70% of websites don’t last 3 years without optimisation?

Non-optimised Site Failure Rate Statistics

I was chatting with a fellow SEO at the weekend, and he informed me that he had read a website failure rate report that stated that of all the business websites that are published in the UK, 70% of them are no longer live after three years. I knew the figure was fairly high, but I didn’t think it was 70%, so on Monday, we set Ally the task of going through old search engine positioning reports, (at least those that we still had on our server),  from 2004 to see how many of the sites were still live and of the sites that were live, what percentage of them had been optimised and here are the genuine figures:

There were only 420 reports still on file from 2004, as many reports are deleted a week after they come in.

Of these 420 reports, only 172 sites were still live on the Internet.

Of these 172 sites, 35 had either changed hands or now had completely different content. (one of them had even changed from selling baby items, to selling adult toys!)

Of the remaining 137, 43 of them had been optimised and were doing well on the search engines.

The remaining 94 were still not firing on the search engines, so we can only assume that the owners were using adwords, direct advertising or simply hadn’t bothered taking their site down.

So, the stats, from our reports would suggest that the 70% figure isn’t far off.

Of the reports that we still had on file from 2004, 41% were still live on the net.

If we take off the 43 that had been optimised, 31% of sites that had not been optimised were still live, making 69%, which isn’t a kick in the arse of the 70% that Andy was quoting to me, which I find quite amazing, as I didn’t think that it would be anywhere near that figure.

It gets worse.

If we then deduct the 35 that had changed hands, or changed content, we get the final figure of only 22% of sites that were live and unoptimised in 2004 that were still unoptimised and hadn’t changed hands or changed direction, were still live on the net. So, the figure is more like 78% failure rate than 70%.

Website Failure Statistics

I know that it’s said that 99% of statistics are just made up (where did that 99% figure come from? - oh, I just made it up!), but these are genuine website failure statistics compiled from actual search engine positioning reports and costing reports that we had on file.

Ally is working on the 2005 and 2006 reports at the moment, as we are clearing up all of the old reports that we have on file. I’ll compile the data and give website failure statistics with two years longevity.

The morale of the story? I’ll leave you to work that out for yourself!

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