We audited the websites of the agencies that build websites
Dr Urls research · first published 19 October 2026 · figures computed live, newest audit 21 October 2026
Agencies, studios and freelancers build the web for everyone else. So we ran the audit we run for our customers on their own home pages: 7,595 of them, in 20 countries. These are the results, recomputed every time this page loads.
Key findings
- The median agency home page scores 57/100 (mean 57).
- 88% score below 70, which is a C+ or worse on the scale we grade every site with.
- Only 32 of 7,595 (under 1%) reach an A (85 or more).
- The median home page has 34 issues our audit flags, out of 189 checks.
How the grades fall
- A+0% · 2
- A0% · 30
- B+3% · 192
- B9% · 710
- C+29% · 2,219
- C34% · 2,577
- D21% · 1,602
- F3% · 263
By country
Countries with at least 40 audited agencies, best median first. Each links to that country's own edition of this study.
| Group | Sites | Median score | Below 70 |
|---|---|---|---|
| France | 1,229 | 59 | 84% |
| Sweden | 187 | 59 | 84% |
| Luxembourg | 182 | 59 | 87% |
| Germany | 727 | 58 | 86% |
| Switzerland | 487 | 58 | 88% |
| Austria | 219 | 58 | 86% |
| Tunisia | 127 | 58 | 90% |
| Spain | 641 | 57 | 88% |
| United Kingdom | 566 | 57 | 88% |
| Belgium | 551 | 57 | 90% |
| Poland | 221 | 57 | 92% |
| Ireland | 173 | 57 | 86% |
| Canada | 525 | 56 | 87% |
| Netherlands | 424 | 56 | 90% |
| United States | 382 | 56 | 91% |
| Morocco | 137 | 56 | 85% |
| Italy | 347 | 54 | 91% |
| Portugal | 276 | 54 | 93% |
| Senegal | 97 | 54 | 86% |
| Côte d'Ivoire | 97 | 51 | 90% |
By speciality
By what each business says it does on its own site. One business can count in several rows.
| Group | Sites | Median score | Below 70 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO agencies | 682 | 63 | 76% |
| Accessibility experts | 448 | 61 | 81% |
| E-commerce agencies | 665 | 61 | 80% |
| WordPress agencies | 1,757 | 61 | 82% |
The most common problems
- Content-Language HTTP header missing: 97% of sites
- Permissions-Policy header missing: 84% of sites
- Twitter site handle meta tag missing: 84% of sites
- Content-Security-Policy header missing: 81% of sites
- Referrer-Policy header missing: 76% of sites
- Page vulnerable to clickjacking: 71% of sites
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) is slow: 70% of sites
- External resources without Subresource Integrity: 67% of sites
- X-Content-Type-Options header missing: 66% of sites
- Images missing responsive srcset: 65% of sites
- Scripts without async or defer: 65% of sites
- Missing preconnect hints for critical origins: 64% of sites
How we measured
- The businesses come from Google Places searches for “seo agency”, “web agency”, “web design agency”, “digital marketing agency” and “web developer” in each city of a fixed plan. Each one has its own website.
- Each home page was fetched once, as published, by our crawler DrUrls-Bot, and run through the same audit Dr Urls runs for customers. One page per business, not a full crawl.
- Scores use our current scoring model, on the same 0–100 scale and grades as the product.
- Included: every audited business that has not asked to be removed. Audits taken between 12 August 2026 and 21 October 2026.
- Groups smaller than 40 sites are left out of the tables rather than shown with a misleading median.