In October 2026 we measured the websites of 600 Turkish exporters under the same conditions: 428 industrial SMEs that export and 172 companies from Turkey's top 1000 exporters list. On each site we checked the three things a foreign buyer meets on a first visit. How long the page takes to show its main content on a phone, whether there is an English version, and whether the buyer can reach the company with a single tap. In both groups, 5 per cent of websites met all three.
We do not name any company. This report covers the combined results, how we measured and what a better exporter website looks like.
Why we ran this study
Webosentez builds websites, online stores and digital infrastructure for companies. For an exporter, the website is the first meeting with a buyer abroad. A buyer picks up a card at a trade fair or finds a supplier on Google, then opens the site. Whether the conversation continues is often decided in those first seconds.
We could not find public data on how that first meeting goes for Turkish exporters, so we measured it. The checks are the same ones our free website checker runs, and we will repeat the scorecard every year so that change can be tracked.
What we measured and how
The sample comes from two public lists. The first is the Ankara Chamber of Industry's list of exporting members; there, a website counted only if the phone number on the list appeared on the site. The second is the Turkish Exporters Assembly's top 1000 exporters list for 2025, which has no phone numbers, so websites were matched on the registered company name and checked by hand. Uncertain matches were removed.
We read each site's home page only. Speed comes from Google PageSpeed Insights' mobile test, which simulates a slow mobile connection and measures every site the same way. The method section at the end has the details.
Findings
Measure | Industrial SME exporters | Turkey's top 1000 exporters |
|---|---|---|
Websites measured | 428 | 172 |
Main content takes over 4 seconds on mobile | 89% | 90% |
Main content takes over 10 seconds | 53% | 55% |
Within Google's "good" threshold of 2.5 seconds | 3% | 4% |
Median home page weight | 3.6 MB | 5.0 MB |
No English version | 22% | 17% |
No tappable phone, WhatsApp or form on the home page | 18% | 30% |
No description for search results | 34% | 48% |
No Google Analytics or Tag Manager found | 54% | 33% |
Under 4 seconds, English version and tappable contact, all three | 5% | 5% |
Large exporters are not ahead
We expected the largest companies to do clearly better. They do not. Home pages in the top 1000 group are heavier than the SMEs', and a quarter of them exceed 10 MB. The heaviest home page we measured was 80 MB, which keeps loading for minutes on a slow mobile connection.
Large exporters also make contact harder on a phone. 61 per cent of their home pages have no tappable phone link, so a buyer browsing on a phone has to copy the number by hand.
Page weight decides speed
Sites that show their main content within 4 seconds have a median home page of about 1 MB. Sites that take over 10 seconds weigh 5 to 7 MB. The weight usually comes from large images and sliders at the top of the page, uncompressed photos and scripts loading at once. All of these can be reduced without changing how the page looks.
The platform makes little difference
41 per cent of the SME sites run on WordPress. Speed is much the same on WordPress and on other platforms, with main content appearing after 10 to 11 seconds in both. What matters is how the site is built, which means large gains are possible without rebuilding on a new platform.
Why these numbers matter
A buyer abroad usually reviews suppliers as a short list and often takes a first look on a phone, between meetings or on the way back from a trade fair. Four things decide that visit.
- A page that does not load sends the buyer to the next supplier on the list. Ten seconds is long enough to open a competitor's site instead.
- A page that is not in English cannot be assessed. If the product range, certificates and capacity cannot be read, the first cut happens there.
- Contact that takes more than a tap gets postponed. Copying a number or typing an email address is usually left for later.
- Without measurement the company never sees any of this. More than half of the SMEs do not measure who visits their site or where visitors leave.
Speed also affects search. Google takes page experience and the speed measures it calls Core Web Vitals into account in ranking, so a slow site is also seen less in search.
What an exporter's website should look like
None of the following needs a full redesign. Most of it applies to an existing site.
- Main content within 2.5 seconds on a phone. Google defines this as good. Keeping the home page near 1 MB and compressing the images at the top covers most of the distance.
- A real English version. Product pages, certificates and contact details written in the target market's language and linked from the home page. A machine translation button does not do this job.
- Contact with a single tap. A tappable phone number, a WhatsApp link and a short enquiry form, reachable from the first screen or the foot of every page.
- Tell Google what each page is. A title with the searched phrase, a description for search results and a single main heading on every page, with company details marked up as structured data.
- Keep it current. Copyright year, catalogues, certificate dates and trade fair dates. Among sites that show a year, 44 per cent showed 2023 or earlier.
- Measure visitors. Without knowing how many people arrive from which country and how many get in touch, nobody can say whether the site works.
Check your own website
Our free website checker runs the same checks on your own site. It shows speed, the basics Google needs to read the page and your contact points, with no sign-up, and you can compare a competitor's site on the same screen.
Method
- Date of measurement: 2 October 2026.
- Sample 1: 2,050 companies on the Ankara Chamber of Industry's exporting members list. 428 companies whose website was found and showed the listed phone number were measured.
- Sample 2: The Turkish Exporters Assembly's top 1000 exporters list for 2025. After removing companies that chose to stay anonymous and companies whose site could not be matched, 172 companies verified by registered name and manual checking were measured. Large brands whose domain differs from the company name were often not found by this method.
- Speed: Google PageSpeed Insights mobile test. Largest Contentful Paint is a lab measurement under a slow mobile connection; real visitors on faster connections may see shorter times.
- Other checks: Only the home page's HTML source was read. English versions were detected from language links and multilingual plugins on the home page; contact links, descriptions and measurement tags were read from the same source. Content loaded after the page opens is not included.
- Rules: Sites closed by robots.txt were not measured. No forms were filled in, nothing was submitted and no personal data was collected. Results are only published in aggregate.