The AussieVitals Benchmark

How Australian business websites are performing right now — measured across speed, SEO, security, and mobile experience.

Pilot release · 37 verified Australian business websites scanned April 2026 · How the sample was built

54 Average AussieVitals Score Out of 100 — across 37 businesses scanned
0% Scored "Excellent" No site in the sample reached 85+ out of 100
84% No Cookie Consent Required under Australian Privacy Act reforms
77% Strong Security Foundations The category Australian businesses do best on

Score distribution

Most Australian business websites sit in the 40–69 range. A handful break into "good" territory, but none yet reached the "excellent" band in this pilot.

Excellent (85–100)
0 (0%)
Good (70–84)
2 (5%)
Needs work (55–69)
17 (46%)
Poor (40–54)
14 (38%)
Critical (0–39)
4 (11%)

Where Australian businesses perform — and don't

The benchmark breaks scores across four categories. Australian business websites score strongly on basic security but lag badly on speed.

Security & Trust 15.5 / 20 (77%)

SSL, about/contact/privacy pages, testimonials. Most sites have the basics.

SEO Foundations 18.1 / 30 (60%)

Title tags, meta descriptions, headings, alt text, canonicals, sitemaps. Middle of the pack.

Mobile Experience 7.8 / 15 (52%)

Viewport, tap targets, font size, layout stability on phones. Half the sample struggles here.

Speed & Performance 12.7 / 35 (36%)

PageSpeed, Core Web Vitals, load times. The single largest opportunity for Australian businesses.

Average score by platform

The platform a website is built on shapes its baseline score. In this pilot, WordPress and site-builders (Wix) outperform custom-built sites on average — the site builders ship sensible defaults that custom builds often miss.

Wix (n=3) 70
Squarespace (n=1) 63
WordPress (n=11) 60
Shopify (n=2) 57
Webflow (n=1) 56
Custom / Other (n=19) 48

Small-sample platforms (n < 5) shown for completeness — their averages are indicative rather than conclusive. Custom and WordPress have the largest samples in this pilot.

What most Australian business websites are missing

Issues ranked by how many sites in the pilot are affected:

  • 84% have no cookie consent — required under Australian Privacy Act reforms.
  • 81% don't have their business name in the page title or main heading — a free SEO fix.
  • 78% are oversized pages that load slowly on mobile data.
  • 57% have security headers missing (HSTS, Content-Security-Policy).
  • 57% have no privacy policy — increasingly required under Australian law.
  • 57% fail LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — the main Core Web Vitals speed metric.
  • 54% serve full-size images to phones — wasting mobile data and slowing load.
  • 49% have broken heading hierarchy — accessibility and SEO issue.

How the benchmark was built

This is the pilot release of the AussieVitals Benchmark. A larger 10,000-site benchmark is in preparation — this first release validates the methodology and surfaces the most common issues.

Sample

  • 37 Australian business websites, manually verified.
  • Drawn from the Australian Business Register via state-stratified random sampling (fixed seed for reproducibility).
  • Homepage URLs resolved via Google Places API, then verified one-by-one against each business's identity.
  • State coverage: NSW 15, QLD 8, VIC 7, WA 4, SA 3. ACT, TAS, and NT are not represented in this pilot — the small-state frames were too thin for the verification process at this scale.

Scanning

  • Each site scanned 3 times; the run with the best PageSpeed result was retained (standard practice in web performance measurement to account for run-to-run variance).
  • 27 checks across 4 categories: Speed & Performance (35 points), SEO Foundations (30), Security & Trust (20), Mobile Experience (15).
  • Scans conducted April 2026 using AussieVitals v2 scoring.

Known limitations

  • Pilot-scale sample — percentages in platform and category breakdowns carry wider uncertainty than they will at the 10,000-site scale.
  • One site in the verified sample was non-functional at scan time — counted toward coverage, contributes a score of 15 (minimal, due to missing performance data) to averages.
  • Industry auto-classification is disabled in this release pending a detection fix.

Sample construction: ABR bulk extract (2026-04-15) · Fixed random seed (20260421) · State-stratified random sampling · Manual one-by-one verification before scanning.

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