Research · Published 4 October 2026
We checked 1,875 local-business websites: what a passive check can and can't see
We asked a simple question: how often is the path to contact a local business visibly broken, when you only read the public website and never submit anything?
The short version
We checked 1,875 UK and Irish local-business websites on 3 October 2026.
of the websites we checked no longer resolve. The listed address has no DNS record, or it redirects to a host that doesn't have one.
had a verified dead end on their own contact route: an error page behind a contact, enquiry or booking link, or a click-to-call button with no usable number.
How we checked
We drew a random sample of 1,921 websites listed for local businesses in OpenStreetMap, across trades, health, legal, property and other local services in Ireland and the UK. We scanned 1,875 of them. The rest were skipped because their robots.txt asked crawlers to stay out, or because the scan errored.
Our crawler, LeadKestrelBot, made plain page requests only. It did not log in, click, or fill in or submit any form. For this study we read each site's robots.txt before requesting anything else. Then we requested every flagged page again, this time identifying as an ordinary web browser, and counted a problem only if it was still there.
What we found
- 162 of 1,875 sites (8.6%) no longer resolve. 1,580 sites (84.3%) loaded when we asked. The remainder blocked our crawler, timed out or returned an error.
- Of the 1,580 sites that loaded, 39 (2.5%) had a verified dead end on their own contact route. In 25 of them (1.6%), a contact, enquiry or booking page that the site itself links to returned an error. In 14 (0.9%), a click-to-call button had an empty or cut-off number.
What these numbers don't tell you
- It is a floor, not a count of lost enquiries. A form can look perfect and still send its email nowhere because of a mail setting, a spam filter or a plugin update, and a check that only reads the public page cannot see that.
- It cannot tell you how many enquiries these dead ends cost. We did not measure that.
- The sample covers businesses that have an OpenStreetMap entry with a website, so it is not representative of every business.
- The 8.6% is partly old directory data. An address that no longer resolves may belong to a business that moved to a new domain, not one that closed.
- It is a single snapshot taken on 3 October 2026. Sites change daily.
Where our first pass was wrong
Our first automated pass flagged far more sites than were really broken. When we checked by hand, most of the extra flags were false alarms: some sites block automated visitors but load fine for people, some phone links use encoded spaces that phones read correctly, and some “share on WhatsApp” buttons have no number by design. We dropped all of those. If you run an automated checker on your own site, expect a few false alarms and look before you worry.
Five minutes to check your own site
- Open your own website on your phone and tap the call button. Does it ring the right number?
- Go to your contact, quote or booking page from your own menu, the way a customer would. Does it load?
- Send yourself an enquiry through each form. Does the notification email arrive, and not in spam?
- Check which address your form sends notifications to, and that someone reads it.
- Repeat after any plugin, theme or hosting change, and about once a month if enquiries matter to you.
Where LeadKestrel fits
Our free checkers read your public pages and look at the structure of your forms and your phone and WhatsApp links. They never submit a form and cannot confirm that an enquiry arrives. Confirming that takes a test enquiry: LeadKestrel's monitoring sends one through your contact, quote or booking form on a schedule, checks that the notification email reaches a test inbox, and checks that your WhatsApp and phone links are present and correctly formed. It starts with a free 14-day trial and no card.
Run a free check of your own site
It only reads your public pages and takes about 20 seconds.
No credit card required. Takes about 20 seconds.
Contact form checker · WhatsApp link checker · How monitoring works
Questions
Does a 2.5% dead-end rate mean 2.5% of enquiries are lost?
No. It counts websites with a dead end on their contact route, not enquiries. Some of those routes are secondary pages, and a working form can still fail to deliver. We have no figure for lost enquiries.
Did you submit forms or contact any of the businesses?
No. The crawler only read public pages. It did not log in, click, or fill in or submit any form, and we did not use this data to contact anyone.
Can I quote these numbers?
Yes, with a link to this page and the limits above: a sample of 1,875 UK and Irish local-business websites drawn from OpenStreetMap, checked passively on 3 October 2026.
Method and data
Sample frame: OpenStreetMap features tagged with a local-service category and a website, queried on 3 October 2026 (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL). Websites that were social-media or directory pages, or that appeared on more than two features, were excluded before the random draw, which used a fixed seed so it can be reproduced. A site counted as “loaded” if its homepage returned a page when our crawler asked. We store per-site results only against a one-way hash, and the list that mapped them back to business names was deleted when the analysis finished. No business is named, and we did not use this data to contact anyone.
LeadKestrel is run by Lynsco Group Limited, an Irish company, and sells website monitoring. We say so because we have an interest in the topic.