I Checked 133 Small Business Websites. Only 1 Passed.
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Author: Ryan Shill
I've been manually reviewing small business websites for a while now — roofing companies, HVAC contractors, plumbers, flooring installers, general contractors. Part of my process is running a Lighthouse performance test on every site I look at.
Lighthouse is a free tool built into Google Chrome that scores a website's performance on a scale of 0 to 100. Google uses performance as a ranking factor, which means a slow site doesn't just frustrate visitors — it actively hurts your visibility in search results before anyone even clicks.
After going through 133 sites, here's what I found.
The Numbers
The average score across all 133 sites was 50 out of 100. Nearly half — 46.6% — scored below 50, which is the threshold Google considers poor. More than one in four sites scored below 40. And only one site out of 133 scored 90 or above.
One site. Out of 133.
How the Scores Break Down
| Score Range | Sites | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| 0-29 | 11 | 8.3% |
| 30-49 | 51 | 38.3% |
| 50-69 | 59 | 44.4% |
| 70-89 | 11 | 8.3% |
| 90-100 | 1 | 0.8% |
The biggest cluster sits in the 50–69 range. These aren't sites that are obviously broken — they load, they function, they look reasonable. But they're slow enough to cost leads without the owner ever knowing why.
Why This Matters
Most small business owners aren't losing customers because of bad service. They're losing them before a conversation ever starts — because the site loaded too slowly on a phone and the visitor was gone within three seconds.
A score below 50 usually points to uncompressed images, code loading when it shouldn't be, or a page builder doing far more work than necessary just to display a few paragraphs of text. These aren't complicated problems. They're fixable. But the contractor sitting at a 28 who's running Facebook ads is paying to send people to a site that's actively working against him.
What a Good Score Actually Looks Like
A score of 90 or above means your site loads fast, responds quickly to interaction, and doesn't make a visitor wait. One site in this sample hit that mark. The other 132 didn't.
That's not a knock on the business owners. Most of them didn't build their own site, and performance probably wasn't part of the conversation when they hired someone. But it's a real problem, and it's one most of them don't know they have.
Check Your Own Score
You can run the test yourself in Google Chrome. Open your site, right-click anywhere on the page, hit Inspect, go to the Lighthouse tab, and run the analysis on mobile. If your score is below 50, your site is working against you.
If you want to know what's dragging it down and what it would take to fix it, reach out — I offer site audits and I'm happy to take a look. You can also email me directly at ryan@ryanshill.co.