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What is broken on 21 small business websites, most of them in London
Of 21 small business websites I checked, most of them in London, two thirds give a homepage visitor nothing to fill in, nine take more than three seconds to deliver their HTML, and four are not properly on https. The most expensive problems were three no scanner found: an email address that bounces, a form that confirms in another clinic's name, and a template placeholder address.
In the two weeks up to 9 September 2026 I scanned the websites of small businesses, most of them in London: dog groomers, dental and physio clinics, tattoo studios, barbers, home care agencies, wedding barns. Ordinary businesses, most of them doing fine.
I did not do it to rank them. I did it to find out what actually goes wrong on the website of a business that is otherwise working. Here is all of it, including the parts where the machine was wrong.
How this was measured
I attempted 26 sites. Twenty-one had a homepage that answered a request, and those 21 are the numbers below. Everything was re-checked on 9 September 2026 so nothing here is a stale note.
The checks are deliberately blunt, and each one has a number behind it:
- Slow means the homepage took more than three seconds to deliver its HTML alone, before a single image started loading.
- Heavy means the first twelve images on the homepage weigh more than 3 MB together.
- Not on https means the site serves over plain http, or the http version does not redirect to the secure one, so two copies of the site exist.
- No viewport means the page has no mobile viewport tag, so a phone renders it as a shrunken desktop page.
- No form on the homepage means exactly that, and nothing more. Most of these businesses have a phone number in the header.
What came back
| Finding | Sites |
|---|---|
| No contact form on the homepage | 14 of 21 |
| Homepage HTML slower than three seconds | 9 of 21 |
| Not properly on https | 4 of 21 |
| First twelve images over 3 MB | 4 of 21 |
| No meta description | 3 of 21 |
| No mobile viewport tag | 2 of 21 |
| Nothing flagged at all | 1 of 21 |
Ten of the 21 tripped two or more checks.
The one that surprised me was not the slow sites. It was that two thirds of these homepages give a visitor nothing to fill in. The homepage is where almost everyone lands. Asking someone to find a contact page first is a step, and every step loses people who were only half decided.
The https number is worth sitting with too. Four sites out of 21 are showing "Not secure" next to the business name in every modern browser, in trades where the whole sale is built on trust.
The three problems no scanner can find
The numbers above are the cheap half. Here is what turned up only because a person went and looked.
A home care agency whose only email address bounces. The mail server behind it cannot be found at all. It is the single address published on the site, so every family that writes in gets a delivery failure, and the agency has no way of knowing it is happening. They are not losing enquiries. They are losing enquiries silently, which is worse, because nothing ever prompts them to check.
A dental practice whose contact form confirms in someone else's name. The form is an embedded widget running from a different clinic's marketing account. Every patient who enquires receives a confirmation signed by another practice, carrying another practice's address. The form works perfectly. It just tells each new patient that they wrote to the wrong place.
A physiotherapy clinic still showing the template placeholder. The address info@mysite.com sits on the page next to the real contact details. Anyone who picks the wrong one is writing to nobody.
None of these three would appear in any site audit tool I know of. Every one of them is more expensive than everything in the table above put together, because each one breaks the path between a person deciding to get in touch and someone actually reading it.
That path is the only part of a website that makes money, and it is the one part nobody monitors.
What I got wrong, and the limits of this
- One site never answered my scanner on two occasions a week apart. That may well be bot protection rather than an outage, so I have not counted it as broken and it is not in the 21.
- Four of these businesses run on free Wix subdomains where the homepage lives on a path rather than at the root. My scan could not reach them cleanly, so they are excluded from every number above.
- "No form on the homepage" is not "no way to get in touch". It is one step added, measured, and nothing more.
- Twenty-one sites, a handful of trades. This is a description of what I saw, not a statistic about British small business.
- Not all 21 are in London, and I should have checked before calling them that. Two of the wedding barns are in Kent and Suffolk, and one dental clinic turned out, after this was first published, to be in London, Ontario. The numbers are unchanged: they describe the 21 sites, wherever they are.
If you want to know which of these applies to you
I write one of these for a single site, free, in two working days: what is broken, what is fine and should not be touched, and what it would cost to fix. No call and no pitch, and the findings are yours whatever you do with them. That is the free teardown.
If you fix things yourself using it, that is a fair outcome too.