Bad Website Examples: 10 Problems and What Each Costs

The bad website examples worth studying are ordinary ones. A dental practice whose homepage takes 9 seconds to load on a phone. A roofer whose quote form goes nowhere. This post describes 10 of them, one for each area in which a site can fail, with what each costs the owner and how to raise it kindly.

Every example is a made-up composite. No real business or website is named, pictured or hinted at.

What makes a website bad?

A bad website is one that stops a visitor from doing what they came to do. For a local business that means calling, booking or asking for a quote. Looks come second.

Three of the five roundups we read for this post name real websites, from famous oddities with clashing colors to large retail brands. Those are fun to look at, and they teach an agency little. The sites an agency meets every day are plainer. Picture a heating company with a tidy site from 2014 that hides its phone number on a small screen.

The 10 examples here follow the 10 domains that Twip, the AI inside Leadodo, scores on every website.

10 bad website examples, one per domain

Each example gives the made-up site, what the problem costs and a sentence you could say to the owner.

1. Design, the site that stopped in 2013

The made-up example. A family law firm. The homepage has a beveled blue header, a scrolling news ticker and a stock photo of a gavel. Most outdated website examples look like this one. Nothing is broken. The site only shows its age.

What it costs. A visitor compares it with the firm two results down, whose site looks current. A dated site suggests a dated practice.

"I put your homepage next to the three other family law firms on page one for your town. Yours is the only one that looks unchanged since about 2013, and I think it undersells the firm."

2. Speed, the 9-second homepage

The made-up example. A dental practice with a full-screen video of its waiting room. On a phone, the main content takes 9 seconds to appear.

What it costs. Google counts a page as good when its main content shows within 2.5 seconds, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads (web.dev). At 9 seconds, some visitors have already gone back and tapped the next practice.

"Your homepage took 9 seconds to show on my phone. Google's mark for a good page is 2.5. The video is the cause, and it is a small fix."

3. Mobile, the desktop site on a small screen

The made-up example. An auto repair shop. On a phone, the whole desktop page shrinks to fit. The text is too small to read and the phone number is one tiny link among four.

What it costs. A driver with a warning light on is searching from a phone. So is Google, which says it "uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking" (Google Search Central).

"On my phone I had to zoom in twice to find your number. A driver at the roadside will call the shop whose number they can tap."

4. Security, the "Not secure" contact page

The made-up example. A physiotherapy clinic. The site still runs on HTTP, so the browser shows "Not secure" beside the address (Google Chrome Help). The label sits above a form that asks for a name, a phone number and a description of an injury.

What it costs. A patient is asked to type health details under a warning. Some will close the tab and call another clinic.

"Your contact form asks about injuries, and the browser marks that page 'Not secure'. A certificate fixes it, and it is usually a small job."

5. SEO, the site where every page is called "Home"

The made-up example. A roofing company with 12 pages. All 12 carry the title "Home". The town is never named in the text, and the list of services is a photo of a brochure.

What it costs. Search engines read titles and text, and this site gives them neither. The company is missing from searches for roof repair in its own town, and the work goes to roofers who are easier to find.

"When I search 'roof repair' with your town, four roofers come up and you are not among them. All 12 of your pages are titled 'Home', which is a likely reason."

6. Accessibility, the pale gray text

The made-up example. An accounting practice. Body text is light gray on white. The contact form has no labels, only hints that vanish when you start typing.

What it costs. Older clients and anyone with weak eyesight struggle to read it. The problem is common. WebAIM's February 2026 check of the top one million home pages found low contrast text on 83.9% of them and detectable WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% (WebAIM). The standard asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text (W3C).

"The gray text on your site is hard to read on a phone in daylight. A darker shade would fix it, and it is a small change."

7. Content, the homepage that says nothing

The made-up example. A cleaning company. The headline reads "Your trusted partner for excellence". The page gives no service area, no price guide and no opening hours.

What it costs. A visitor wants three answers at a glance. What you do, where, and roughly for how much. When the page gives none, they ask a competitor.

