The State of Small Business Web Design in 2026

Key findings

17% of local businesses still have no website

We found 127,157 businesses with a Google listing in the cities collected so far, and sampled 47,097 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, 1.2% just link a Facebook page or a directory profile. Another 7.9% 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 59% have one. SaaS lead at 96%.

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

88% pass Google’s mobile checks

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. 88% of sites pass, based on 30,138 checks (95% CI: 88.0% to 88.7%).

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.

The average mobile speed score is 57 out of 100

We ran 10,764 full Lighthouse performance audits through Google’s PageSpeed Insights API on mobile settings. The average performance score: 57/100. 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 43/100). Lawyers 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.

5% still don’t use HTTPS

Chrome has marked plain HTTP pages as “not secure” since 2018. All these years later, 95% of audited small business sites serve over HTTPS, which still leaves 5% greeting customers with a browser warning.

The sloppier gap: only 89% 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.

Most sites nail the title tag. Then it falls apart.

97% of audited sites have a title tag. From there the basics decay: 76% write a meta description, 75% put a proper H1 heading on the homepage, and 71% 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.

Only 28% put a contact form on the homepage

A website that can’t capture a lead is a brochure. Just 28% of audited sites put a form right on the homepage. 38% publish a blog anywhere on the site, and 67% link their social profiles.

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

42% fly blind with no analytics

58% of audited sites run some kind of analytics. Google Analytics leads at 57%, with Tag Manager on 30% 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.

WordPress still runs 36% of small business websites

We could identify the platform on 69% of audited sites. WordPress dominates at 36%. Wix (8%) and Squarespace (7%) split the DIY crowd, Shopify carries the commerce sites at 5%, and GoDaddy’s builder holds 4%.

Reviews are the healthiest habit: 89% have at least one

89% of sampled businesses hold at least one Google review. The average business carries 185 reviews at a 4.574994160986902 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 82/100. Accountants trail with 67/100. Click a column to re-sort.

City rankings

Among cities with broad coverage, Denver leads so far with an average score of 80/100. Watch the industries column: a city with only a few markets in can ride a lucky draw. Collection is still sweeping, so city averages will move as the remaining markets land.

Explore every market

Want your own numbers? Pick a city, an industry, or both. Every collected market shows its score, its rates, and how it compares to the average across everything we’ve audited.

Independents vs chains

Chains and franchises make up 18% 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.