We (rightfully) like to focus on what your website could and should be doing better. But with so many notes and corrections in all site analyses, companies and web designers can get the feeling that you're not doing a great job. Try not to think that way; if you're doing your best with the resource you have available, you're doing fine.

In this post I want to cheer you up, even if you know you have a lot of work to do on your site. So, we're looking at the Top 10 companies on the latest Fortune 500 list. Guess what? These massive corporations are in some cases are not doing things as well as you are with their web site.

Give yourself a pat on the back as we take a look at 4 different evaluations we put these "Fortune 10" companies through.


Site-Rating Tools We Used

A simple Google search for "SEO analyzer", "website speed score" or similar things will reveal a lot of analysis sites; free sites where you type in your URL (or somebody else’s) and they rate the quality of your site. We just picked 4 but you can use others. For what it's worth, the suite of free Google Dev Tools are pretty incredible.

These tools (and others) give good detailed reports and checklists of where the site in question in weak. All are great instruments for you to measure your website; we recommend Googling for multiple tools and running LOTS of them to test your site. If you're serious about improving your site, all of this info and data really does help.


The "Fortune 10" (Top 10 in Fortune 500)

We could have looked deeper in the Fortune 500 list or focused on more customer-facing websites, but we wanted to do something simple and we also didn't want to cherry-pick sites to examine only in certain industries which would have just validated our preconceived notions.

The 10 biggest Fortune companies are in a variety of fields and are as follows: #1 Walmart (retail), #2 ExxonMobil Mobil (oil), #3 Apple (computers), #4 Berkshire Hathaway (investments), #5 Amazon (online retail), #6 UnitedHealth Group (health care), #7 McKesson (pharmaceutical), #8 CVS (drug store chain), #9 ATT (telecom) and #10 AmeriSource Bergen (pharmaceutical).

When looking at these site scores, keep in mind which industry the company in question is in. The sites on Amazon, Walmart display a lot of interactive data, whereas the Berkshire Hathaway home page is just a little more elaborate than a text file.


TEST #1: Speed

We used: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Numbers will go slightly up or down if you run this test multiple times; has a lot to do with the Google test server speed, the company host server and also the vagaries of internet speeds in general.

• Walmart 27


• ExxonMobil 31


• Apple 42


• Berkshire Hathaway 99


• Amazon 41


• UnitedHealth Group 59


• McKesson 24


• CVS 36


• ATT 3


• AmeriSource Bergen 71

What sticks out here is the AT&T score. 3! As in "3 out of 100." It's egregiously slow in the Google Page-Speed evalution. If you go to their home page, ATT doesn't seem that bad. But I can vouch for this number when it comes to their site as a whole; I'm a Directv subscriber and the latency on every page in their site is maddening.


TEST #2 - Search Engine Optimization, Results/Authority

We used Moz's "Link Explorer", explained here: https://www.quicksprout.com/score-website-seo/

These scores are about "Domain Authority", meaning how well each company has established itself as the first brand in their area - it's not a measure of how well they've formatted their SEO tags on their page. Each of these companies is obviously huge, so if they don't have a score in the 80s or 90s, it's kind of a headscratcher why they don't have a larger advantage in search or a larger "Domain Authority".

• Walmart 93


• ExxonMobil 77


• Apple 100


• Berkshire Hathaway 73


• Amazon 96


• UnitedHealth Group 66


• McKesson 67


• CVS 76


• ATT 91


• AmeriSource Bergen 56

Perhaps the poor scores of the two pharmaceuticals and the health care group can be attributed towards them being less classically "customer-facing" and less worried about SEO and search engine placement. But still ... Ouch.


TEST #3 - Search Engine Optimization, Formatting

We used: https://sitechecker.pro/app/main/project/:projectId/audit/summary

Sitechecker is a harsh critic. It deducts heavily for perceived errors. Case in point: Amazon gets a 20.

• Walmart 55


• ExxonMobil 77


• Apple 53


• Berkshire Hathaway 47


• Amazon 20


• UnitedHealth Group 71


• McKesson 96


• CVS 100


• ATT 59


• AmeriSource Bergen 41

Let's face it, Amazon and Walmart (and most of these companies) get so much organic traffic and they are such names that ideal SEO code on their site isn't even necessary. Nobody searches "shopping" to find Amazon, they search "Amazon".

Also, congratulations to CVS.


TEST #4 - Mobile-Friendly Responsiveness

We used: Varvy.com "Mobile Friendliness" Score: https://varvy.com/mobile/

Results here have two numbers rated out of 100. The first value is a grade for readability and responsiveness. One would hope that the most influential companies in the world have crafted a website that looks decent when viewing on a phone or a tablet.

The second number (mobile speed) scoring system does seem pretty unsophisticated; it's not so much based on real-time speed but instead the score comes from evaluation of minimization of .CSS, .HTML, .JS files, etc. But it's still useful.

• Walmart 99-69


• ExxonMobil 98-0


• Apple 99-55


• Berkshire Hathaway 67-97


• Amazon 98-54


• UnitedHealth Group 100-56


• McKesson 91-44


• CVS 95-48


• ATT 99-45


• AmeriSource Bergen 89-66

A common reason for the mobile speed grade getting dinged was "images not optimized". Let that be a lesson to us all.


The Takeaway

All 10 of these companies have incredible amounts of talented programmers, designers, IT specialists working for them and creating/maintaining their websites. You see above that their results were mixed.

Furthermore, not one of these Top 10 companies' websites did well in all four metrics.

That should show you that while having a perfect site is a great goal, even the biggest players in the world are not getting there. So when it comes to your site, do your best ... then cut yourself some slack if it's less than perfect.