Research · Auto repair
Thirty-nine out of six thousand
We have published eight separate findings about auto repair websites. This one asks a different question: how many sites get all eight right at the same time. The answer is thirty-nine.
Fewer than one website in a hundred and fifty missed none of the eight.
Each of the eight is ordinary: a secure address, some way of knowing who visits, enough words to explain the business, a machine-readable summary, a decent preview when the link is shared, a tappable phone number, a heading, and content that arrives reasonably quickly. Individually, most sites pass most of them.
Problems arrive in groups
2,284 websites, more than a third, missed at least four of the eight. 230 missed every single one. That is the useful part: these are not eight separate populations of unlucky shops, they are largely the same sites failing repeatedly, because nobody has looked at the website in years.
It cuts the other way too. If your site misses one or two, you are in the largest group by far, and you are closer to the top of this list than the shape of the chart suggests.
How we got these numbers
We took eight measurements we have already published on their own, and scored each website against all eight at once, using the latest homepage result and counting every website once.
A site was scored only when all eight measurements were available for it, which was true for 6,108 of 6,606 websites. Each of the eight is a piece of research of its own:
- No secure address — Still not secure
- No analytics of either kind — Flying blind
- A homepage under 200 words — The 200-word homepage
- No machine-readable summary — The missing structured data
- No link preview — The missing link preview
- No tap-to-call link — Can customers tap to call?
- No main heading — The missing SEO basics
- Main content taking 2.5 seconds or longer — The seven second wait
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. The eight are not equally serious, and counting them treats them as if they were. Passing all eight does not make a website good, and missing one does not make it bad. The finding is how often these problems turn up together on the same site.
What to do about it
- Do not try to fix eight things. Pick the one a customer would notice first, usually the tappable phone number or how long the page takes.
- Check the cheap ones. A secure address and a main heading are usually settings, not rebuilds.
- Do them in one sitting. Whoever maintains the site can normally handle several of these in the same hour.
- Then measure. Analytics is on this list because without it, nothing else you change can be judged.