Data Studies
Studies on how websites are built and what that means for speed, accessibility and trust: website platforms and page builders, themes, fonts, images, sliders, forms, color contrast and legal pages. Most use the public HTTP Archive crawl, which records the code and technologies on millions of homepages, together with Google Lighthouse accessibility results and site popularity from Google's Chrome UX Report. Others look at the websites linked from US Google Business Profiles across dozens of industries. Useful before a redesign, a platform choice or a build brief.
22 studies · Need help acting on them? See our web design services.
The 10,000 most visited websites fail Google's automated accessibility test 65.7% of the time, more often than small business websites at 60.2%. And 94.8% of all homepages fail at least one accessibility check.
On all 11 website platforms compared, most small business homepages have at least one image with no alt text, the description a screen reader reads aloud: 60.1% overall, from 52.5% on Drupal to 83.2% on Webflow, where homepages carry a median of 25.5 images.
53.9% of websites running an accessibility overlay still score below 90, the passing line on Google's automated accessibility test, against 60.7% of websites without one. Overlay sites average 3.1 points higher, and 94.2% still fail at least one accessibility check.
5.5% of websites on .us domains run an accessibility overlay, about 18 times the 0.31% rate of German .de websites and more than three times the 1.7% rate across the whole web. About 263,000 homepages run one, and four products account for most of them.
68.6% of website homepages have text too faint against its background to meet the accessibility standard for color contrast, making low contrast the most common accessibility failure on the web, more than twice as common as images with no alt text.
56.3% of forms on the 10,000 most visited websites have no label, the name that tells a screen reader what a field is for, against 44.7% of forms on small business websites. Across the web, 45% of homepage forms have no label at all.
WordPress runs 32.9% of small business websites, seven times the 4.6% share of Shopify in second place. Shopify, not Wix, is the runner-up: Wix runs 2.9% and Squarespace 1.6%.
50.7% of website homepages have no preview image set for shared links, so when someone shares the link on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack or iMessage, the site owner has not chosen the picture people see. The 10,000 most visited websites do no better, at 50.6%.
Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and Framer together run 5.13% of website homepages, down from 5.26% a year earlier and close to the 5.07% of two years ago. Inside that flat total, Framer grew 31.7% in a year while the three larger builders shrank.
Websites built with the AI website builders Lovable, Emergent and Base44 grew 162.6% in nine months, from 5,309 homepages in December 2025 to 13,939 in September 2026. Lovable built 87% of them, and the count rose every month from January on.
33.4% of website homepages load a slider or carousel, the rotating banner of images that has fallen out of favor with usability researchers, against 19.6% of the 10,000 most visited websites. Swiper alone is on 18.2% of homepages.
6.3% of websites on .us domains load a cookie consent tool, the software behind "accept cookies" banners, about half the 12.6% rate on .com and a quarter of the 27.2% rate on German .de websites. Spanish websites lead at 33.6%.
Elementor, a page builder plugin for WordPress, runs on 34% of WordPress homepages, more than twice the 16% built with WordPress's own Block Editor. Its 1,681,162 homepages outnumber the 771,649 run by Wix, Squarespace and Webflow put together.
Hello Elementor, a theme that exists to hand all design work to the Elementor page builder, runs on 9.6% of WordPress homepages, more than any other named theme. With Astra at 6.7% and Divi at 6.4%, three builder-first themes cover 22.6% of WordPress sites.
93.7% of US web design and marketing agency homepages fail at least one of Google's automated accessibility checks, and 45.3% score below 90 out of 100, the line Google treats as a pass. The most common failure, text too faint to read against its background, shows up on 57.1% of agency homepages.
83.6% of US small business websites do not link to a privacy policy page, even though many collect visitors' details through contact forms, booking tools or analytics. The gap reaches 96% for churches and 94% for the smallest websites, and 70.7% of dentist, clinic and med spa websites have no privacy policy link either.
85.1% of US retail store websites, from furniture and fashion to jewelry and electronics, have no link to a terms of service page, the page that sets the rules on returns, shipping and warranties. 74.3% have neither terms nor a privacy policy.
51.8% of website homepages with images offer only one size of each image, so a phone downloads the same large files as a desktop computer. The web's most visited sites do worse, not better: 60.7% of the top 10,000 and 62.8% of sites ranked 10,000 to 1 million serve one size to every device.
Google Fonts, Google's free library of web typefaces, loads on 42.8% of website homepages, more than the 32% that run on WordPress. It is more than twice as common as the next font service, the Font Awesome icon set at 19.5%, and about 14 times as common as Adobe Fonts.
In 14 of 15 industries, more than half of small business homepages have at least one image with no alt text, the description a screen reader reads aloud. Manufacturers miss it most often at 65.4%, auto dealers least often at 42.9%, and 89% of real estate homepages with more than 15 images leave at least one photo undescribed.
Only 12.7% of restaurant websites show customer reviews or testimonials, against 61.1% of dental websites and 39.1% of small business websites overall. Across six industries, the same eight website features appear at very different rates, and each industry leaves a different opening for the business that fills it.
15.2% of the 500,000 most visited websites never tell browsers what language their homepage is in, more than the 12% that are not set up for phone screens. 14.1% of all website homepages have no favicon, and 4.8% of the top 500,000 support dark mode.
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