We list 7,583 contractor websites across three trades. In August we tried to open every one of them, twice.
386 did not load either time. That is one in twenty — and the interesting part is not the number, it is what “doesn’t load” turns out to mean.
What the numbers say
417 failed the first check. 386 failed both. Checking once would have overstated the problem by 7.4%. Of the confirmed failures, 108 have lost the domain entirely and 92 answer but not at that address — and 29 load perfectly well while showing every new visitor a security warning.
GreaseTrapLocator, GeothermalFinder and WellDrillerFinder — 7,583 websites, checked 4 and 16 August 2026.
By trade
| Directory | Websites listed | Failed once | Failed both times |
|---|---|---|---|
| WellDrillerFinder | 3,613 | 226 (6.3%) | 206 (5.7%) |
| GeothermalFinder | 2,147 | 101 (4.7%) | 93 (4.3%) |
| GreaseTrapLocator | 1,823 | 90 (4.9%) | 87 (4.8%) |
| All three | 7,583 | 417 (5.5%) | 386 (5.1%) |
Water well drillers are the least likely to have a website at all — 64%, from our earlier count — and the most likely to have one that has stopped working. That is the same finding twice: it is the trade least well served by whoever built its websites.
Checking once would have been wrong
This is the part we would have got wrong if we had published in August.
Of the 417 sites that failed on the 4th, 31 loaded fine on the 16th — not because anyone fixed them, but because the first check caught them at a bad moment. Which failures were real depended almost entirely on how they had failed.
| How it failed on 4 August | Loaded fine 12 days later |
|---|---|
| Nothing listening on the port | 33% |
| Server error | 17% |
| No response within 15 seconds | 16% |
| Refuses a secure connection | 5% |
| The domain is gone | 4% |
| Answers, but not at that address | 3% |
| Loads over plain http, certificate broken | 0% |
A timeout is the weakest evidence there is — one in six was a slow server having a bad minute, not a closed business. A dead domain is the strongest. And the broken-certificate group did not move at all, because nothing about it was temporary.
If you ever see a report claiming some share of businesses in your trade are “gone”, ask how many times they checked. Once is a guess.
What is actually wrong with the 386
| Sites | What is wrong |
|---|---|
| 108 | The domain itself is gone — nothing to point a browser at |
| 92 | The server answers, but not at that address |
| 63 | No response within fifteen seconds, twice |
| 37 | Refuses a secure connection outright |
| 33 | Server error, both times |
| 29 | Loads — but the certificate is broken |
| 24 | Other connection failures |
The 29 that matter most
Most of that list is a business that has moved on, or a domain somebody stopped paying for. Not much to be done, and the owner probably knows.
The 29 at the bottom are different, and they are the reason this post exists.
Those businesses are trading. Their website is there. The pages load. But the security certificate is broken or expired, so a visitor typing the address gets a full-page browser warning — the alarming one saying the connection is not private — before they see a single word.
Most people press back at that point. Some assume the business is not real.
Not one of the 29 recovered between the two checks, so this has been true for at least twelve days and probably far longer. Sixteen of them install geothermal, nine drill wells, four service grease traps.
Here is what makes it worth writing about: it is the cheapest thing on this entire list to fix. A certificate costs nothing — free ones are issued automatically and renew themselves. This is not a rebuild or a redesign. It is usually minutes for whoever hosts the site, and often a single setting.
The owner is very unlikely to know. They visit their own site from a browser that already trusts it, or from a bookmark, or they never check at all. The warning appears for new visitors — which is to say, for customers.
Check yours in about a minute
Nothing here needs an agency:
- Open your website on a phone that has never visited it — not your own, and not on your office wi-fi. A colleague’s phone on mobile data is ideal.
- Look for a padlock in the address bar. A warning instead, or a crossed-out padlock, is the problem in this post.
- Type your address without the www, then again with it. One often works while the other does not.
- Ask your host: “is the SSL certificate valid and set to auto-renew?” If they cannot answer that plainly, that is the answer.
If it fails, it is your host’s job, it is usually free, and it usually takes them minutes.
What we are not claiming
That 386 businesses have closed. A website can lapse while a firm trades happily on phone calls and word of mouth. We measured websites, not businesses.
That our list of websites is perfect. Some addresses were captured a while ago and never updated, so a share of these will be our record being stale rather than the site being broken.
That twice is enough for certainty. It is enough to publish, and it is twice what a single sweep would have given you — but a third check would move some of these again, particularly the timeouts.
Nothing has been changed in any directory on the strength of this, and nobody has been contacted about it. No listing has been marked dead or removed, and we are not emailing the businesses concerned. This is published as a finding about the trades, not as a route to anybody’s inbox.
How we measured this
Every website recorded in the three directories was requested twice — 4 August 2026 and 16 August 2026 — using the same classifier both times, so a difference between the dates is a difference in the websites rather than in our code. Fifteen-second timeout, an ordinary desktop browser user agent, and one retry over plain http for anything that failed the secure connection.
Counted as working: any site that answered, including the 237 that recognised us as an automated request and declined politely. A server that says no is a server that is running.
Counted as failing: only sites that failed on both dates.
This is directory measurement, not client results. We have no client results in these trades to report, and we say so on the evidence page.
Published by Groundline Marketing, 16 August 2026.