I Checked 213 Local Business Websites. Here's What Was Quietly Broken.

Most business owners never look at their own website. They had it built a few years ago, it went live, and as far as they know, it still works. Customers rarely call to say "your website is broken." They just leave and call the competitor.

I wanted to know how common that was in my own backyard. So I built a tool that walked through every business I could find from Mt. Vernon down to the Illinois border, seventeen counties in all. It turned up 1,683 businesses. Of those, 213 had websites the tool could check from the outside, the same way a customer would see them.

I was not hacking anyone or testing for weak spots. The tool simply visited each site like a regular visitor and wrote down what it saw. A lot of what it saw was not good.

How the System Works

• Looks Like a Customer: The tool loads each homepage, follows the main links, and notes anything a customer would bump into: missing pictures, dead pages, error screens.
• Spots the Leftovers: It looks for builder placeholder text like "click here to edit" that was never replaced before launch.
• Checks the Locks: It notes whether the security certificate is valid and whether the domain name is close to expiring.
• Grades the Results: Each site gets a simple A through D grade so the worst problems rise to the top of the list.

What It Found

These are the patterns that showed up again and again. I have left out business names on purpose.

1. Pictures That Only Worked on the Designer's Computer

On one site, the photos pointed back to the web designer's own laptop. They looked fine to the designer during the build. For every customer since, those pictures have been empty boxes.

2. Online Store Links That Go Nowhere

Several businesses had a "Shop Online" button that led to an error page. In some cases, the online store had been moved or shut down, and nobody updated the button. That is a customer ready to spend money, hitting a wall.

3. Old Pages That Disappeared

Sites that were rebuilt at some point often left their old product pages behind as dead links. Anyone who bookmarked them, or found them through a search, gets a "page not found" screen.

4. A Hacked Site Selling Something Else

One local club's website had been broken into and stuffed with foreign gambling ads. The owners almost certainly have no idea, because the spam was tucked into pages they never visit. Search engines see it, though, and that does real damage to a business's reputation.

Overcoming the Friction

1. The First Pass Was Too Harsh

My first run flagged far more sites as "broken" than were really broken. Some sites were simply blocking automated visitors, which is a reasonable security choice, not a failure. My spam detector also flagged an innocent page because the word "specialist" happens to contain the name of a well-known spam drug. I tightened both checks and reran everything. The honest final count: 1 site in great shape, 15 in good shape, and the rest with at least something worth a closer look.

2. "No Website" Usually Was Not True

Public business listings said hundreds of these businesses had no website at all. When I looked them up by hand, most did. They just were not listed anywhere the map knew about. Lesson learned: never trust a single source. I now double-check every "no website" result before believing it.

The Business Win

• A Five-Minute Self-Check: Open your site on your phone. Tap every button on the homepage, especially "Shop," "Book," and "Contact." Make sure every picture loads.
• Search for Yourself: Search your business name plus words like "casino" or "pharmacy." If odd pages show up under your domain name, you may have been hacked.
• Look for Leftovers: Scroll every page once, looking for "lorem ipsum," "click here to edit," or other placeholder text.

The next step is reaching out to the businesses with the most serious problems and offering to fix them, starting with the hacked site, before their customers notice first.

Curious what this looks like for something you need built? See more of these side by side on the case studies page.