Small Business Website Upkeep: 11.5% of Domain Names Are Due to Expire Within 60 Days

A homeowner finds a local electrician on Google and taps through to the website. The homepage loads, but the "Contact us" button leads to a missing page. On another day, the same visitor might have met a full-screen security warning, a "500 Internal Server Error" on the quote form, or nothing at all, because the domain renewal failed on a card that expired last spring. None of these faults is dramatic, and the owner rarely notices any of them, because the owner usually looks only at the homepage.

Website upkeep is the unglamorous work that keeps a site reachable and working: renewing the domain name, keeping the security certificate valid, fixing links to pages that were deleted, and catching pages that fail to load. Each fault costs the same thing, a visitor who was ready to call or book and went to a competitor instead, and most of them give no warning to the business.

The biggest exposure is the domain name. 11.5% of small business domain names were due to expire within 60 days of September 23, 2026, and 73% expire within a year, which means most small businesses depend on one renewal going through every twelve months. Broken internal links affect 8.5% of small business websites, security certificate faults 3.8%, and server errors 1.4%, and each problem is concentrated in a handful of industries.

On September 23 and 24, 2026, we checked 6,142 small business websites listed on Google Business Profiles across 56 US industries, from accountants and electricians to yoga studios and nonprofits. We loaded up to 20 pages of each website, 69,800 web addresses in all, and recorded the response to every address. On 5,120 of these websites we also checked the security certificate and tested every link that pointed to another page on the same site. We looked up the public registration records of 4,569 of their domain names to see when each was first registered and when it expires.

A domain name is the web address a business rents from a registrar, usually a year at a time; it "expires within 60 days" when its registration end date falls within 60 days of September 23, 2026. A security (SSL) certificate is the file that lets a browser confirm it is talking to the real website, shown as the padlock; it fails the check when it has expired, covers a different address or does not trace back to a trusted authority. A broken internal link points to a page on the same site that returns a "not found" error. A server error is any response from 500 to 599, meaning the server failed to build the page. The median is the middle value: half are above, half below.

These problems differ a lot in how common they are, but each can stop a visit before the business makes its case. The table shows the share of small business websites, or of their domain names, affected by each.

Three patterns run through all of them. The faults sit away from the homepage, on inner pages, in menus and in registrar accounts nobody logs into. They cluster by industry: trades lead on expired certificates and server errors, and businesses whose websites change every season lead on broken links. And the fixes that work are automatic: auto-renewal, certificates that renew themselves and monitoring that checks every important page.

Almost three quarters of small business domains come up for renewal within a year, because most are registered and renewed annually. Just 14.4% have been paid for more than two years ahead. That leaves most businesses one failed payment or one unread email away from losing the address on their vans, invoices and Google listing, along with every email address that uses it.

The 11.5% due within 60 days, 523 domain names, sit in the window where a renewal problem turns into an outage. Auto-renew charges a card on a set date; if that card has expired, or the registrar's reminder goes to a web designer who left years ago, the renewal fails quietly and the first sign of trouble is a website and inbox that stop working. After a short grace period, anyone can register the name.

The registrar matters less than the account behind it. GoDaddy holds 1,992 of the 4,564 small business domain names with a current expiry date, more than the next six registrars combined, and among registrars with at least 100 small business domains the share expiring within 60 days ranged from 7.3% to 17.9%. Whichever company holds the domain, the renewal succeeds only if the payment method is current and the contact email reaches someone who acts on it.

The average small business domain name is 12.6 years old and the median is 11.4. 22.5% are 20 or more years old, and the oldest dates to 1986. An old domain carries years of links from other websites, reviews and printed materials that point to it, all of which are lost if it lapses, and it is also the most likely to sit in the personal account of a founder or former employee.

Age depends heavily on the trade. Manufacturers' domains average 18.9 years, followed by financial advisors and insurance agencies at 18, and law firms and funeral homes at 16.8. At the young end, cleaning companies average 7.2 years and tattoo shops 7.4, and 59% of cleaning company domains were registered in the last five years. 91% of small business domains end in .com.

The websites that have broken links tend to have several: 7.6 on average, pointing to just 2.1 different dead pages. The gap shows how they spread. One dead link in the menu or footer repeats on every page, so fixing that one link cleans the whole site. On homepages, 6.2% link to one of the site's own pages that returns an error, and the links that break are the ones visitors use most: "learn more" buttons top the list with 18 broken homepage links, followed by "contact us" with 12.

Yoga studios lead on both websites and homepages, at twice the small business average, because their websites change every season: class schedules, workshops, retreats and teacher pages come and go, and each deleted page leaves behind the links that pointed to it. Chiropractors follow at 14.3% of websites. On homepages, 14.3% of yoga studio homepages link to a dead page, followed by general contractors at 10%, while funeral homes have the cleanest homepages, at 1.7%.

Plain expiry is the smaller part of the problem: 0.5% of small business websites, 28 sites, were serving a certificate past its end date. About seven times as many, 197, had a certificate that failed for some reason, most often one issued for the wrong address after a move to a new host, a domain change or a switch to "www" that did not cover both versions. To a visitor the reason does not matter: every modern browser blocks the page with a warning. Another 1.5% of websites have no certificate at all, so browsers label every page "Not secure".

How the certificate renews explains most of the difference. Free certificates that hosts renew automatically cover 84% of small business websites but account for only 4 of the 28 expired certificates. A certificate renewed by hand once a year expires the year the reminder goes to someone who has left the business.

Across all small business websites the rate is 1.4%, 89 sites, and not one small business homepage returned a server error. Every failure was on an inner page, often the quote form, booking page or listings feed where a visitor takes action. Of all 69,800 web addresses, 0.17% returned a server error, fewer than one page in 500, so the problem is concentrated on a small group of websites rather than spread thinly.

Movers, electricians and real estate run at about three times the small business average. Their websites lean on interactive tools, such as quote calculators, service booking and property listing feeds, and each depends on a plugin, a database or an outside service that can fail. Electricians appear on two lists: 4.3% of electrician websites return a server error and 2.4% serve an expired certificate.

Start with the domain, because it takes the website and email down together. Log in to your registrar, confirm auto-renew is on, the card on file is current and the contact email is one you read. If a former designer or employee registered the domain in their own account, move it into one the business controls, and for a domain you depend on, renew for several years at once.

Then set up checks that run without you. Ask your host to replace any hand-renewed certificate with a free one that renews itself, and after any change of host or domain, visit both the "www" and plain versions of your address in a private window. Put a free uptime monitor on your contact, booking and quote pages, not just the homepage. Once a quarter, and after every redesign, click through your menu, footer and homepage links, and redirect every deleted page to the closest live one.

Upkeep fails when nobody owns it. Our website management plans track domain and certificate expiry dates, monitor uptime on every important page, and check links and redirects, so a lapsed renewal or a dead contact page is caught before a customer finds it.

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