocking the page from painting. Half sent visitors through a redirect before showing them anything.
WHAT THIS IS
Nothing here is exotic
Every problem below is a default. Nobody chose it. A page builder shipped it, a plugin added it, or a theme has always done it that way, and then nobody looked again. That is what makes the list useful: the fixes are boring, cheap, and mostly one-time.
It also means a site can look completely fine to the person who owns it. None of this shows up when you load your own homepage on your own laptop on your own wifi. It shows up on a phone, on cell data, for someone who has never been to your site before.
The percentages below are how many of the 29 sites had that problem. Live running totals — updated every time anyone uses the free checker — are on the data page. Those figures will not match these: they count every check run since, repeats included, and their redirect row counts only chains of two or more redirects rather than any redirect. The numbers on this page are the first 29 sites, frozen on September 13, 2026.
Sites were chosen from ordinary Google results for service queries in the West Valley of Phoenix. Real sites, nobody warned in advance. It is not a random sample of the web and it is not big enough to be a survey.
THE FINDINGS
What was broken, in order
100% — images published with no width or height
All 29 of them. When an image has no dimensions in the HTML, the browser cannot reserve space for it, so it draws the text and then shoves it down when the picture lands. That is the jump you feel when you reach for a phone number and hit something else instead. Google measures it as Cumulative Layout Shift and counts it as one of three Core Web Vitals. Check it in ten seconds: load your site on a phone on cell data and watch the first two seconds. If anything moves, you have it.
77% — scripts in the head that block the page from painting
Three out of four sites load JavaScript in the head with no defer or async attribute. The browser stops, fetches it, runs it, and only then goes back to drawing the page. It is almost always a chat widget, a tracking pixel, or a font loader nobody has looked at since the day it went in. View source, search for script src, and count how many appear before the closing head tag without the word defer or async.
73% — HTML documents that are simply too heavy
This is not about images. It is the HTML itself: inline styles repeated on every element, wrapper divs nested six deep, a stylesheet for a slider on a page that has no slider. On a phone on a weak connection this is the first thing that has to arrive before anything else can begin, and page builders are the usual source.
50% — a redirect before the visitor sees anything
Half the sites sent people through at least one extra stop before the real page: http to https, or non-www to www, or an old URL to a new one, and sometimes all three in a row. Each hop is a full round trip. Chains also confuse crawlers about which URL is the real one. Type your domain with no https and no www, then watch where the address bar settles.
47% — no link preview tags
Nearly half had no Open Graph tags at all. Paste the URL into a text message, LinkedIn, Facebook or Slack and you get a grey box with a bare domain instead of a title, a description and a picture. This one is free, it is usually a plugin setting, and it decides whether anyone clicks the link a happy customer just shared.
40% — page titles the wrong length
Too long and Google rewrites it into something you did not choose. Too short and it says nothing worth clicking. Either way the title is the one line a person reads before deciding, and it is the easiest thing on this list to fix, because it is a text field.
38% no map link, 34% no LocalBusiness markup, 31% no hours, 28% no address
These are local service businesses. More than a third do not tell a machine, in a form a machine can read, where they are or when they are open. Google, Apple Maps and every AI assistant answering who is open near me right now reads structured data first and guesses second. Guessing is how the wrong hours end up on your own listing.
0% — the things everybody already gets right
Every site returned a clean 200. Every site was on HTTPS. Every site declared a mobile viewport. Every site had a working sitemap. The 2015 problems are solved. What is left is the category of problem that never announces itself, which is exactly why it survives.
Seven questions, one email. If the replies are specific, you are in better shape than most people paying for this.
THE SCORE
Why an average of 84 out of 100 is misleading
A score averages your failures away. A site can pass twenty checks and still be slow on a phone, invisible in a map pack and ugly when shared — because the four things it failed are the four that cost money, and the twenty it passed are table stakes.
So read the list, not the number. The useful question is never what did I score. It is which of these am I doing, and how long would it take to stop doing it.
Nothing above is scored on opinion. Every finding is a pass or fail on a specific, checkable condition, and no page is judged on its design.
CHECK YOUR OWN
Run the same 26 checks on your site
It takes about ten seconds. No email, no signup, no sales call afterwards unless you ask for one. You get the same list of pass and fail conditions used to produce the numbers above.
If something on the list is a problem and you would rather not deal with it yourself, that is what the teardown is for: I run the checks by hand, verify each finding, and send you a plain list of what is wrong and what it would take to fix.
One honest caveat. Fixing all of this will not, on its own, move you up the rankings. It removes the reasons a visitor leaves and the reasons a machine misreads you. That is worth doing regardless of what Google does next.
Next step: see the live running totals as more sites get checked, or read how to tell whether your web guy is doing anything.
Further reading: Google on Cumulative Layout Shift and LocalBusiness structured data.