Why local business websites stop working

The six ways a small business site actually dies

We have run the same health check on every business in our 28,046-site study. The result is that about 27 out of every 100 verifiable sites are broken in some way. They are not all broken the same way.

Here is the list, in the order we see them:

• Domain expired and went back to the registrar's landing page.
• Hosting account cancelled and the DNS now points nowhere.
• SSL certificate expired and modern browsers block the page.
• A plugin or theme update broke WordPress, and the owner cannot get back in.
• A redesign went live without forwarding the old URLs, so the homepage loads but every other page 404s.
• The site is technically alive but the load is so slow that visitors leave before the first paint.

The first three are the most common. The last two are the most expensive to recover from because there is no obvious sign anything is wrong.

Why the small business owner is usually the last to know

A local plumber does not check his own site. He gets his leads from referrals, his Google Business Profile, and repeat customers. By the time he notices, the site has been broken for weeks, and so have the few leads that were coming through it.

The fix is not to "remember to check the site." The fix is to run an automated check from the outside, every day, and to get an email when the verdict changes.

Questions we get about this