1. Low-contrast text (the most common error on the web)

83.9% of websites have text that doesn’t meet minimum contrast standards, up from 79.1% the year before. It’s almost always the same mistake: light gray text on a white background, because it looks “clean” in a mockup. For anyone with low vision, in bright sunlight, or just tired eyes at the end of the day, it’s close to unreadable.

The fix is a five-minute pass through your site checking any gray-on-white or gray-on-gray text against a contrast checker, and darkening anything that fails. It’s the single easiest win on this list.

2. Images with no alt text

53.1% of pages are missing alt text on at least one image, and on the average small business site, it’s closer to one in five images site-wide. Alt text does double duty: it’s what a screen reader announces to a blind visitor, and it’s one of the only ways Google understands what an image actually shows.

If you’ve never written alt text, it’s not a technical job — it’s just a short, honest description. “Woman reviewing paperwork at a desk” beats nothing every time.

3. A homepage that takes too long to actually load

71.2% of sites fail a basic performance check, and 58.4% take longer than 2.5 seconds for the main content to appear on mobile — the threshold Google considers a “good” experience. Almost all of it comes down to one thing: images that were never resized or compressed before they were uploaded.

A 4000-pixel-wide photo straight from a phone doesn’t need to load at full size behind a 1200-pixel hero section. Resizing and compressing your images before upload is usually worth more than every other performance fix combined.

4. A meta description nobody wrote

52.4% of sites are missing a meta description, or have the same one duplicated across multiple pages, and 33.7% have duplicate title tags. When that happens, Google writes its own description by pulling a random sentence off the page, which is rarely the sentence that would make someone click.

Every page you actually want found needs its own title and description, written for a human deciding whether to click, not stuffed with keywords.

5. Broken links nobody’s clicked on in months

57.3% of sites have at least one broken link, with a median of 14 per site, and 36.1% have internal links pointing at pages that no longer exist. Every one of those is a small moment of distrust for a visitor, and a dead end for Google trying to crawl the rest of your site.

Old blog posts and case studies are the usual culprits — a link to a partner site, a tool, or an image that’s since moved or disappeared.

Where to actually start

None of these five take more than an afternoon to fix once you know they’re there. The hard part is actually knowing — most business owners have never seen their site through this lens. Run your site through our free audit tool and you’ll get a real score across all five categories in under 15 seconds, no account required.

If the list comes back longer than you expected, book a free call and we’ll walk through what’s actually worth fixing first.