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Original research
How many Santa Barbara businesses have a broken website?
Published 3 October 2026 · Data collected 23 September 2026, rechecked 3 October · By Marc N
About one in three. In September 2026 SB Website Specialists checked 988 independent businesses in Santa Barbara, California, leaving out chains. 327 of them (33%) had a problem: 111 had a website with a fault we confirmed in a real browser, and 216 had no website we could find. Twenty-two businesses had a site that would not load at all. Twelve of those returned a 404 error, six had let their domain lapse, three failed the secure connection, and one asked visitors for a password. The most common fault on sites that did load was a homepage with almost no text, which leaves Google and AI assistants with nothing to describe. Restaurants made up the largest group, with 27 broken sites and 16 with no site found.
What was broken
These are the faults we confirmed on the 111 businesses whose website had a problem. One site can have more than one fault, so the counts add up to more than 111.
| Fault | Sites |
|---|---|
| Homepage has almost no readable text (under 200 words) | 43 |
| Built with obsolete 1990s-era HTML | 32 |
| Page returns a 404 error | 12 |
| No HTTPS (browser shows "Not secure") | 10 |
| Content runs off the screen on a phone | 1 |
| Domain has lapsed and no longer resolves | 6 |
| Takes 5 seconds or longer to load | 6 |
| Only a Square or social page, no site of its own | 4 |
| Secure connection fails (broken TLS) | 3 |
| Still uses Flash, which browsers dropped in 2020 | 2 |
| Page asks visitors for a password (HTTP 401) | 1 |
Which industries fared worst
The ten categories with the most problems. "Broken site" means a confirmed fault from the table above. "No site found" means the business had no website listed and we could not find one.
| Category | Broken site | No site found | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | 27 | 16 | 43 |
| Clothing stores | 8 | 18 | 26 |
| Beauty | 5 | 13 | 18 |
| Hair salons | 0 | 15 | 15 |
| Convenience stores | 0 | 13 | 13 |
| Fast food | 6 | 6 | 12 |
| Doctors | 2 | 9 | 11 |
| Massage | 2 | 9 | 11 |
| Cafes | 5 | 5 | 10 |
| Car repair | 2 | 7 | 9 |
Restaurants stand out for broken sites rather than missing ones. Hair salons and convenience stores are the reverse: none of the ones we flagged had a broken site, because none had a site we could find See the restaurant findings in detail.
How we checked
- The list. We started from every business in Santa Barbara listed on OpenStreetMap and removed national and regional chains, leaving 988 independent businesses.
- A fast first pass. An automated script requested each website and flagged anything that looked wrong.
- A real-browser second pass. The first pass flagged 505 sites, far too many. We reloaded every flagged site in a real Chromium browser, and only problems that showed up there count in these results.
- Phone layout. We loaded each page at 390 pixels wide, the size of a typical phone, as a real iPhone and Android browser, and measured whether the content ran wider than the screen. The phone identity matters: some website builders send a wider tablet layout to anything that is not a phone. Our first pass missed that and flagged 8 sites, but only 1 really overflows on a phone. We also did not use the common shortcut of checking for a viewport tag. When we tested that shortcut, it was wrong every time.
- Text and code recheck. On 3 October we recounted the words on every "almost no text" homepage in a real browser. Nine had plenty of text after all, so we took them out, along with one site that now blocks automated visitors. We also rechecked the 1990s-era code finding, and 32 of 33 sites still show it.
What these numbers do not show
- Some sites block automated visitors with a security check. We could not test those, so we left them out instead of counting them as broken.
- "No site found" is our best effort, not a certainty. Some of the 216 may have a website we missed.
- We did not count a missing tap-to-call phone link as a fault. iPhones turn phone numbers into links on their own, so the test is unreliable.
- This was a snapshot from 23 September 2026. Some owners have fixed their sites since.
Citing this research
You are welcome to quote these figures. Please credit SB Website Specialists, Santa Barbara website audit, September 2026 and link to this page. Journalists can email marc@sbwebsitespecialists.com for more detail. We do not publish the names of the businesses involved.
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