The Louisville Website Health Report

Fixing websites is the job, so I spend a lot of time looking at other people's. Over the last two months I opened and checked 654 Louisville area business websites by hand, more than 100 kinds of businesses, roofers to florists to locksmiths to vets. I was hunting for trouble, that is what I do, and I still was not ready for the count.

259 broken, and broken is not a metaphor

259 of the 654, that is 39.6 percent, were broken in a way a customer would hit immediately. Sites down behind hosting suspension pages. Homepages reduced to one heading and a button. Contact forms that say thank you and deliver the message nowhere, so the customer waits for a reply that was never going to come. A broken site never phones in the news. The owner finds out last, usually never, because the customer just calls the next name on the list.

The hacked ones are the worst of it

Around 3 percent showed signs of being hacked or hijacked. The pattern is ugly: the business's own domain, still paid for, now serving gambling pages or spam to anyone who visits, including everyone who searches the business by name. Cleaning that up is real work, which is why hack cleanup is its own job and starts at a flat $499. If your search result looks wrong, my notes on what to do when Google says your site is hacked are the starting point.

Not secure, says the browser

Almost half of everything I checked, about 47 percent, loads without a secure connection. That means the visitor's browser prints "not secure" next to the address before they read one word of the site. The fix is usually a setting and a certificate, not a rebuild, and I explain it in why your website says not secure. It is one of the cheapest trust problems a business can have, and one of the most common.

Placeholder text, still showing

About one in four, roughly 23 percent, still displays the words the template came with. "Slide title, write your caption here," on a live homepage carousel. "Signed in as filler@godaddy.com," printed where customers can see it. These sites were launched and never actually finished, and nobody has looked at them since. The owner has no idea. Every visitor does.

Outdated is its own kind of broken

The biggest group, 394 sites, 60.2 percent, was not down, just left behind. Old designs, stale prices, staff who moved on years ago, news sections that end in 2019. Nothing on those sites is technically broken, and they still cost the business calls, because a site that looks abandoned reads as a business that might be. This is the slow leak a care plan exists to stop.

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

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

Most of this is cheap to fix

That is the real finding. A certificate setting, an afternoon of placeholder text, a form repaired instead of a site rebuilt. These businesses are losing customers over fixable problems they do not know they have. The work I do is exactly this: share your screen, I find what is broken and fix it while you watch, $99 for the first hour, same-day emergency help at $299 for the first hour, and every fix carries a 30-day warranty.

There is a companion version of this report on the marketing side, covering what these same problems do to ads and tracking, at MarketingTrouble. Whichever side of the site is leaking, broken pages or broken marketing, it is fixable, and it is easier to fix once you can see it.