I checked 1,994 South Florida small business websites. Here's what I found.

I spend my days looking at small business websites in South Florida, because that's who I build for. I kept seeing the same few problems, so I stopped guessing and counted.

I took the South Florida businesses I'd found through Google's business listings, mostly in Miami-Dade and Broward, and wrote a script that read each one's homepage on 19 October 2026. 1,994 homepages loaded properly and got checked. Salons and barbers, shops, dentists, bars, clinics, real estate, law firms and contractors.

• Can a customer reach you?

  A contact form, a booking link, or a phone number you can tap.

• Can Google read you?

  A page title, a description, and the structured data that says what your business is.

• Can you see who visits?

  Any sign of analytics in the page.

• Spanish, and the licence number

  Two things that matter more here than almost anywhere.

241 of the 1,994 sites (12.1%) had no contact form, no booking link and no tap-to-call link. I looked on the homepage and, if it linked to one, the contact page too.

88 of those still showed a phone number as plain text, so a customer could copy it. The other 153, 7.7% of every site I checked, showed no phone number in the page at all. Some of those may have an email address or a number inside a picture. Either way, the customer has to work for it, and most won't.

The kind of site matters more than the kind of business. On WordPress sites it was 3.4% (27 of 802). On sites I couldn't match to a known builder, it was about one in six (112 of 665).

A lot of people look up a local business on their phone. When your number is a link, they tap it and it rings. When it's plain text, they have to press, hold, copy, open the dialer and paste. That's where you lose them.

Of the 1,597 sites that showed a phone number, 285 (17.8%) didn't make it tappable. Across all 1,994, 68.8% had a tap-to-call link.

It's the cheapest fix on this page. On any builder, it's one link.

Google says it uses your page content and your meta description to write the short summary under your name in search results, and it looks at your page title for the headline. Leave them out and Google guesses.

• 20.3% had no meta description

  404 of 1,994. That's the line of text under your name in Google.

• Only 42.7% said what kind of business they are

  852 of 1,994 had LocalBusiness structured data, the code that tells Google your hours, address and type of business.

• 37.1% had none of it

  740 of 1,994 had no LocalBusiness or Organization structured data at all.

Page titles, at least, are nearly universal: only 41 of 1,994 (2.1%) had no usable one.

652 of the 1,994 sites (32.7%) showed no sign of analytics. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, nothing my scan could see. The owner can't tell how many people came, what they looked at, or whether the site brings in a single customer.

Contractors were the worst group: 28 of 54 trade sites (51.9%) showed no analytics.

• 20.3%

  no meta description

  404 of 1,994

• 32.7%

  no analytics

  652 of 1,994

• 9.9%

  missing all three: description, LocalBusiness data and analytics

  197 of 1,994

315 of the 1,994 sites (15.8%) had a Spanish version or a switch to Spanish that my scan could find. Some sites handle Spanish in ways it can't see, so read that as at least one in seven.

Dentists (18.8%) and other medical practices (17.7%) did best. Shops (8.0%) and contractors (4 of 54, 7.4%) did about half as well, in a part of the country where plenty of customers would rather read Spanish.

Florida's statute says a contractor's licence number has to appear in every advertisement, whatever the medium. I wrote about it in my guide to roofing and contractor websites.

14 of the 54 contractor sites I checked (25.9%) showed a Florida licence number on the homepage. Plenty said “licensed and insured” without the number.

Not everything is broken, and it would be wrong to say it was.

• 97.6% are secure

  1,947 of 1,994 ended up on https.

• 98.9% are sized for phones

  1,972 of 1,994 have the tag that tells a phone how to size the page.

• Almost none hide from Google

  Only 25 of 1,994 (1.3%) told search engines not to list the page.

• Most footers are current

  Of the 1,404 sites that show a copyright year, 84.0% say 2025 or 2026.

• Dentists and salons take bookings

  71.5% of dentists and 66.8% of salons, barbers, med spas and tattoo studios link to online booking.

The quickest way: run my free website check. Type your address and it runs the same checks on your homepage and shows you how you compare with these 1,994 sites. Or do it by hand. Grab your phone.

• Tap your phone number

  On your own site, on your phone. If it doesn't ring, it's text.

• Send yourself a message

  Fill in your own contact form and see if it reaches you. Then ask who else gets it.

• Google your business name

  Read the line under your name. If it's nonsense or a jumble, you have no meta description.

• Ask who can see your visitors

  Ask whoever built your site where your analytics are. If nobody knows, you have none.

• Ask a customer about Spanish

  If half your calls are in Spanish, your website should be too.

• Contractors: find your licence number

  Can a homeowner see it on the page they land on?

Every site I build has all of this from day one: a number that rings, a form I test all the way to your inbox, a description and structured data for Google, and analytics you can read. It's never more than $999 to build. Care is $99 a month, it's required while I host your site because your hosting is part of it, there's no minimum term, and if you leave you get a full export, free. If you want to know how your site did on these checks, run the free check or ask me and I'll go through them with you.

I'm putting the limits next to the numbers, because a number without its limits isn't worth quoting.

• The homepage only, plus the contact page when I was looking for a form. A site might do something right on another page.
• The page as the server sent it. My script didn't run JavaScript, so a form or a phone number added that way wouldn't be seen. That's why I don't publish a form figure for Squarespace, where forms usually load that way.
• Not a random sample. These are businesses I found through Google's listings while searching for particular kinds of business, mostly in Miami-Dade and Broward. The groups are the size they are because of what I searched for.
• Not checked: speed. I planned to measure it with Google's PageSpeed Insights and couldn't run it, so there are no speed numbers here.
• Not “down”. Of the sites that didn't load, many were blocking automated visitors rather than broken, so I don't claim any share of sites is down.
• Small groups stay out. I don't publish any group smaller than 30, which is why contractors aren't broken down by trade.

I'll run it again and date the new numbers, so you can see whether things get better.