I Checked 133 Small Business Websites. Only 1 Passed.

Published on: May 13, 2026

Author: Ryan Shill

I've been manually reviewing small business websites for a while now, mostly roofing companies, HVAC contractors, plumbers, flooring installers, and general contractors, the kind of businesses that live or die on local search traffic. Part of my process for every site I look at is running a Lighthouse performance test, the free tool built directly into Google Chrome that scores a page's real-world performance on a scale of 0 to 100. Google uses that same performance signal as a ranking factor, which means a slow site is not just an annoyance to visitors, it is actively working against the business in search before anyone even clicks through.

After running that test on 133 of these sites, one at a time, I started keeping track of the results, and the pattern that emerged was worse than I expected going in.

The average score across all 133 sites landed at 50 out of 100. Nearly half of them, 46.6 percent, scored below 50, which is the threshold Google itself treats as a poor result. More than one in four sites scored below 40. And out of all 133 businesses I checked, exactly one scored 90 or above, the range that actually qualifies as fast by Google's own standard.

One site. Out of one hundred and thirty three.

A quick note on how I put this list together, since the number matters as much as the method. These were not hand-picked worst-case examples. I pulled sites from local search results across a range of service categories in a handful of different metro areas, the same way a homeowner or a facilities manager would actually find these businesses, then tested each one exactly as it exists in the wild. Nothing here was cherry-picked to make a point. The sample is boring, ordinary, and representative, which is exactly what makes the results worth paying attention to.

The businesses at the bottom of the range are worth a closer look, because the pattern there is consistent. A roofing company with a hero video autoplaying full screen on load. A plumber's site pulling in three separate font services and a chat widget that loads before the page content does. A general contractor running a page builder theme with features enabled for an online store the business does not even have. None of these choices were made with any intent to slow the site down. They accumulated one reasonable-sounding decision at a time, and the total is a page that fights the visitor before it ever gets the chance to make a case for the business behind it.

Here is how the full set broke down by score range.

The biggest cluster sits in the 50 to 69 range, and that group is the one that worries me the most, honestly. These are not sites that are obviously broken. They load, the layout looks fine, nothing throws an error. But they are slow enough, quietly and consistently, to cost leads without the owner ever having a reason to suspect why. A site in that range still functions well enough that nobody thinks to question it, which is exactly what makes the problem so persistent.

Most small business owners are not losing customers because of bad service, weak reviews, or a poor reputation. They are losing them before a conversation ever has the chance to start, because the site took too long to load on a phone and the visitor was gone within three seconds, long before they ever formed an opinion about the actual business behind the page.

A score below 50 almost always traces back to the same handful of causes. Uncompressed images straight from a phone camera. Code loading on every page whether it is needed there or not. A page builder platform doing far more background work than a simple five-page contractor site should ever require just to display a headline, a phone number, and a few paragraphs of text. None of these are exotic problems. They are common, well understood, and fixable. But the contractor sitting at a score of 28 who is also paying for Facebook ads is spending real money to send interested people to a site that is working against him the entire time.

The single site that scored above 90 is worth mentioning too, because it was not a fluke or an outlier built by some enterprise agency with a massive budget. It was a lean, simple site. A handful of pages, real photos instead of stock imagery, no page builder framework running underneath it, nothing loading that was not directly needed to answer the question a visitor actually came there to answer. That is the entire difference between a 92 and a 31. It is not a bigger budget. It is fewer things standing between the visitor and the content.

A score of 90 or above means the site loads fast, responds instantly to interaction, and never makes a visitor wait around wondering if anything is happening. One business out of the 133 I checked hit that mark. The other 132 did not, and most of them were not even close.

That gap is not a reflection on the business owners themselves. Almost none of them built their own site, and performance almost certainly was not part of the conversation when they hired whoever built it. Most page builder platforms and template-based site builders were never optimized with this in mind, because speed was never the thing being sold. It is a real problem sitting underneath a lot of otherwise solid businesses, and it is one most of them have no way of knowing they have until someone runs the test.

You can run this exact test yourself in about thirty seconds. Open your site in Google Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page, choose Inspect, go to the Lighthouse tab, and run the analysis set to mobile. If the number that comes back is under 50, the site is working against the business rather than for it, in a way that is completely invisible until you actually look.

None of this is meant to shame anyone running one of these sites. Most small business owners are focused on running the actual business, not auditing JavaScript payloads, and there has historically been very little reason for anyone to explain that performance even matters this much. But the data is what it is. A 50 out of 100 average across a sample this size means the typical small business site is, by Google's own measure, in poor territory, and most owners running one have no idea.

The fix, most of the time, is not a full rebuild. It is a focused performance audit that identifies exactly what is dragging the score down and addresses those specific issues directly, rather than starting over from scratch. For businesses whose current site is closer to a lost cause than a quick fix, a custom, hand-coded rebuild tends to land in that 90-plus range by default, simply because there is no bloated framework working against it from the start.

If you want to know where your own site actually lands and what specifically is dragging it down, run the test yourself or send me the link and I will tell you exactly what I see, no sales pitch attached to the answer.