What 7,500+ small-business website support requests taught us (2017–2026)
Most website support is small and predictable. In about 7,600 requests from 2017 to 2026, nearly 4 in 5 took under an hour of hands-on work, and in 2026 the typical request was done in a day. The most common breakage wasn’t a site going down: it was a contact form whose emails quietly stopped arriving. Six habits would have prevented a large share of the problems.
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Key findings
- 78%of requests took under an hour of hands-on work. Only 6% were half a day or more.
- 1 daywas the median time from request to done in 2026. 62% were done within a day and 89% within a week.
- ~120requests were for contact form emails that stopped arriving: the most common breakage of all, in the top five almost every year.
- ~30requests were for a site that was fully down. Quiet breakage, in forms and email delivery, is far more common than outages.
- +30%March is the busiest month and spring is project season. January is fix-it month; December is the quietest.
- 12%of 2026 requests were about email, down from about one in five, as mailboxes moved to Microsoft 365. Content edits rose to 35%.
The work has a long tail. The ten most common problem types are only 14% of all requests, and the top hundred are 56%. The other 337 types share the remaining 44%. That’s why written-down habits matter more than any single fix: no one problem dominates, but the same few causes sit behind many of them.
What people ask for
Content edits and email lead, together about 4 in 10 requests. Logins, the online store, site errors, domains and forms come next, each around 1 in 10.
Share of requests by topic, 2017–2026
Show the numbers as a table
| Topic | Share of requests |
|---|---|
| Content edits | 22% |
| 19% | |
| Website logins and access | 10% |
| Store and payments | 10% |
| Site errors and bugs | 8% |
| Domains, DNS and SSL | 8% |
| Forms and registration | 8% |
| SEO, Google and analytics | 6% |
| New sites and redesigns | 3% |
| Hosting, updates and migrations | 3% |
| Billing, accounts and general | 2% |
| Security and spam | 2% |
The mix has shifted. Email requests ran between 17% and 26% of each year through 2024, then fell to 12% in 2026 as mail moved to Microsoft 365. The move itself shows up a year earlier: domain and DNS requests jumped to 19% in 2025. Content edits are now by far the largest share of the work.
How the mix changed, share of each year’s requests
17% in 2017 · 12% in 2026
20172026
Fell to 12% in 2026 as mailboxes moved to Microsoft 365
Content edits
24% in 2017 · 35% in 2026
20172026
Rose to 35% of requests in 2026
Website logins
14% in 2017 · 8% in 2026
20172026
Down from 13–15% to 4–8% since 2024
Domains, DNS and SSL
5% in 2017 · 6% in 2026
20172026
Jumped to 19% in 2025, the year of the Microsoft 365 DNS switch
Yearly totals depend on how much history was kept for each year, so the chart compares shares within each year, not counts.
Show the numbers as a table
| Year | Content edits | Website logins | Domains, DNS and SSL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 (from Feb) | 17% | 24% | 14% | 5% |
| 2018 | 21% | 18% | 13% | 8% |
| 2019 | 20% | 19% | 15% | 9% |
| 2020 | 17% | 18% | 9% | 9% |
| 2021 | 25% | 17% | 7% | 6% |
| 2022 | 24% | 17% | 11% | 9% |
| 2023 | 19% | 20% | 13% | 9% |
| 2024 | 26% | 18% | 5% | 6% |
| 2025 | 18% | 24% | 4% | 19% |
| 2026 (Jan–Oct) | 12% | 35% | 8% | 6% |
What breaks
These are the requests where something stopped working, rather than a request for a change. Email delivery causes far more of the breakage than outages do: forms, bounces and spam folders, again and again. A fully down site is rare; a quietly broken form is common.
The most common breakages, approximate requests, 2017–2026
Show the numbers as a table
| Breakage | Approximate requests |
|---|---|
| Contact form emails stopped arriving | about 120 |
| A link is broken | about 100 |
| The security firewall locked out the office | about 100 |
| A site feature stopped working | about 90 |
| The login page says “page not found” | about 70 |
| “Not Secure”: the certificate expired or didn’t renew | about 70 |
| An email account is locked or disabled | about 60 |
| Emails bounce or are rejected by Gmail, Yahoo or AOL | about 60 |
| Not receiving any email | about 50 |
| The page layout is broken | about 50 |
| Spam coming through a form | about 45 |
| The site broke after an update | about 40 |
| The whole site is down | about 30 |
How big the jobs are, and how fast they’re done
Most requests are small: 36% take minutes and another 42% take under an hour. In 2026, the median request was done one calendar day after it arrived. Two kinds take longer: domains, DNS and SSL (a median of 2 days, waiting on registrars and DNS to update) and new sites and redesigns (3 days, because of feedback rounds).
