We know that SMEs are investing time, effort and money into their websites and are aware of just how important this is from a business perspective. But how are those websites actually functioning?
We started off by asking SMEs how happy they are with their business sites, and the overwhelming majority were pretty pleased:
- 90% of businesses are happy with the overall look and feel of their website
- 89% considered their website to be up to date
But we wanted to find out more about whether the reality matches these opinions. To learn more we worked with Insites to analyse the performance and accessibility of over 1 million SME websites. We reviewed how accessible sites were, how secure they are for customers, how clear they are for visitors and search engines, and whether they were performing well on mobile. We discovered:
- 19% of websites weren’t optimised for mobile, at a time when 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online (Statista, April 2021).
- 13% of websites contained text too small to be read on a mobile device
- 24% of websites do not have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate – this is what keeps any customer information secure from hackers
- Two thirds (66%) of websites didn’t have an email address on their website, stripping out a convenient way for customers to get in touch
This shows that many business websites haven’t quite been set up as effectively as their owners believe, with many even leaving their customers open to privacy invasion.