We measured every business website we could find across 12 towns: 5340 of them. Then we counted the businesses that have no website at all. This is what the region actually looks like online.
Newest measurements August 2026 · Data: shoregrade.ca · Free to quote with credit
More than four in five local business websites score a C or worse, and 1296 businesses in the same towns have no website at all.
Every site is scored out of 100 on design, speed, search visibility, accessibility, the Google listing, and a set of practical checks a customer would notice. The letters are bands of that score.
| Band | Score | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 90 to 100 | 11 | 0% |
| B | 80 to 89 | 695 | 13% |
| C | 70 to 79 | 2730 | 51% |
| D | 60 to 69 | 1560 | 29% |
| F | 0 to 59 | 344 | 6% |
The middle is where the region lives. A C is not a broken website. It is a website that works and does nothing else: no clear heading, nothing for search engines to read, slow on a phone, and no obvious next step for a customer.
Of the categories with enough businesses to judge, industrial scores worst: 92% at a C or worse across 154 sites. Hospitality does best, and still puts 81% at a C or worse. Real estate, a trade that sells marketing for a living, comes out second worst: 91% of its 278 websites score a C or worse.
| Category | Sites | Mean score | C or worse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial | 154 | 69 | 92% |
| Real estate | 278 | 70 | 91% |
| Professional services | 333 | 70 | 90% |
| Other | 256 | 70 | 90% |
| Creative | 197 | 70 | 89% |
| Trades and home services | 1726 | 72 | 88% |
| Personal services | 292 | 71 | 88% |
| Clinics and health | 707 | 72 | 87% |
| Recreation | 212 | 72 | 85% |
| Retail | 378 | 73 | 83% |
| Auto and equipment | 214 | 72 | 83% |
| Hospitality | 406 | 73 | 81% |
The spread between towns is small. Wherever you are in this region, the picture is roughly the same.
| Town | Sites | Mean score | C or worse | No website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barrie | 1581 | 72 | 87% | 192 |
| Collingwood | 727 | 72 | 84% | 164 |
| Orillia | 639 | 71 | 85% | 186 |
| Owen Sound | 555 | 71 | 89% | 170 |
| Midland | 492 | 71 | 89% | 141 |
| Wasaga Beach | 310 | 71 | 89% | 122 |
| Meaford | 203 | 72 | 86% | 76 |
| Thornbury | 200 | 72 | 84% | 33 |
| The Blue Mountains | 197 | 72 | 90% | 29 |
| Stayner | 187 | 71 | 85% | 69 |
| Creemore | 127 | 71 | 87% | 28 |
| Penetanguishene | 122 | 71 | 87% | 86 |
The common faults are not exotic or expensive. Most are an afternoon of work on a site that already exists.
These are real, open businesses that Google knows about and that customers search for. They have a Google listing and nothing else. 1171 of them list a phone number, which is the only way to reach them online.
Every business we could find with a public website in 12 towns across Simcoe and Grey County. Each site is loaded in a real browser, scored on design, speed, search visibility and accessibility, checked against its Google listing, and put through practical checks. Newest measurements August 2026.
323 businesses were measured but are not counted here. A record is held back when a signal is missing, when the page captured was not the business's own homepage, or when the site may belong to a different company with the same name. Publishing a grade computed from another company's website is the least defensible thing this project could do, so those are withheld rather than estimated.
This is not a census of every business in the region, and a score is not a judgement of the business. Plenty of excellent businesses have poor websites, which is rather the point.
Headway sells website and technology work to local businesses, and Headway runs ShoreGrade, which produced this data. That is a plain conflict of interest and worth saying out loud. The grades are computed by formula, identically for every business, and no business can pay to change its score or its rank.
Quote them freely with credit to ShoreGrade and a link to this page. Journalists and anyone who wants the underlying breakdown for a specific town or trade can email hello@headwaydigital.ca.
Look it up free on ShoreGrade. If you would rather talk about what to fix, I spend a free hour in your business, write down what I find, and leave the page with you.