We checked 4,628 websites built by design studios
Design studios ship beautiful websites. We wanted to see the parts a portfolio screenshot doesn't show, so we opened 4,628 live sites that 746 design studios link to from their own portfolio pages, on a phone-sized screen, and checked what visitors meet. The layouts hold up; the invisible details often don't.
- 87%
- fail at least one automated WCAG check
- 50%
- have links a screen reader can't name
- 14%
- stop visitors zooming on a phone
- 35%
- have no image for link previews
What we found
01
87%
Almost nine in ten fail at least one automated accessibility check
Free tool: website accessibility checker →We ran axe-core, the open-source engine behind most accessibility testing tools, against each homepage for WCAG 2 Level A and AA rules. 87% had at least one failure. Automated checks find only part of the problems, so the real share of sites with barriers is higher, not lower.
Most of it is a build detail, not a design flaw, and is fixed without changing how the site looks.
02
50%
- Text with too little contrast62%
- Links with no accessible name50%
- Images with no text alternative14%
- Zoom blocked on phones14%
- Buttons with no accessible name10%
- Embedded frames with no title8%
- No page language7%
Half have links a screen reader can't name
Free tool: free website audit →Contrast leads (62%), and it's partly a design decision. Close behind are links with no name (50%), almost always icon-only links: social icons, logos, menu buttons. A screen reader announces them as "link" and nothing else. Images with no description (14%) and buttons with no name (10%) follow. Each is a label in the code.
03
14%
- WordPress sites blocking zoom22%
- Shopify sites blocking zoom14%
- Webflow sites blocking zoom2%
- Squarespace sites blocking zoom1%
One in 7 won't let you zoom on a phone, and WordPress sites are the worst
Free tool: mobile-friendly test →14% of sites tell phones not to allow zooming (user-scalable=no or maximum-scale=1). On WordPress it's 22%, against under 2% on Webflow, Wix and Squarespace, which suggests a theme setting that nobody revisits. It shuts out anyone who needs larger text, and it's one line in the page head to fix.
04
35%
A third show a blank card when the link is shared
Free tool: free website audit →35% have no share image (og:image), so a link pasted into LinkedIn, Slack or iMessage shows an empty card or a random picture from the page. 22% have no search description either, so Google writes its own snippet.
05
19%
- No main heading (H1)19%
- More than one H120%
- No page language declared7%
- At least one broken image8%
One in five has no main heading
Free tool: free website audit →19% of homepages have no H1 and 20% have more than one, which leaves search engines and screen readers guessing what the page is about. 7% don't declare the page language, and 8% show at least one image that fails to load.
06
1%
- Sites that scroll sideways on a 390-pixel phone1%
The good news: the layouts hold up on phones
Free tool: mobile-friendly test →Only 1% of sites scrolled sideways on a phone-sized screen. Studios get the visible part of mobile design right; what slips is what you can't see.
By platform
Share of working sites on each platform. * Fewer than 30 sites: read as indicative only.
| n | Fail WCAG checks | Unnamed links | Zoom blocked | No share image | No H1 | No description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 2074 | 89% | 58% | 22% | 37% | 22% | 28% |
| Webflow | 402 | 93% | 67% | 2% | 21% | 7% | 6% |
| Wix | 300 | 77% | 34% | 0% | 37% | 19% | 8% |
| Next.js | 235 | 78% | 16% | 4% | 20% | 9% | 5% |
| Shopify | 202 | 92% | 50% | 14% | 25% | 15% | 13% |
| Squarespace | 164 | 75% | 46% | 1% | 4% | 24% | 25% |
| Drupal | 43 | 77% | 42% | 0% | 54% | 21% | 28% |
| All | 4628 | 87% | 50% | 14% | 35% | 19% | 22% |
What they're built on
Share of the 4,628 working sites by the platform we could detect from the page's code. "Custom or other" includes hand-built sites and platforms we don't fingerprint.
- WordPress45%
- Custom or other26%
- Webflow9%
- Wix6%
- Next.js5%
- Shopify4%
- Squarespace4%
- Drupal1%
- Framer0%
Seven checks before a site launches
- Every icon-only link and button has a name a screen reader can say.
- Every meaningful image has a description; decorative ones are marked decorative.
- Zoom is allowed: no user-scalable=no or maximum-scale in the viewport tag.
- One H1 per page, with headings in order.
- A share image and a search description on every key page.
- The page language is declared.
- Re-check after launch and after every theme or plugin update: these creep back in.
Check a client site in seconds
The free accessibility checker runs the same automated checks on any page, each failure explained with how to fix it.
Check a site →How we did it
The sites. In October 2026 we read the portfolio, work, projects, case-study and clients pages of 746 design studios (mostly in the US) and collected the live websites they link to. We left out links that many studios share (tools, social networks, platforms), government, education and news sites. A link from a studio's portfolio doesn't prove the studio built every part of the site, or still maintains it.
The visit. One visit to each homepage in a phone-sized browser (390 × 844), identifying itself honestly as "KodinavSiteCheck". axe-core 4.13 checked WCAG 2 Level A and AA rules; sideways scrolling, headings, meta tags, share image, page language, broken images and platform were read from the loaded page. 584 sites didn't load and 321 blocked or refused the visit; they're left out.
The limits. Homepages only. Speed isn't reported, because our visits came from outside the US and timings wouldn't reflect US visitors. Automated checks can't judge keyboard order, the screen-reader experience or whether alt text is meaningful, so they find a portion of accessibility problems, not all of them, and a failed check is not a legal finding. We publish only totals and never name a studio or a site.
Other editions
Cite this study
Kodinav (2026). We checked 4,628 websites built by design studios. https://kodinav.com/research/design-studio-websites-2026