The Louisville Website Health Report: What 654 Local Business Sites Taught Me

I check local business websites for a living. Over the last two months I have personally opened and checked 654 of them around Louisville, across more than 100 kinds of businesses: roofers, florists, locksmiths, vets, contractors, accountants, pawn shops, gyms, and a long list of others. I was not sampling the good ones. I was looking for problems. Even with that in mind, the numbers surprised me.

Four in ten were broken

259 of the 654, that is 39.6 percent, were broken in some way. Not slow, not ugly. Broken. Sites down behind hosting suspension pages. Domains that now land on gambling spam. Homepages that are one heading and a booking button. Contact forms that accept a message and send it nowhere, so the customer thinks they reached out and the business never hears a thing.

A broken website does not announce itself. The owner is usually the last to know, because nobody calls to report a website, they just call the next business on the list.

Six in ten were outdated

Another 394, 60.2 percent, were outdated rather than down. Old templates, copyright lines from years ago, news sections that stop in 2019. And almost half of everything I checked, about 47 percent, still loads without a secure connection, so every visitor's browser tells them the site is not secure before they read a single word. Whatever trust the business earned over the phone or in person starts leaking right there.

The words the site builder left behind

About one in four, roughly 23 percent, still shows the template's placeholder words to the public. "Slide title, write your caption here," sitting on a homepage carousel. A login line reading "Signed in as filler@godaddy.com," visible to anyone who visits. Testimonial headings with filler text under them. The business owner has never seen any of it. Their customers see it every day.

A few were worse than broken

Around 3 percent showed signs of being hacked or hijacked, including domains that now serve spam or gambling pages under the business's own name. The business is still paying for the domain. The domain is working for somebody else.

The numbers, all in one place

• 654 Louisville area business websites checked by hand
• 259 broken in some way, 39.6 percent
• 394 outdated, 60.2 percent
• About 47 percent load without a secure connection
• About 23 percent still show template or placeholder text to visitors
• About 3 percent show signs of being hacked or hijacked

How I checked, honestly

Every site on this list was opened and looked at directly during October and November 2026, and the finding was written down at the time. Two honest caveats. First, I was hunting for problems, so this is not a random sample of every Louisville website. It is an accurate picture of how many troubled sites a customer can run into in an ordinary search. Second, the percentages for the secure connection, placeholder text, and hacking findings come from counting the words in my own check notes, so read those as close approximations, while the broken and outdated counts are exact.

The part that matters

Almost none of this is expensive to fix. A secure connection is a setting. Placeholder text is an afternoon. A broken form is a repair, not a rebuild. These businesses are not losing customers because their work is bad. They are losing customers because the front door is stuck and nobody told them.

That is the work I do, two ways. If the site itself is broken, that is WebsiteTrouble, a live repair on a screen share while you watch. If the site works but the marketing leaks, ads spending with nothing to show, tracking you cannot trust, that is MarketingTrouble, and it is what a Marketing Help Session is for. We open your site and your ads together, live, find what is leaking, and fix it while you watch, $99 for the first hour.