Read more: the opposite example: dentist sites that load fast.
What we found. 1,253 car dealer websites checked. 495 of them, 39.5%, were broken in some way. The next worst trade, automotive repair, was 27.8%.
What we measured
We ran the same availability and load check on every car dealer website we could find in our data set. A site was counted as broken if it returned a hard error, had an expired domain, was blocked by the browser, or took so long to respond that the check gave up.
39.5% is not a rounding error. It is the worst broken rate in the entire 28,046-site study by a margin of 12 points.
Why dealer sites break so often
Most of the broken dealer sites we saw were on a vendor template that nobody maintained. The vendor went out of business, or moved on to a different product, and the dealer's site stayed on the last version of that template. Plugins go unupdated. The certificate expires. The hosting lapses.
The fix is the same as it is for any other small business site: own the site, not the template, and pay someone to keep the boring parts working.
Questions we get about this
Is the 39.5% the same for new and used car dealers?
Our data does not split them out by new vs used. Both are in the 39.5% figure.
What is the trade with the lowest broken rate?
Real estate agents, at 18.6% broken.
How do you check a dealer's site?
Same way: type the domain into the free checker. It will tell you whether the site is up, and if it is not, what the problem is.
Ready to car dealer websites are the most broken in our study?
Email shoaib@localsiteshop.com and tell us about the site. We will reply same day with a fixed quote and a date.
Email usOr first, run your site through the free checker and see the verdict in 10 seconds.