I Audited 89 Capital Region Business Websites. Here Is What Is Broken.

In September 2026 I pulled a list of 89 small businesses across New York's Capital Region — Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Colonie, Latham, Cohoes, Clifton Park, Guilderland, Delmar and East Greenbush — and opened every single website by hand. Towing companies and auto shops. HVAC contractors, plumbers, electricians. Landscapers, roofers, plow operators. Restaurants, barbershops and salons along Central Avenue and State Street.

Not a directory scrape. I loaded the pages.

Here is what I found, and the five-minute check you can run on your own business tonight.

The numbers

Of 89 established, currently-operating local businesses:

• 28 had no website at all. A Facebook page, a Yelp listing, an Angi profile — but nothing they owned.
• 9 had a website that was actually broken. Not ugly. Broken. Domains that no longer resolve, pages returning 404, SSL certificates that throw a security warning before a visitor sees a word.
• 15 had a site that loads but has gone stale — copyright years reading 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022; single pages with no way to contact anyone; layouts that don't work on a phone.
• 19 had a decent, modern site that cannot capture a lead after 5pm. No chat, no booking, no callback. A form, and an empty office.
• 18 were in good shape. Modern site, mobile-friendly, online booking or chat already in place. Roughly one in five.

That is 71 of 89 local businesses with a fixable problem costing them money right now.

Three findings deserve their own paragraph.

One business had 315 reviews and a website that will not load. Years of earned trust pointing at a locked door.

One long-established contractor's domain now forwards to the web agency that built it. Four decades of name recognition sending traffic to somebody else's homepage.

One restaurant's domain was picked up after it lapsed and now redirects to an offshore gambling site. They are open. They are busy. They almost certainly have no idea.

Why this happens

None of these are stupid people. The pattern is almost always the same, and it has three stages.

A developer builds the site — often a relative, often cheap, sometimes fine. The developer moves on, stops answering, or quietly goes out of business. Nobody holds the domain renewal, the hosting login, or the certificate. Eighteen months later something expires, and no one finds out, because the owner never types their own web address. They know where their shop is.

The tell is almost always in the footer. If yours names a company that is not yours, you do not own your website. You are renting it from somebody who may no longer be in business.

The five-minute check

Do this on your phone, tonight, in this order.

1. Open your own website. Type the address by hand rather than clicking a bookmark. Does it load? Does it load without a security warning? Does it load on cellular data with wifi turned off?

2. Read your footer. Look at the copyright year. If it is more than two years old, every visitor is quietly wondering whether you are still in business. Look at whose name is next to it.

3. Search your business name in Google Maps. Is the address right? Is the phone right? Are the hours right? Do a second search on Yelp and compare. Conflicting hours are one of the most expensive errors in local business — people drive to a closed door and blame you for it.

4. Check who owns the domain. Look up your domain on any WHOIS lookup. If the registrant is your old developer, you do not control your own address, and you cannot move it without them.

5. Ask what happens at 9pm. Someone finds you at nine at night with a burst pipe, a dead car, or a roof leak. What can they actually do on your site? If the answer is "leave a message," you are competing against companies where the answer is "book a slot."

What is actually worth fixing first

If your site is broken or gone, that is the whole job — nothing else matters until people can reach a working page. Expect to pay somewhere between $2,500 and $6,000 for a real small-business site, and insist on three things in writing: the domain is registered in your name, the code is handed to you, and you hold the hosting login. Any developer who will not agree to those three is planning to own you.

If your site works but nothing happens after hours, the fix is cheaper and faster than a rebuild. Online booking, or an AI voice agent that answers the phone at 2am, captures the job and puts it on your calendar, typically runs a few hundred dollars a month. For trades where a single emergency call is worth several hundred dollars, that pays for itself in the first week of a cold snap.

If your site is simply old, be honest about whether it is losing you work. A dated site that loads fast, shows your phone number, and has real photos of your own work outperforms a beautiful site that nobody can find. Stale is a smaller problem than broken. Fix broken first.

A note on the businesses in this sample

I have deliberately not named anyone. These are working businesses with real customers, and publishing a list of what is wrong with each of them would be a cheap thing to do to people who have not asked for my opinion.

If you operate in the Capital Region and you would like to know which of these applies to you specifically, ask. I will look at your site and tell you what I find, including "nothing, you are fine" — which was true for eighteen of the eighty-nine.

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Tech Build Dreams builds small-business websites, custom applications and AI voice agents, on-site across Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Colonie and Clifton Park and remotely nationwide. English and Spanish. Se habla español.