We analysed 50 Exeter business websites. Here's what we found.

On 5 October 2026 we took 50 Exeter service businesses from Google Maps and put each of their websites through the same tests. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, builders, landscapers, cleaners, accountants, solicitors, dentists and hair salons, five of each, picked by rules we wrote down before we looked at a single site.

We're not naming anyone. The point isn't to embarrass a business, it's to show what a typical Exeter website looks like from the customer's side, and where the easy wins are.

The headline: fine on a laptop, slow on a phone

On a desktop connection most of these sites are perfectly quick. Half scored 90 or more in Google's Lighthouse test, and the typical page showed its main content in 1.6 seconds.

Then we loaded the same pages the way Google tests mobile: a mid-range phone on a slower 4G connection. The typical site took 9.7 secondsto show its main content. Google calls anything over 4 seconds “poor”. That was 38 of the 47 siteswe could test. Only 3 hit Google's “good” mark of 2.5 seconds.

Most local searches happen on a phone, often on the move. The person searching for an emergency plumber isn't sitting at a desk on office wifi. This is the version of your site they see.

Three listings pointed at websites that don't exist

Three of the 50 Google listings link to a domain that no longer resolves. Someone taps “Website” on the listing and gets a browser error. That's 6% of the sample, and all three were tradespeople. If your Google Business Profile still links to an old domain, it's worth checking today. It takes thirty seconds.

What's on the homepage

For the 45 sites we could read, we checked the basics a customer or Google looks for:

Two of these are worth a closer look.

• Tap-to-call.A quarter of homepages have no tap-to-call link. On a phone, that means memorising the number or copying it out, if it's on the page at all. For a business that lives on calls, it's the cheapest fix on this list.
• Schema.Two in three sites don't tell Google, in the structured format it reads, what the business is, where it is and when it's open. It's invisible to visitors, and it's one of the signals AI search tools lean on. (More on that in how to get recommended by AI search.)

Accessibility: one problem almost everywhere

Only 10 of 47sites passed Lighthouse's colour contrast check. Usually it's pale grey text on white, or white text on a light photo. It's the most common failure in the whole study, and it isn't only an accessibility issue. Low-contrast text is hard for anyone to read on a phone in daylight.

What's running these sites

27 of the 45 were built on WordPress, 4 on Wix, and one each on Squarespace, GoDaddy, Duda and Next.js. We couldn't identify the rest. WordPress produced the three quickest-loading sites in the study and the slowest, so the platform alone doesn't decide the result. How the site is built on it does. The slow ones had heavy images and page-builder code in common: the heaviest homepage weighed 35 MB, more than most people would want to download on mobile data for a single page.

What to do with this

If you run a local business, open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, and count to ten. Then check three things: can you tap the phone number, does the text read easily outdoors, and does your Google listing link to the right address. Those three cost little to fix, and they're where most of the sites in this study fell down.

If you'd rather we looked, our free audit runs these same checks on your site and tells you what to fix first.

How we did it

We searched Google Maps for ten service types in Exeter on 5 October 2026 and took the first five businesses in each that had an EX1 to EX6 postcode, their own website domain, and no more than three UK branches. Every homepage was fetched once and its HTML checked, and every site was tested once with Lighthouse 12 on mobile and desktop settings. Single runs vary by a few points, so treat individual scores as approximate. The trends hold across the sample. Eleven sites wouldn't complete the desktop test, so the desktop figures cover 36 sites.