Study: How Good Are the Websites of Vienna's Tradespeople?

How good are the websites of trade businesses in Vienna? We measured it: 227 websites of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, glaziers, tailors and other trades, loaded the way a phone loads them. We checked what customers and Google notice first: speed, encryption, privacy and the basics of being found. The result is better than its reputation: most sites get the basics right, and the problems sit in a few clear places, above all speed on a phone.

Key findings

• Most sites get the basics right. Leaving speed aside, a site meets 5 of 6 basic points on average, and almost three quarters miss one at most.
• Three in four sites are too slow on a phone, measured on throttled 4G. Only 25% stay within Google’s 2.5-second limit, and the median is 5.1 seconds.
• More than one address in seven leads to no working website. For 21 of 227 addresses the browser warns about an invalid certificate, 13 domains no longer exist and one shows an error page.
• One site in five loads Google Fonts from Google’s servers, even though this has been considered a privacy risk since 2022.
• Only 28% tell Google in machine-readable form who they are and where, meaning trade and address. It’s the biggest untapped lever for local search and AI answers.
• 6% pass all seven basic checks at once. The most common reason is speed alone: for a third of all sites it’s the only point missing.

How we measured

The sample comes from OpenStreetMap: every Vienna business tagged as a trade with a website, one entry per domain. Pages on Facebook, Instagram or in directories weren’t counted. That gave us 227 domains, most often plumbers and heating engineers (57), electricians (28), carpenters and joiners (27) and glaziers (24).

What we measured on each website

1. One visit like a phoneAn Android phone screen, connection throttled to 1.6 Mbit/s with 150 ms latency, processor four times slower – the values Google's Lighthouse uses for mobile.
2. Speed and page weightLargest Contentful Paint (when the largest content appears), layout shifts, data transferred and number of requests.
3. What happens without a clickWhich services load before any interaction (Google Fonts, Analytics, Meta Pixel, maps, videos) and which cookies they set.
4. Basics for Google and the lawhttps and redirects, mobile layout, title, meta description, headings, structured data, imprint and privacy policy.

Addresses that didn’t load in the first run were tried again, with and without “www”, and checked via DNS to see whether the domain still exists. Lab results also vary, so we measured 30 randomly chosen sites a second time. Loading time changed by a median of 0.08 seconds, and 97% landed in the same band again. The figures are solid, but they aren’t a verdict on any single business. A lab test shows one moment under fixed conditions, not averages from real visitors. That’s why we only publish totals.

Finding 1: Waiting on a phone

Google judges speed mainly by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): up to 2.5 seconds is good, over 4 seconds is poor (web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint). Under phone conditions, Vienna’s trade businesses look like this:

Loading speed on a phone (LCP), 186 home pages

1. 25%
2. 18%
3. 57%

• good, up to 2.5 s: 25%
• needs improvement, up to 4 s: 18%
• poor, over 4 s: 57%

The most common cause is simply weight. Half of the home pages transfer more than 1.4 MB, one in five more than 3 MB. Usually that’s large photos at full camera resolution, image sliders at the top of the page and plugins that load their code on every page. The median home page makes 51 separate requests.

The difference by platform stands out. The 79 WordPress sites in the sample took a median of 7.1 seconds, the rest 3.9 seconds. That’s not down to WordPress itself but to what gets built on it: heavy themes and lots of plugins. A lean WordPress site can be very fast.

To put this in context: it’s a lab test under unfavourable conditions. Real visitors on Wi-Fi or 5G see most sites faster. Google itself judges speed using data from real Chrome users, but for small business sites that data usually doesn’t exist. So our measurement shows the unfavourable case, and it happens often: in a basement, on a building site, on the underground.

Why it matters: many searches for a tradesperson happen on the go, on a phone, often in a hurry. Someone staring at a blank screen for five seconds during a burst pipe calls the next listing. Our article on Core Web Vitals explains how to improve speed step by step.

Finding 2: More than one address in seven doesn’t work

Before speed comes the question of whether the site opens at all. For 35 of the 227 addresses it didn’t, and for another 4 the server rejected our test:

What visitors see at 227 addresses

• The site loads83%
• Browser warns about an invalid certificate9%
• Domain no longer exists6%
• Server error page<1%
• Test blocked by the server2%

The 21 certificate warnings are the costliest mistake in the whole study. The certificate has expired (8), belongs to a different address (12) or is self-signed (1), and instead of the site the browser shows a full-page warning that the connection isn’t private. Hardly any customer clicks past that. The fix usually costs nothing: most hosts issue free Let’s Encrypt certificates that renew automatically.