"I read your homepage twice and could not tell whether you clean homes, offices or both, or which towns you cover."

8. Conversion, the 11-field form

The made-up example. A kitchen fitter. The only way to get a quote is a form with 11 required fields, three screens down. The phone number is part of an image, so nobody can tap it.

What it costs. These losses hurt the most, because the visitor had already decided to get in touch.

"Your quote form asks for 11 things before someone can send it. I would cut it to a name, a phone number and a photo of the kitchen."

9. Trust, the site that could be anyone's

The made-up example. An electrician. Every photo is stock. The site shows no names, no license number and no reviews, and the last blog post is from 2019.

What it costs. People let an electrician into their home. With no face and no proof on the site, they pick the one who shows both.

"Your Google listing shows a licensed, well-reviewed business. Your website shows stock photos. I would put your own van and your license number on the first screen."

10. Technology, the visible error

The made-up example. A florist. A code warning is printed across the top of every page. The order widget never loads, and the map is a gray box.

What it costs. The site looks abandoned. The owner does not know orders are failing, because nobody reports a broken widget. They leave.

"There is an error message at the top of your homepage and the order widget does not load. You may be missing orders without knowing."

Which bad websites make the best leads?

The best leads are established businesses whose sites fail in several domains at once. One flaw is a tune-up. Four or five mean a rebuild, and the owner often suspects it already.

Our own test supports writing to them. We scored 20,000 Dutch company websites and sent 3,570 cold emails. The businesses with the weakest 20% of sites replied positively about 3.2 times as often as a random sample of the rest. The test covered email only, in one country. The details are in our write-up of the test.

You can run the checks by hand. A website audit covers the same ground in depth, and our website audit checklist gives you the list. For a one-minute version, use the nine signs a business needs a new website.

Twip does the same across a whole search. It scores each site out of 100, and sites that score below 40 form the shortlist. You can see how the score works.

How do you raise a problem without insulting the owner?

Describe what you saw, say what it costs their customers and offer one fix. Never grade the site. An owner who hears "your website is bad" hears "you chose badly".

1. Lead with one finding. Pick the one that costs the most. Save the rest for the call.
2. Report what happened. "The form returned an error twice" is a fact. "Your site is outdated" is an opinion.
3. Make it checkable. The owner should be able to confirm it on their own phone in 10 seconds.
4. Credit what works. Good reviews, a clear logo, 20 years in business. Say so first.
5. Keep it private. Write to the owner. Never post a prospect's site in your marketing.

A posted letter suits this kind of message, because it is private and plainly took some effort. Our guide explains why the letter goes first.

The fifth rule is why every example in this post is made up. An agency that shames a local business in public shows every other owner in town what working with it would feel like.

Questions

What are the most common signs of a bad website?

Slow loading on a phone, a layout that does not fit a small screen, no clear way to call or book, and text that says nothing specific. A "Not secure" label and an old copyright year are the quickest to spot. Three or more of these together point to a site that needs replacing.

Where can I see real examples of bad websites?

Roundups from site builders and marketing companies collect real sites, from famous oddities to large brands. For examples closer to your own market, search a trade in your town and open the results from page two on your phone. Keep what you find between you and the owner.

Is an ugly website always a bad website?

No. A plain site that loads fast, shows the phone number and says what the business does will beat a beautiful one that hides all three. Judge a site first by whether a visitor can act, then by how it looks.

How much business does a bad website lose?

Nobody can give one honest figure, because it depends on the trade and the traffic. Use the owner's own numbers. As an illustration, if a new patient is worth $1,200 in the first year and a slow page loses two a month, that is $28,800 a year. Those figures are made up to show the arithmetic.

Should I tell an owner their website is bad?

Not in those words. Tell them one thing you saw, what it means for their customers and how you would fix it. The owner will draw the conclusion, and they will trust it more because it is theirs.

Can I use a prospect's site as a before example?

Only with written permission, and normally only once they are a client and the new site is live. Until then, describe patterns with made-up examples.

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Next step. Twip scores every website in a search across these 10 domains, and its findings become the opening line of each letter and email. See AI Analysis.