Field study · Run 1 · September 2026
Two of these businesses no longer have a website. Nobody had told them.
In September 2026 we pointed an automated browser at 28 currently-trading South Florida service businesses — roofers, landscapers, CPAs, a dentist, a caterer, a plumber, a banquet hall — and checked the unglamorous things a customer actually runs into. Not design. Plumbing.
- 28
- Businesses checked
- 2
- Domains that no longer resolve
- 64
- Median score out of 100
- 11
- Of 26 with no serious fault
Two of the 28 domains no longer resolve at all. Both businesses are still open, still answering the phone, and still handing that address out.
What broke
Every figure is out of the 26 sites that loaded. Each one was observed directly by a browser; nothing here is inferred.
10 of 26 had no contact form on the home page or the contact page
SeriousThe only route left was a phone call, or a mailto link that opens a desktop mail application most people no longer have configured. A form was counted as present if it appeared on the home page or on the page behind the site's own Contact link.
13 of 26 had a phone number that does not dial when tapped
SeriousSix had a broken or malformed tap-to-call link. Seven printed the number as plain text, so tapping it on a phone does nothing. One had joined two office numbers into a single link, producing a twenty-one digit string that connects to nothing — and it looked entirely normal on a laptop, which is why it survived.
6 of 26 showed a browser security warning to every visitor
SeriousTested with a direct TLS connection rather than by trusting the page to load. One certificate had expired, one was issued for a different domain, and two timed out entirely.
10 of 26 took longer than 2.5 seconds to become readable on a 4G phone
ModerateMeasured as largest contentful paint in a throttled mobile browser — the moment the main content becomes readable, not the moment the last request settles.
6 of 26 still carried template placeholder content
ModerateContent the site's builder never replaced, live in front of customers: an events calendar reading “Event Title 1”, a page carrying “Lorem Ipsum”, and images pointing at files that no longer exist.
4 of 26 still referenced infrastructure that was not theirs
ModerateOne referenced a hosting provider's staging server thirty-three times, including in its navigation. One loaded a script from a developer's own machine. One ran entirely on a free hosting subdomain while advertising its own domain in its email address.
21 of 26 offered no way to book or request a time online
ModerateRecorded as a warning rather than a failure. For some trades a phone call genuinely is the right front door; for most of these, nobody had built one.
17 of 26 carried a footer copyright two or more years out of date
CosmeticThe oldest read 2015. This costs nothing on its own, which is exactly what makes it useful: nobody neglects the free thing on a site they are otherwise maintaining, so it reliably marks where the expensive problems are.
4 of 26 published a personal email address as the business contact
CosmeticA further thirteen listed an address on a domain different from the website it appeared on, which usually signals an accounts-and-ownership tangle rather than a website problem.
The number worth sitting with is the eleven. Eleven of 26 had nothing serious wrong at all, and the distance between those and the worst — a spread of 7 out of 100 to 98 — did not correlate with budget. It correlated with whether anybody had looked since launch. Most of that gap closes in an afternoon, by whoever already has the login.
Check your own in five minutes
No tools and no sign-up. Do it on a phone, away from your office wifi.
- 1
Open your site on cellular data, not office wifi.
Office wifi is the fastest connection your site will ever see. Count the seconds until you can read something.
- 2
Tap your own phone number.
Thirteen of twenty-six did nothing. On a laptop every one of them looked normal.
- 3
Send yourself a message through your own contact form.
Start a timer, then check your inbox and your spam folder. This is the one that catches people, because a form that stops delivering produces no error, no bounce and no complaint.
- 4
Read your own footer.
Seventeen of twenty-six were two or more years stale.
- 5
Look at the address bar.
If it says Not Secure, every visitor sees that before they see your business name.
Method, and what this does not measure
How the run worked. A real Chromium browser loaded each home page, then followed the site’s own Contact link where one existed. Mobile timings come from a second pass in a 390×844 viewport throttled to roughly 4G, measuring largest contentful paint. HTTPS was tested with a direct TLS connection rather than trusting the page to load.
What it cannot see. Whether a submitted form actually lands in somebody’s inbox. This run never submitted anything, because a real submission spends a real person’s attention without asking. So “a form exists” is the strongest claim here, and the true figure for forms that silently fail to deliver is almost certainly worse than anything on this page. It also says nothing about design, copy, search ranking, or whether the business is any good at its trade.
Sample. Twenty-eight businesses, not randomly drawn — they came from an existing prospect list, so read this as a field sample rather than a census. No business is named, and no finding is tied to one. Any phone number shown anywhere on this site has had its digits changed.
Scoring. Each site starts at 100 and loses points per finding, weighted by severity. The number is a sorting device. The individual findings are the part that holds up, because each is something the browser observed.
Want yours checked?
We will run the same 9 checks on your site and send you what comes back, in writing, whether or not you ever speak to us again.
Run 1, 2026-09-21. Compiled by Trenith Technologies. We published this because we were tired of reading “your website is losing you money” with no numbers attached to it.