By James Folk, principal software engineer and founder of NJLIGames Ltd (building software on Long Island since 2015). Measured on October 20, 2026. Each homepage was requested once, and only totals are published. No business is named. Our own prices are on our pricing page.
The four basics
These are the checks a search engine, a phone and a visitor all hit first. Most sites pass the technical ones. The gap is in the pieces someone has to write.
| Check | Share of the 187 sites that pass |
|---|---|
| Loads over a secure connection (HTTPS) | 95.2% |
| Has a mobile viewport tag | 91.4% |
| Has a page title | 95.2% |
| Has a meta description | 69.5% |
| Passes all four of the above | 66.3% |
| Misses at least one of the four | 33.7% |
A meta description is the line a search engine can show under your link. Without one it picks text from the page. Nearly 1 site in 3 left that to chance.
Main headings
A page should say once, near the top, what it is about. That is the H1. Fewer than half the sites have exactly one in the HTML they send, a third have none, and about 1 in 5 have more than one.
| Main headings in the page's HTML | Share of the 187 sites |
|---|---|
| Exactly one main heading (H1) | 44.9% |
| No main heading | 33.2% |
| More than one main heading | 21.9% |
This reads the HTML as a server sends it, before any script runs. A site that builds its headings in the browser can show a heading to a visitor that this check did not see.
Image descriptions
Alt text is the short description a screen reader reads aloud and a search engine uses to understand a picture. Most sites describe some of their images. Few describe all of them.
| Image descriptions (alt text) | Share of the 169 sites with images |
|---|---|
| Every image has alt text | 27.8% |
| At least half the images have alt text | 68.0% |
Speed and weight
These were measured with one request from one location, so read them as a rough picture and not a score for any single site.
| Speed and weight (one request, one location) | Result |
|---|---|
| Median time to first byte | 0.58 seconds |
| Slower than 1 second to first byte | 17.6% |
| Median size of the homepage HTML | 142 KB |
| Homepage HTML over 500 KB | 15.5% |
What the sites are built on
Detected from the page's HTML. WordPress is the single largest named platform, with a quarter of the sites. Nearly half use something else, or something this check could not identify.
| What the site appears to be built on | Share of the 187 sites |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 25.1% |
| Wix | 9.1% |
| Squarespace | 9.1% |
| Shopify | 4.3% |
| GoDaddy site builder | 3.7% |
| Weebly | 1.6% |
| Something else, custom or not detectable | 47.1% |
How the sites were chosen
OpenStreetMap is an open map that businesses and volunteers add to, and many entries list a website. On October 20, 2026 we pulled every entry in a box around Nassau and Suffolk counties that listed its own website: 2,385 of them. We dropped social, review and booking pages, anything outside the two counties, and chains (an entry tagged as a brand, a web address used by three or more entries, or a page for one branch). That left 1,018 separate business websites. We drew 240 at random with a fixed seed and requested each homepage once.
Of those 240, 30 web addresses no longer resolve at all and 23 refused the request or returned an error. The percentages above use the 187 that could be read.
What this does not show
- It is not every Long Island business. It is businesses listed in OpenStreetMap with a website of their own, and about 4 in 10 are restaurants, cafes or bars. Sites with no web presence at all are not in it.
- It measures what is on the page, not how a site ranks or how many customers it brings in.
- It reads the homepage only, as plain HTML.
- Speed comes from one request from one place. A single slow answer can be a bad moment, not a slow site.
A ten minute check for your own site
Open your homepage, right click, choose View Page Source, and search
the page for four things: the word <title, the phrase
name="description", the characters <h1, and
name="viewport". You want one of each. Then look at your
photos and ask whether someone who could not see them would know what
they showed. If any of that sounds like work you would rather hand off,
our design preview is free and you pay nothing unless you love it.
Common questions
How were the 187 websites chosen?
We pulled every Nassau and Suffolk business that lists its own website in OpenStreetMap, dropped chains, social pages and listing sites, kept one site per domain, and drew a random sample of 240 with a fixed seed. 187 of them could be read. The sample leans toward restaurants and cafes, about 4 in 10, so treat the numbers as a snapshot of that group, not of every business on Long Island.
Why were 53 of the 240 sites left out?
Thirty of the listed web addresses no longer resolve at all, so there was nothing to read. Another 23 refused the request or returned an error, such as a block on automated visits, a missing page or a failed secure connection. None of them are counted in any percentage.
Does a missing meta description or heading hurt my search ranking?
This study measured what is on the page, not how it ranks. A meta description is the text a search engine can show under your link, and a main heading tells readers and search engines what the page is about. Both are cheap to fix, which is why we counted them.
Which businesses are in the study?
No business is named anywhere. Only totals are published, and the per-site results are not shared.
Related reading: what a website costs on Long Island, seven signs your site needs a redesign and Wix versus hiring a web designer.
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