I Ran 200+ Website Audits — Here's What's Actually Broken in 2026

Performance Dev Posted on May 30 I Ran 200+ Website Audits — Here's What's Actually Broken in 2026 # performance # showdev # tooling # webdev Over the last few weeks I built a website audit tool and ran it on 200+ small business and service websites — dental practices, plumbing companies, landscapers, law firms, real estate agents. Not Fortune 500 pages optimized by dedicated teams. The sites that actually serve local customers. I expected some issues. I did not expect this. Here's the raw data, the patterns I found, and what you can actually do about it. The Scorecard I grade sites across five dimensions on a 0–100 scale. Here are the averages from 200+ audits: Dimension Average Score Worst Score Speed 56 11 SEO 68 29 Mobile usability 61 18 Accessibility 52 8 Security 70 17 SEO and security tend to be passable (automated checks from Google Search Console and automatic SSL help). Speed and accessibility are consistently neglected — probably because the feedback loop is invisible. A slow or inaccessible site loses visitors silently, and the owner never knows why. Finding #1: 67% of Sites Ship >50% Unused CSS This was the single most surprising data point by far. When a browser loads a page, it downloads every byte of CSS, parses it, builds style rules for every selector, and only then paints. If 60% of those rules never get applied (because they target a contact form behind a click, or a mobile menu at 768px+), the browser still processed them. Worst case: a dental practice shipped 287 KB of CSS. Only 31 KB was used on first paint. That's 256 KB of unnecessary render-blocking weight that delayed First Contentful Paint by roughly 1.4 seconds. The fix: If you're using Tailwind, make sure tree-shaking is enabled. If you're writing vanilla CSS, open DevTools > Coverage tab > Reload. Anything over 40% unused is worth addressing. Most bundlers handle this — you just need to turn it on. Finding #2: Average Image Payload Is 1.8 MB — Way Too High Average imag