The bar is low
Half the qualified businesses failed on load time alone. Being merely fast is a competitive position in most of these markets.
Audit report · 470 businesses, 19 industries
What we fix, found across 470 local businesses.
Before contacting a single business, we audited them. This page is what the audit recorded, including the finding that talked us out of selling to an entire segment.
The sample
470US businesses analysed
21Metro areas
19Industries
179Qualified into a scored pipeline
Every finding in this report carries the source URL it came from, saved at the time of measurement.
Method
How the numbers were taken
Each business was found from public sources and put through an automated technical audit. The audit loaded the homepage on a simulated phone connection and recorded load timings and total transfer weight. It then checked the things a customer actually tries to do: book, order, pay, or log in to something.
Findings were scored. A business stayed in the pipeline only when the audit had identified a specific problem, not a general impression. Of the 470 analysed, 179 qualified on that basis.
The point of this method is that nothing is asserted. Each number below can be opened and checked against the page it was measured on.
Finding 01
Speed was the most common failure, and it was not close.
Largest contentful paint — the moment the main content of a page finishes drawing — ranged from 5 to 47 seconds on a simulated phone connection. Google treats anything over 2.5 seconds as poor.
The range matters more than the average. A page that finishes in 5 seconds is losing customers. A page that finishes in 47 seconds has effectively stopped being a page. Both were in this sample, in the same industries, in the same cities.
What we build
Performance engineering. We rebuild the page so main content lands under two seconds on a phone. Images compressed and sized, render-blocking scripts removed, caching set properly. This site scores 100 on mobile; run PageSpeed on it and compare.
Finding 02
The weight of these pages is the reason.
Two homepages from the sample, measured as a phone would download them.
Measured
- A med spa homepage
- 85 MB
- A dental homepage
- 36.9 MB
- Slowest page in the sample
- 47 s
For comparison
- This page
- under 1 MB
- Target we build to
- under 2.5 s
- Works from
- 320 px
An 85 MB homepage is roughly the download of a feature film trailer, spent on a page that had not yet told the visitor the opening hours.
What we build
Page weight reduction. Most of that weight is uncompressed images and scripts nobody uses. We cut it to under a megabyte without losing a single thing the visitor sees.
Finding 03
Whole segments were missing one system.
Four segments we examined closely. The pattern was not that these businesses had bad software. It was that they had none for the job in question.
| Segment | Businesses audited | What we found |
|---|---|---|
| Preschools and childcare | 22 | 20 ran no parent platform at all. Enrolment was printed PDF packets and phone calls. |
| Recurring home services | 24 | None offered recurring-visit scheduling. Every repeat visit was re-booked by hand. |
| Restaurants | 24 | None had a loyalty program of their own. Repeat custom was owned by delivery platforms. |
| Property management | 30 | 16 already ran a tenant portal. We reported back that this segment had no gap worth selling. |
What we build
The missing system, built. Booking that replaces the phone, a portal with digital intake and online payment, a customer app carrying memberships and balances, recurring scheduling and dispatch, or own-brand ordering. Which one depends on what the audit finds.
Finding 04 · the one that cost us money
We told a whole segment there was nothing to sell them.
Of 30 property management companies audited, 16 already ran a tenant portal. The gap we expected to find was not there. So we reported that back and stopped selling to the segment.
That decision is on this page deliberately. A research report that only ever finds problems the author happens to sell is not research, it is a brochure. We report what the audit found, including when the finding is that you do not need us.
What we build
Nothing, and we said so. When a segment already has the system, we report that. The businesses that do not need us are worth more to us as an honest answer than as a sale that unravels.
What it means for you
If your competitors are in this sample, so is the opportunity.
The missing system is usually one system
Not a digital transformation. One portal, one booking flow, one loyalty program that the whole segment is going without.
You can have the measurement first
We run the same audit on your business before the call, and you keep the numbers whether or not you hire us.
Want your own business measured?
We run the audit before the call and walk you through what it found. If your numbers are already good, that is what we will tell you.