93.7% of Web Design Agencies' Own Websites Fail at Least One Accessibility Check

A business owner shortlists three web design agencies and opens each one's homepage to judge its work. What she does not see is how those pages behave for a visitor who is blind, has low vision or navigates by keyboard. A screen reader stumbles over icon links with no names, and grey text on a white background fades out for anyone with weaker eyesight.

Accessibility is the practice of building sites that people with disabilities can use: text they can read, links and buttons a screen reader can name, and pages that work without a mouse. Agencies are the businesses that build websites for everyone else, so their own homepages are the clearest sign of whether they build accessibility in by default. A buyer should not assume it is part of the package.

93.7% of agency homepages fail at least one of Google's automated accessibility checks, and the average homepage fails 3. 45.3% score below 90 out of 100, the line Google treats as a pass, and 6.3% score a perfect 100. The failures are basic and fixable: faint text, unnamed links and headings out of order.

On September 23, 2026 we ran Google Lighthouse, the free site test built into the Chrome browser, on the homepages of 333 US web design and marketing agencies listed on Google Business Profiles under "website designer" and "marketing agency". We used the mobile test, which scores a page as a phone visitor would load it, and recorded each homepage's four scores: accessibility, performance (speed), SEO and best practices.

Each score runs from 0 to 100, and Google treats 90 or above as good. The accessibility score is built from dozens of individual checks, such as whether text has enough contrast and whether every link has a name a screen reader can read. A homepage fails a check when it does not pass it; the median is the middle homepage, with half scoring higher and half lower.

312 of the 333 agency homepages fail at least one check, and the average agency homepage fails 3. Failures cluster: 22.2% of agency homepages fail five or more checks, which points to several separate problems on the same page rather than one slip.

These are automated checks, the kind any agency can run in a minute from its own browser. That is what makes the result telling. A failure here is not a subtle judgment call that needs an expert; it is a warning Google shows to anyone who runs the test.

Low color contrast, text too faint to read against its background, is the most common failure, on 57.1% of agency homepages. Light grey text on white and white text over photos are the usual causes, and they are design choices: an agency picks them for looks. Links with no readable name come second, on 45.3%. An icon link with no text, such as a social media icon, reads out as "link" with no destination, and the screen reader user is left guessing where it goes.

Headings out of order, on 44.4% of agency homepages, means a page jumps from a main heading to a sub-sub-heading, which breaks the outline screen reader users rely on to skim a page. On 38.7%, the page does not mark where its main content begins, so a keyboard or screen reader user has to move through the whole menu every time. Missing image descriptions, the best-known accessibility issue, are comparatively rare on agency sites at 15%.

The median agency accessibility score is 90, exactly on the pass line. 48.3% of agency homepages score between 90 and 99, and 30.6% land between 80 and 89, close but short. At the extremes, 21 agencies, 6.3%, score a perfect 100, and 14, 4.2%, score below 70.

A score of 90 or above is not the same as an accessible site: 93.7% fail at least one check, so most of the homepages above the line still carry a known issue. The score tells you how many problems a page has; the list of failed checks tells you which ones, and that list is what an agency should be able to show you.

Speed scores are weaker still. The median agency homepage scores 42 out of 100 on Google's mobile performance score, 58.9% score below 50, and 4.8% reach 90 or above. A slow homepage on a phone loses visitors before they see any of the work it was built to show.

Agencies do better on the scores that are easiest to meet. The median SEO score is 92, though 29.7% of agency homepages still fall below 90, and the median best practices score is 96, the highest of the four.

Before you sign, test the agency's own homepage and two or three client sites from its portfolio. Open each page in Chrome, right-click, choose Inspect, then Lighthouse, and run the test for mobile. It is free and takes about a minute. An agency whose own site scores 90 or above, and fails few individual checks, is more likely to deliver that standard for you.

Then put the standard in the contract. Ask for a Lighthouse accessibility score of 90 or higher on key pages at launch, no failed contrast or link-name checks, and a mobile performance target. Ask how the agency tests with a keyboard and a screen reader, since automated checks catch only part of what matters to disabled visitors.

If the agency cannot answer, bring in someone who can check the work independently. A website accessibility consultant can review a proposed design or a finished site against current accessibility standards and give you a fix list to hold the builder to.

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