What I Learned Auditing 50 Websites in One Week

Last month I had one of those restless weeks where I couldn't focus on any single project, so I did what any reasonable person does: I audited 50 random websites with SCOUTb2 and kept notes on everything I found. It started as procrastination. It turned into something genuinely interesting.

Here's how I picked the sites. I grabbed a mix: small local business sites, personal portfolios, nonprofit sites, mid-size e-commerce stores, SaaS landing pages, and a handful of news/blog-style sites. I deliberately avoided the tech giants of the world because those have entire teams dedicated to this stuff. I wanted to see what the average site looks like out there in the wild.

I scanned each site's homepage using SCOUTb2, recorded the results in a spreadsheet, and looked for patterns. The findings below reflect this informal sample and are not a scientific study, but the patterns were consistent enough to be worth sharing.

92% Had Accessibility Issues

Let that sink in. 46 out of 50 sites had at least one accessibility failure. Some had dozens. Only 4 sites came through clean on all 26 checks.

The most common issues, in order:

1. Missing image alt text. This showed up on 38 of the 50 sites. Not all images need alt text (decorative images can have an empty alt attribute), but most of the violations I found were legitimate content images with no description at all.
2. Color contrast failures. Light gray text on white backgrounds. Pale blue links on pale gray cards. I saw combinations that, when I ran the actual contrast ratio, came in at 1.8:1. WCAG requires 4.5:1 for normal text. That's not even close.
3. Missing form labels. Placeholder text is not the same as a label. I can't tell you how many contact forms I saw where the email field just had placeholder="Email" and absolutely nothing else to identify it. Screen readers don't do well with this.
4. Heading hierarchy problems. Jumping from an H1 directly to an H4 because it "looks better" is shockingly common. Headings are not font sizes. They're semantic structure. Assistive technologies use them for navigation.
5. Missing skip links. Almost nobody had them. A skip link is a tiny invisible link at the top of the page that lets keyboard users jump straight to the main content instead of tabbing through the entire navigation on every single page. Takes about 10 minutes to implement. Almost no one does it.

The sites that scored worst on accessibility were, somewhat ironically, the ones that clearly had a lot of design investment. Heavy custom fonts, elaborate hover effects, image-heavy layouts. Design and accessibility are not opposites, but they do require intentional effort to combine well.

78% Had at Least One Broken Link

This one genuinely surprised me. I expected broken links to be a "small site problem" but I found them everywhere. 39 out of 50 sites had at least one link on their homepage that returned a 404 or redirect loop.

The most common culprits:

• Social media links pointing to old or deleted accounts (social media accounts that no longer exist were particularly common)
• Footer links to pages that were removed during a redesign
• Blog post links to external sources that had gone offline
• Internal links that were never updated after URL structure changes

One site, which I won't name, had 14 broken links on its homepage alone. Its navigation had been partially redesigned at some point and nobody had verified that the old URLs still resolved. The pages existed; the links just pointed to the wrong paths. A five-minute scan would have caught this immediately.

Broken links are one of those things that accumulate invisibly. Your site looks fine to you because you never click those specific links. But users do. And search engine crawlers do. And every broken link is a small signal that your site is not well-maintained.

65% Failed Core Web Vitals

More than half the sites I scanned had at least one Core Web Vitals metric in the "needs improvement" or "poor" range. LCP was the most common failure, which tracks: most sites' biggest performance bottleneck is a large unoptimized image in the hero section.

A few patterns I noticed:

CMS sites with page builders were consistently the worst performers. If you're using a drag-and-drop page builder and haven't done anything to optimize performance, your site is almost certainly loading 3 to 5 megabytes of CSS and JavaScript before showing any content. I clocked one site at an LCP of 11.2 seconds on my home connection. That's not a website; that's a loading screen.

Sites built on modern frameworks (Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit) tended to perform better, though not universally. A couple of over-engineered React apps with too much client-side rendering had surprisingly high INP scores because JavaScript was blocking interactivity long after the page looked loaded.

CLS was sneaky. Several sites looked fine visually but had high CLS scores because things were shifting just slightly during load. Fonts swapping in, small layout adjustments as images loaded without dimensions. The users probably didn't notice consciously, but the score was there.

40% Had Missing Meta Descriptions

I know meta descriptions don't directly affect rankings, but they can affect click-through rates from search results, which may have a practical effect over time. 20 of the 50 sites had at least one page with no meta description at all, meaning the search engine was just grabbing random text from the page and showing that in search results.

I checked a few of these in search console (for sites I had access to) and the click-through rates were noticeably lower than pages with well-written descriptions. It's a small thing that takes a few minutes to fix and has a measurable impact.

The Most Surprising Finding

Honestly? The sites with the best accessibility scores were almost always also the best performers. I wasn't expecting that correlation. But it makes sense when you think about it: accessibility practices and performance practices overlap a lot. Clean semantic HTML is fast to parse. Properly sized images need alt text anyway. Well-structured headings help both screen readers and search crawlers.

The sites that clearly cared about one tended to care about the other. The ones that didn't care about accessibility often also had terrible Core Web Vitals and broken links everywhere. It felt like an indicator of general engineering culture more than anything else.

What I Would Tell Those 50 Site Owners

If I could sit down with each of them, here's what I'd say: run a scan. It's free, it takes under a minute, and it will tell you more about the state of your site than any gut feeling you have. Most people genuinely don't know what's wrong with their site because they've never looked. SCOUTb2 gives you a starting point with zero setup required.

For the sites with bigger issues or multiple pages to manage, SCOUTb2 Pro can crawl up to 10,000 pages, schedule recurring scans, and send email alerts when new issues appear. That's how you stay on top of things without doing a manual audit every week like I apparently do for fun.

The web is a little messier than we'd like to think. But it's also very fixable. Most of the issues I found across 50 sites could have been resolved in an afternoon by someone who knew where to look. The hard part is just knowing where to look.

That's what a scan gives you.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, professional, or compliance advice. SCOUTb2 is an automated scanning tool that helps identify common issues but does not guarantee full compliance with any standard or regulation.