The State of Small Business Web Design in 2026

Key findings

We found 423,009 businesses with a Google listing across the 24 cities, and sampled 131,514 of them at random. 83% list a website on their profile. The rest give customers nothing to click.

It gets worse. Among businesses that do list a website, 1.1% just link a Facebook page or a directory profile. Another 8.2% point to a site that didn’t load when we tried it. A dead link on your Google listing is arguably worse than no link.

Which industries skip websites the most? Hair Salons sit at the bottom: only 63% have one. SaaS lead at 97%.

If your business is in that no-website group, a website that pays for itself is kind of our thing.

For every audited site we check whether the page sets a mobile viewport, and Lighthouse adds a tap-target check on the subsample that gets a full run. 78% of sites pass, based on 69,915 checks (95% CI: 77.9% to 78.5%).

Sounds healthy, right? The catch is what the check means. Passing says the page scales on a phone. It says nothing about whether it’s pleasant to use there. Pair it with the speed numbers below and the picture dims fast.

We ran 69,560 full Lighthouse performance audits through Google’s PageSpeed Insights API on mobile settings. The average performance score: 58/100. Google’s own scale labels 0 to 49 as poor and 50 to 89 as needs improvement. The average small business site sits right in the struggling zone.

Hospitality run the slowest sites in our sample (average 44/100). Electricians run the fastest (64/100). The full spread is in the industry table below.

Slow pages bleed customers quietly. Here are nine easy ways to make your website load faster.

Chrome has marked plain HTTP pages as “not secure” since 2018. All these years later, 94% of audited small business sites serve over HTTPS, which still leaves 6% greeting customers with a browser warning.

The sloppier gap: only 88% of audited sites redirect plain HTTP traffic to the secure version. Type the bare address and on the rest you can land on the insecure copy, even when a certificate exists.

99% of audited sites have a title tag. From there the basics decay: 78% write a meta description, 74% put a proper H1 heading on the homepage, and 70% use schema markup.

Alt text is the quiet failure. The average homepage describes just 55% of its images, so screen readers and image search get nothing from the rest.

Alt text coverage is an average of per-site shares rather than a yes-or-no rate, so no interval is shown for it.

These are the exact basics our SEO service fixes first, because they’re the cheapest wins on the list.

A website that can’t capture a lead is a brochure. Just 28% of audited sites put a form right on the homepage. 37% publish a blog anywhere on the site, and 66% link their social profiles.

Want the easiest win on this whole page? Put a short form above the fold. Your competitors probably haven’t.

58% of audited sites run some kind of analytics. Google Analytics leads at 57%, with Tag Manager on 29% and Facebook’s pixel on 9%. Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar barely register.

The other 42% have no idea which marketing brings customers and which burns money. You can’t improve what you never see.

We could identify the platform on 70% of audited sites. WordPress dominates at 36%. Wix (8%) and Squarespace (8%) split the DIY crowd, Shopify carries the commerce sites at 5%, and GoDaddy’s builder holds 4%.

88% of sampled businesses hold at least one Google review. The average business carries 179 reviews at a 4.6 star average.

Notice the gap? The same owners who work hard on reviews let the website those reviews point to fall apart. Customers read the stars, click through, and land on a slow page with no form.

Industry rankings

Every industry gets a score out of 100 built from ten weighted checks (mobile, speed, reviews, HTTPS, blog, social, schema, titles, descriptions, analytics). The exact weights live on the methodology page.

Orthodontists lead with 78/100. Accountants trail with 65/100. Click a column to re-sort.

City rankings

Among cities with broad coverage, Scottsdale leads with an average score of 75/100. Watch the industries column: a city with only a few markets in can ride a lucky draw. All 24 cities are fully collected and speed-tested, so these averages are final.

Explore every market

Want your own numbers? Pick a city and an industry for a single market, or pick just one of the two to roll up a whole city or a whole industry. Either way you get every rate, how it compares to the average, and how many sites each check actually ran on.

Independents vs chains

Chains and franchises make up 16% of audited sites, and their websites come from corporate teams. Strip them out and the true small business picture emerges: independents blog less, install analytics less, and trail on nearly every basic.

Mobile and speed are left out of this comparison because those checks run on a Lighthouse subsample that isn’t split by chain status. Details on the methodology page.

How this data gets collected

For each city and industry we take a census of every business with a Google listing inside the city’s bounding box. Then we draw a seeded random sample, so nobody can cherry-pick, and fetch each listed website server-side for a homepage audit. A random subsample gets a full Lighthouse run through Google’s PageSpeed Insights API.

No survey answers. No purchased lists. Every rate carries its own sample size and a 95% confidence interval, and the explorer above pulls up any market’s numbers.

One bias worth knowing: the sample frame is businesses with a Google listing, so businesses with no Google presence at all aren’t represented. True averages are likely a bit lower than what you see here.

Use this data

Everything here is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Quote it, chart it, cite it in your article or your deck. Just link back to this page as the source.

Downloads: per-market aggregates as CSV (with confidence intervals) or as JSON. Both regenerate with every update to this page.

Writing a story and need a cut of the data this page doesn’t show? Email patrick@rapidweblaunch.com and you’ll get it.