Among the sites that load, https is almost universal (98%). 87% also redirect the unencrypted address to https properly.

Finding 3: Privacy on the first visit

What a website loads before anyone clicks anything is the most sensitive point for privacy. In Austria, cookies that aren’t strictly necessary need consent (Section 165(3) of the Telecommunications Act 2021), and every connection to a third-party server passes on the visitor’s IP address.

What loads on the first visit, 188 home pages

• Google Analytics, Tag Manager or Meta Pixel28%
• Google Fonts from Google's servers21%
• Tracking cookies without anyone consenting10%
• Google Maps or YouTube embedded9%
• Cookie banner from a known provider detected34%

Google Fonts are the best-known example. In 2022 the Munich Regional Court ruled that a website loading fonts from Google’s servers without consent unlawfully passes on the visitor’s IP address (judgment of 20 January 2022, 3 O 17493/20). The same year, thousands of businesses in Austria received letters demanding payment; a test case in Vienna was later dismissed. The risk is still unnecessary, and one site in five still loads its fonts from Google. The fix is simple: host the font files on your own server.

Tracking cookies without consent turned up on almost one site in ten, typically _ga from Google Analytics or _fbp from the Meta Pixel. Usually it’s a setup error: the banner is there, but the script doesn’t wait for it.

Finding 4: Being found

Google and AI search tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity need clear signals about what a page is about and where the business is. Small things are often missing:

Basics for Google and AI search, 188 home pages

• Imprint linked91%
• Set up for phones (viewport)84%
• Meta description present70%
• Tap-to-call phone number63%
• Exactly one main heading (H1)58%
• Markup with trade and address (LocalBusiness)28%

Structured markup is used least of all. Only 28% of sites tell Google in machine-readable form that a plumber or a carpenter works here, at this address, with these opening hours and this phone number. For local search and AI answers it’s one of the simplest improvements. More on this in our articles on local SEO in Vienna and on getting found in AI search.

Almost a quarter of the sites have no H1 heading at all, often because the business name only appears as an image in the logo. 16% have no mobile setting, so the site shows up on a phone as a shrunken desktop page. And 9% have no recognisable link to an imprint, which is mandatory for businesses in Austria.

Seven basic checks: nearly there, rarely complete

For the overall picture we combined seven points. Most sites meet each one on its own, with one exception:

Share of sites meeting each point

• Imprint linked91%
• No tracking cookies before consent90%
• https with redirect87%
• Set up for phones84%
• No Google Fonts from Google's servers79%
• Meta description70%
• Loads within 2.5 seconds on a phone24%
• All seven at once6%

So why do only 6% pass all seven? Because the gaps sit in a different place on each site: one lacks a meta description, the next loads Google Fonts, a third has no mobile setting. Leaving speed aside, the distribution looks like this:

How many of the six points without speed are met, 188 home pages

1. 39%
2. 35%
3. 18%
4. 8%

• all 6: 39%
• 5 of 6: 35%
• 4 of 6: 18%
• 3 or fewer: 8%

So most businesses are close. Leaving speed aside, almost three quarters miss one point at most, and it can usually be fixed with little effort. Speed is the bigger job, but it rarely needs a new site either: smaller images, fewer plugins, faster hosting.

What you can check now

This order gets the most out of the least effort:

1. Open your site on a phone, without Wi-Fi. If a warning appears or it takes noticeably long, that’s the first job for whoever looks after your website.
2. Check the certificate: is there a padlock before the address? Does http:// turn into https:// automatically?
3. Measure speed with PageSpeed Insights, mobile view. Goal: LCP under 2.5 seconds.
4. Replace large images: bring photos at the top of the page down to around 1,600 pixels wide in a modern format like WebP or AVIF.
5. Host Google Fonts locally and check that analytics scripts really only load after consent.
6. Write a meta description and one H1 for the home page and your main services, including trade and district.
7. Add LocalBusiness markup with name, address, phone and opening hours, matching your Google Business Profile.

How to cite: Wimmer Webservices (2026): How Good Are the Websites of Vienna's Tradespeople? Measurement of 227 websites, November 2026. https://wimmer-webservices.com/en/blog/study-vienna-trade-websites – Data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.

Want to know where your own site stands? As part of SEO and care we measure exactly these points for your site and put the improvements in place. Get in touch through the contact form.