We checked 467 business websites. 72% show signs of dated technology.

Business website statistics: paying for clicks, sending them somewhere dated

These are not abandoned websites. Every business on the list was buying Google ads when we found it, which means it pays for each visitor who clicks through. 72% of them are paying to send people to a homepage that shows its age somewhere.

One in twenty does not adapt to a phone at all: the visitor gets the desktop page shrunk to fit and has to pinch and zoom to read it. The heaviest tenth of homepages start at 667 KB, which is a long wait on a phone with one bar of signal.

The problems we found most often, and what each one costs

Images with no description: 22% (105 sites)

Alt text is the short description written into the code behind a picture. Without it, a blind customer using a screen reader hears nothing, or a file name, where the photo of your work should be. Search engines get no words to go with the picture either, so your best photos do nothing for you in search.

A layout fixed to a desktop width: 18% (82 sites)

Part of the page is set to a width in pixels sized for a desktop screen. That is how a page ends up wider than a phone, with the customer dragging it sideways to find your number. It is the kind of thing the screen widths every Droom build is tested at exist to catch.

No preview when shared: 16% (77 sites)

When someone pastes your address into a text message, Facebook or LinkedIn, the app looks for a title, a description and an image to show. Without them the link arrives as a bare address. A customer sending your site to a friend is a recommendation, and a link with no picture is easy to scroll past.

No main heading on the homepage: 16% (75 sites)

The main heading is the line that tells software what the page is about. Search engines read it for exactly that, and so do the AI assistants people now ask for a recommendation. The words may be on screen, but if nothing marks them as the heading, a machine has to guess. It is one of several quiet ways a site can go missing from AI answers.

A meta keywords tag: 16% (73 sites)

A list of search terms hidden in the page’s code. Google stopped reading it years ago, so it does nothing for rankings, and it hands your list of target terms to any competitor who looks. It is a reliable sign the site was set up to an older rulebook and not revisited.

Toolkits a decade old: Bootstrap 3 on 13% (60 sites), Font Awesome 4 on 12% (56 sites)

These are building blocks a designer uses, and the Font Awesome version is from 2017 or older. Customers never see the names, but they date the last rebuild, and old building blocks are the reason a small change turns into a big quote.

Further down the list: an old-style image slider on 10% (47 sites), no favicon (the little icon on the browser tab) on 8% (39 sites), and the retired Universal Analytics tag on 7% (35 sites). That last one is Google’s old visitor-statistics tool, which Google has switched off, so whatever it was put there to count is no longer being counted.

Trade by trade

We publish a group only when it has at least 25 sites. Three groups were too small. In the rest:

• Trades and home services, 111 sites. 81% show at least one dated sign, the highest of any group. A layout fixed to a desktop width on 24% (27 sites).
• Home improvement, 25 sites. A layout fixed to a desktop width on 32% (8 sites), the highest of any group, and the heaviest median homepage at 272 KB.
• Clinics, 65 sites. 72% show a dated sign. Images with no description on 31% (20 sites), the highest of any group.
• Auto and marine, 35 sites. 71% show a dated sign. A meta keywords tag on 31% (11 sites), the highest of any group, and the retired Universal Analytics tag on 17% (6 sites).
• Professional services, 55 sites. 69% show a dated sign. Images with no description on 25% (14 sites), and no main heading on 18% (10 sites).
• Urgent services, 51 sites. 67% show a dated sign. No main heading and no share preview, each on 22% (11 sites), and 10% do not adapt to a phone, for the kind of business people ring in a hurry.
• Seniors and mobility, 43 sites. 65% show a dated sign, and 12% do not adapt to a phone, the highest of any group.
• Aesthetic, 33 sites. 61% show a dated sign, and the heaviest tenth of homepages start at 1012 KB, the highest figure in the study.

About the numbers

467 business websites we found advertising on Google, scanned in October 2026. 57 more could not be reached and are not counted. Only totals are published: no business is named here or anywhere else.

Is yours one of them?

The free Field Test checks your own site the way a customer uses it, on a real phone, and comes back with what fails on video and a fixed price to fix it. If the fixes add up to a rebuild, here is how a Droom website is built. And if nobody can make changes because the person who built the site has gone, start with the rescue checklist.