The grading curve
Every site received a score from 0 to 100, converted to a letter grade. Here's how Northwest Arkansas stacked up:
Three out of four local business websites have serious problems. Not cosmetic issues — structural ones that affect whether customers can find them, trust them, or use their site on a phone. Over half scored an outright F.
The five most common problems
Across all 972 sites, these issues showed up again and again:
Every one of these is fixable. Most take less than a day. But the business owners we talked to had no idea these problems existed — because their site "looked fine" when they opened it on their laptop.
What a D or F actually costs you
A bad score isn't just a number. It shows up in your business in ways you might not connect to your website.
No booking means lost revenue. Over half the sites we scanned have no way for a customer to book online. When someone finds you at 9 PM and can't schedule an appointment, they move on to the next result. You'll never know they were there.
No analytics means you're flying blind. 42% of NWA businesses have no idea how many people visit their site, where they come from, or what they do once they're there. You can't improve what you can't measure.
No schema means Google ignores you. Schema markup is how your business shows up with star ratings, hours, and service details in Google search results. Without it, you're just a blue link competing against businesses that show a rich, detailed preview. A third of NWA sites are invisible to Google's enhanced results.
No contact form means friction. If the only way to reach you is a phone number, you're losing every customer who doesn't want to make a call — and that's most people under 40.
The bright spots
It's not all bad news. The sites that scored well had a few things in common — and none of them were expensive.
The top 90 sites (A and B grades) weren't all big companies with big budgets. Some were small shops with simple, well-built sites. What they shared: a working contact form, basic analytics, clean mobile layouts, and SEO fundamentals like schema markup and meta descriptions. The common thread wasn't money spent — it was that someone who knew what they were doing built the site with intention.
The gap isn't resources — it's awareness. Most business owners we spoke with had no idea their site had these issues. They paid someone to build it, it looked fine on their laptop, and they assumed it was working. The audit changed that conversation in 30 seconds.
Why we built this tool
We're a web design and AI company based in Northwest Arkansas. We built this audit tool because we kept having the same conversation: a business owner would ask about a new website, and we'd look at their current one and find a long list of problems they didn't know about.
So we automated it. The audit checks 20 factors in about 30 seconds — speed, mobile, security, SEO, accessibility, schema, and more. It generates a score, a grade, and a plain-English breakdown of what's wrong and what to fix. No jargon, no scare tactics. Just data.
We made it free because it's the fastest way to show a business owner where they stand. And honestly, the numbers speak for themselves — when 529 out of 972 local websites score an F, there's a lot of room to help.