Industry benchmark
Hardware & building materials website benchmarks
27.6% of these sites are still flagged "Not secure" by Chrome — the single cheapest fix in the report.
Get the full hardware & building materials dataset (US)
29 hardware & building materials across the US with contact + diagnostic data. Delivered by email in ~5 minutes.
- Business name, address, phone, website
- Up to 3 emails per record
- Google rating, review count, category
- PageSpeed, SSL, tech stack
- SEO basics: meta, canonical, og, schema
- Social links: IG, FB, LinkedIn, YouTube
Secure checkout via Stripe. CSV emailed within ~5 minutes.
Key findings
What the data says about hardware & building materials
The handful of things that jumped out after crunching every diagnostic. Details and quick wins are below.
- 01
27.6% of these sites are still flagged "Not secure" by Chrome — the single cheapest fix in the report.
- 02
Average page takes 10.9s to render its main content — 8.4s over Google's passing threshold.
At a glance
Headline scores
Averages across the full sample. Google's thresholds shown as the white marker on each bar.
Core Web Vitals
How sites perform in the real world
The four metrics Google uses to rank pages. Lower is better for all of them.
Security
SSL and HTTPS adoption
No SSL in 2026 is a trust killer — and a Chrome warning. These numbers should be 100%.
Sites with SSL
Weak21 secure, 8 without
Sites without SSL
ExposedEach of these loses visitors at the browser warning
Technology landscape
What this market runs on
Top platforms, CMSs, and analytics tools detected across the sample.
Social presence
Where these businesses show up online
Share of sites that link out to each platform from their homepage footer or header.
With any social
At least one platform linked
11 sites linking out
8 sites linking out
Performance spread
How hardware & building materials cluster on page speed
PageSpeed scores grouped into Google's tier labels. The shape of the distribution tells you whether the industry average hides a few great outliers — or a long tail of broken sites.
- Critical0–4941.4%
- Needs work50–6944.8%
- Decent70–896.9%
- Good90–1006.9%
Long tail: 41% of sites land in the Critical tier. This is where the easiest wins live — any site that climbs above 50 outperforms nearly half the market.
SEO health
The basics Google expects from hardware & building materials
Adoption of the table-stakes SEO signals across the sample. Gaps here are the cheapest wins — any one of these fixes tends to outperform months of content work.
Viewport meta
StrongSites declaring a mobile viewport — without this, Chrome renders pages at desktop zoom on phones.
Meta description
WeakSites with a populated meta description — the text Google shows in search results.
Canonical tag
MixedSites declaring which URL is the main one — prevents duplicate-content penalties across www, http, and tracking-parameter variants.
Open Graph tags
WeakSites with og:title / og:image tags — controls how links preview on LinkedIn, Facebook, iMessage.
Structured data
WeakSites publishing JSON-LD schema — unlocks rich results (stars, hours, FAQ snippets).
Quick wins
The fixes that would move most hardware & building materials forward
Ranked by how often we saw each issue across 29 sites. If yours has these, every competitor with them fixed is beating you on something Google measures.
- 01
Main content takes too long to appear
Found on 89.7% of sitesSpeedhigh impact - 02
363 broken links
Found on 72.4% of sitesSecuritymedium impact - 03
18 pages share the same title
Found on 62.1% of sitesSEOmedium impact - 04
No sitemap found
Found on 51.7% of sitesSEOhigh impact - 05
No robots.txt found
Found on 44.8% of sitesSEOhigh impact
FAQ
Common questions
We ran full diagnostics on 29 hardware & building materials websites across the US. Every site on this page cleared our complete crawl — PageSpeed, SSL, tech stack, social links, and structured data — so the numbers represent real, production sites, not samples from a survey.
The average hardware & building material site in our sample scores 52/100 on Google PageSpeed. Anything above 80/100 puts you ahead of most of your competitors. Below 50 is where sites start losing traffic to faster alternatives — Google's own data shows bounce rate climbs sharply past a 3-second load time.
Google's "Good" threshold for Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds. The average hardware & building material website we analyzed takes 10.9s. If your LCP is above 2.5s, you're penalized in search rankings and visitors drop off before your homepage finishes rendering.
Across our sample, the top technologies are jQuery (58.6%), WordPress (51.7%), MySQL (51.7%). Platform choice matters less than how it's configured — we see well-tuned WordPress sites outperform poorly-built custom builds routinely.
72.4% of the hardware & building materials sites we analyzed use SSL. Any site without HTTPS gets a "Not secure" warning in Chrome, which kills trust — especially for hardware & building materials where clients are handing over personal details or payment info. It's free to add and takes minutes.
Enter your URL in the audit box on this page. You'll get a free report covering performance, SEO, SSL, and tech stack — benchmarked against the same 29 hardware & building materials sites we used here. Results arrive in under 60 seconds. No signup or credit card.
Top markets
Hardware & building materials by city
The cities with the most hardware & building materials websites in our sample. Jump straight into the local benchmark for any of them.
Related industries
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How we fix it
Web Boost — we fix the gaps we just showed you, every month
The diagnostic above tells you what's broken on hardware & building materials websites. Web Boost is the monthly retainer that actually ships the fixes: senior developers, AI-assisted, concrete before/after reports, cancel anytime.
Speed + Core Web Vitals
Image compression, caching, lazy loading, render-blocking cleanup — the fixes the benchmark above flagged.
On-page SEO + structured data
Meta tags, canonicals, schema markup, internal linking — every signal Google's crawler expects, audited and fixed.
Conversion rate + mobile UX
CTAs, forms, microcopy, mobile layout. Turn the traffic you're already getting into leads and customers.
The diagnostic engine is the same one we ship for product and agency clients
Want a diagnostic on your hardware & building material site?
Email us and we'll run the same benchmark you see on this page — Core Web Vitals, SEO hygiene, tech stack, quick wins. No intake form, results back within a business day.
Or write to hello@borahlabs.us directly. No intake form, no pitch deck.