Typical hands-on work per request
Show the numbers as a table
| Hands-on work | Share of requests |
|---|---|
| Minutes | 36% |
| Under an hour | 42% |
| 1 to 3 hours | 16% |
| Half a day or more | 4% |
| Project | 2% |
Time from request to done, 2026
Show the numbers as a table
| Done | Share of requests |
|---|---|
| Done the same day | 30–47% (depends on the topic) |
| Done within 1 day | 62% |
| Done within 7 days | 89% |
When requests arrive
Spring is project season. March runs 30% above an average month, with new sites, redesigns, hosting moves, search work and store changes all peaking then. January is fix-it month, when site errors and form problems peak. Email requests peak in May. The year winds down in December, 24% below average, and July is the summer low for content edits and forms.
Requests by month, index (100 = an average month)
Show the numbers as a table
| Month | Index |
|---|---|
| January | 114 |
| February | 105 |
| March | 130 |
| April | 105 |
| May | 112 |
| June | 96 |
| July | 87 |
| August | 97 |
| September | 92 |
| October | 92 |
| November | 94 |
| December | 76 |
Prevention wins
Six habits would have prevented the most requests. None is expensive; each is a setting or a routine that someone has to own.
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1Send form mail through an authenticated service, and test the form every month
Contact forms that quietly stop delivering are the most common breakage we see, about 120 requests, plus many more “form emails go to junk”. Sending through a real mail service, saving every entry on the site and a monthly test submission stop most of them.
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2Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC for every domain that sends email
Bounces, rejections from Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, and mail landing in spam folders come back to missing or wrong email authentication records.
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3Allowlist the office’s internet address in the site firewall
A security firewall that blocks a client’s own office is one of the three most common breakages. Allowlisting the office connection and sensible lockout limits keep the protection without the lockouts.
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4Use a password manager, and write down each site’s login address
Forgotten passwords, a login page that “doesn’t exist” and locked email accounts add up to about 380 requests. A shared password manager and one documented login address per site answer most of them before they’re asked.
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5Add a redirect whenever a page moves or is renamed
Most broken links point at a page that was moved, renamed or deleted. A redirect from the old address, added at the time of the change, prevents the error page and keeps search results working.
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6Update on a staging copy first, then check the pages by eye
Sites that broke after an update, layouts that fell apart and features that stopped working have one prevention in common: test updates on a copy of the site and look at the key pages before the live site changes.
Three smaller habits are worth adding: spam protection on every form by default (an invisible challenge plus a hidden honeypot field, about 45 requests), certificate expiry monitoring so “Not Secure” is caught before visitors see it (about 70), and an onboarding checklist for every new staff member, so a new mailbox, its phone setup guide and any website access arrive together. A new staff mailbox is the single most common request of all, about 175.
Explore every problem
The explorer lists the 241 problem types we saw 10 or more times, about 6300 requests in all. Filter by topic, year, season or month, see the typical time to fix, and open the help guide for each one.
Method and caveats
- Sources. E-3 Design’s support history: about 4,250 knowledge-base entries made from help-desk tickets (February 2017 to May 2026) plus about 150 later entries, and 966 client requests logged from January to October 2026. Entries that merged several similar tickets count once per ticket, for 7,591 ticket-equivalents in all. Not every original ticket was kept, so yearly totals undercount the busy years.
- Grouping. The problem types were drafted from machine clusters of the ticket text, and every request was then labelled against them with AI. A spot check found about 90% labelled correctly. Treat every count as approximate (±10–15%), and compare shares, not totals.
- Dates. Older ticket months are estimated from ticket numbers (±2 weeks). 2026 combines two sources and may count a few January to May requests twice. The month index uses full years only (2017 to 2025).
- Time to done is 2026 only: 539 requests with a recorded done date, in calendar days, not hours of work. Older resolution times weren’t kept. Hands-on effort is a typical figure per problem type, judged from past fixes, not a timesheet.
- Privacy. Everything here is anonymized aggregates. No client names, addresses, domains or message text are published. The data has no reliable business-type field, so there is no breakdown by industry.
- Whose clients. These are E-3’s own clients: small businesses, nonprofits and event organisers, many on WordPress, many with email on E-3’s mail service before the move to Microsoft 365. Other businesses will see a different mix.
The aggregate data behind the charts: support-report-aggregates.csv (shares only).
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Every habit in this report is something we set up and look after for clients. Call, or start with a free website check.