Between May 2024 and January 2026, the BoaterOS design team audited 240 US and Canadian dealer websites. Every one, scored on the same 32-point rubric. Same eyes, same week-of-day, same desktop and mobile passes.
The distribution was clearer than I'd hoped: six problems show up over and over, in the same shape, across brands and price tiers. Fix all six and your website closes 20-30% more leads. I've watched it happen.
1. Running on WordPress built for car dealers
Roughly 71% of the sites in our audit run WordPress, and of those, roughly 62% run a theme originally developed for auto dealers. The result: Vehicle schema where there should be Product schema (see Marcus's schema post), search filters for "transmission" and "drivetrain," and a listing-card layout designed for a sedan and badly adapted for a 50-foot sportfish.
The rich-results penalty alone runs 12-18% organic traffic. The UX penalty is harder to quantify but shows up in average time-on-site: dealer sites on car-themed WordPress average 1:42. Dealer sites built for boats average 3:08.
2. Photos uploaded at 6000px
78% of audited sites served at least one listing page where the hero photo was delivered uncompressed at the original camera resolution. Typical payload: 4.2MB. Typical mobile LCP: 6.8 seconds. Google's "good" threshold: 2.5 seconds.
Here's what's happening under the hood on a slow 4G connection:
Six seconds is enough time for a buyer to close the tab. And this is on a brand-new flagship hull with beautiful photography — the kind of boat worth $800K. You spent $2,200 on that photo shoot to lose the buyer in 3.2 seconds.
The fix is one AVIF encode + srcset per photo. 20 minutes of work per listing template.
3. No live inventory — 3-day stale
47% of audited sites had at least one listing for a boat that had already sold. In 12% of audits, we found "available" boats that had been sold more than 30 days earlier. When a buyer fills out a form on a sold boat, the conversation starts with disappointment. Most of those leads never recover.
Root cause is almost always the same: inventory lives in DockMaster (or a similar DMS), gets exported to CSV once a week, gets uploaded by a human to the website. The gap between "sold in DMS" and "sold on website" is always at least a weekend, often a week.
Live inventory is a binary feature — you either have it or you don't. If you don't, fix it before you touch anything else on this list.
"Every hour your website is lying about a sold boat is an hour you're spending an ad-spend budget to disappoint the highest-intent buyer on the internet."
4. Phone number buried instead of top-of-fold
Boat buyers, especially on hulls over $200K, want to talk to a human. Period. The median boat buyer in our audit cohort made 2.1 phone calls before a first showing. They expect to find a phone number in 2 seconds.
Here's where the phone number typically hides on a dealer site:
Put the phone number in 20-24px type, at the top, with a click-to-call link on mobile. This is a 10-minute fix. The sites that get this right see 35-60% more inbound calls.
5. 12 fields on the "Request info" form
The median "Request more information" form on a dealer website has 12 required fields. Name, email, phone, address line 1, address line 2, city, state, ZIP, "best time to contact," "how did you hear about us," "are you a current owner," "preferred contact method." 12 fields, 2:40 to complete on mobile.
Conversion data is stark. Moving from 12 required fields to 3 required fields (name, email, phone — the rest optional) increases form submission rates by 2.8-4.2× in our A/B tests. Yes, you'll get some leads with less information. You'll get three to four times as many leads with enough information to follow up. Do the math.
6. No clear path to financing info
63% of audited sites had no financing content above the "Request info" form. No sample payment. No rates. No lender partners listed. Nothing.
For a buyer considering a $300K hull, financing is a top-three question. They're going to check three competitors' sites to sanity-check rates. If yours doesn't have any information, they go to the site that does, they call that dealer, and by the time they call you they've already started a relationship somewhere else.
Minimum viable financing content: one sample payment per price tier, two-sentence description of how pre-approval works, logo strip of lender partners. Half a day of work, meaningful lift on mid-funnel intent.
Everything you fix compounds
A dealer we audited in October 2024 fixed all six items in a weekend (they had an in-house developer — not available to everyone, I know). In the 90 days after:
- Organic traffic up 22% (schema + LCP)
- Inbound calls up 41% (prominent phone)
- Form submissions up 310% (3 fields vs 12)
- Average time-on-site up from 1:52 to 3:21
- Sold-boat complaints to front desk: dropped to zero
That dealer is now on BoaterOS — they got tired of maintaining the WordPress build themselves. But the point is that the fixes worked before they came to us. None of this requires a new platform. It requires attention.
Jess Okonkwo is Head of Design at BoaterOS. She runs the website audit program and has seen more "testimonials carousel" widgets than any human should.