BDRIBahamas Digital Readiness Index

The 2026 Index · as of April 2026

The Index

Where 2,604 Bahamian businesses actually stand across the four doors. Browse by industry or by door, with the national findings below. Which doors matter for your industry →

The penetration heatmap

Where every industry stands on every door

Penetration of each door, by industry. Darker means more open. Pick a lens, sort any column, and open the page behind any row.

Digital door penetration by industry, as of April 2026. Values are percentages. Darker cells indicate higher penetration.
Restaurants 70.2%38.3%54.7%19.5% 1.56
Tourism 71.2%59.1%50.0%36.8% 1.93
Retail 57.9%30.8%41.4%15.0% 1.23
Professional Services 52.8%57.1%27.6%8.9% 1.31
Salons & Beauty 55.1%31.0%44.3%28.0% 1.34
Auto Services 63.1%23.5%34.9%30.2% 1.33
Home Services 38.3%29.2%36.0%0.0% 0.74
Creative Services small sample 43.3%46.7%36.7%0.0% 0.83
National 62.1%39.7%27.7%19.4% 1.38

Penetration lowerhigher

Door penetration by industry · canonical figures (Table B.1) · as of April 2026. The matrix shows where businesses stand; The Four Doors shows which doors matter.

The findings

What the 2026 reading shows

Five patterns run through the data: the readiness tiers, an unclaimed-Google opportunity, broken doors, the way doors compound, and the geography of it all.

01 Readiness tiers

Most businesses sit in the bottom two tiers.

Every business is scored 0–100 and placed in one of four tiers. 72.7% (1,893 businesses) sit in the Developing or Absent tiers, scoring below 48. Only 4.7% reach Digitally Strong. The shape of the distribution is the opportunity: the work isn’t fixing a few stragglers, it’s lifting a broad middle.

  • A Digitally Strong 65+ 4.7%123
  • B Digitally Capable 48–64 22.6%588
  • C Digitally Developing 32–47 56.5%1,471
  • D Digitally Absent <32 16.2%422
Share of all 2,604 businesses by readiness tier · as of April 2026

02 The Google opportunity

623 Google profiles sit unclaimed.

1,618 businesses already have a Google Business Profile, the most common door. Of those, 623 are unclaimed: already listed on Google, just left unmanaged. Another 986 businesses have no profile at all. Claiming a profile is free and takes about 15 minutes, which makes this the single most addressable gap in the index.

Claimed 995 · Unclaimed 623 · No profile 986 · of all 2,604 businesses.

  • Claimed995
  • Unclaimed623
  • No profile986
Google Business Profile claim status · as of April 2026 · Open the Google door →

03 Broken doors

Some doors are open but broken.

A door that exists but doesn’t work does more harm than no door at all. 333 businesses have website doors that are broken (unreachable, returning a 404, timing out, or throwing a server error), and another 137 run without SSL. On Facebook, of 1,104 pages found, 300 are broken: abandoned pages that create doubt rather than presence.

333

broken website doors

unreachable (217), 404 (88), timeout (14), server error (14)

137

sites without SSL

a browser warning before a visitor sees the page

300

broken Facebook pages

of 1,104 pages found, deleted, deprecated, or abandoned

Door health across the full database · as of April 2026 · Website door → · Facebook door →

04 Doors compound

Every door you open multiplies the rest.

Doors don’t just add up. They compound. A business with zero open doors averages no reviews and a 31.9 readiness score. A business with all four averages 218 reviews and a 60.6 score. Each door opened makes the others work harder: more ways to be found, more reasons to be trusted, more reviews feeding back into discovery.

Average reviews & readiness score by number of open doors · as of April 2026

  • 031.90 doors
  • 6337.91 door
  • 11745.42 doors
  • 18055.23 doors
  • 21860.64 doors
Bar height = average Google reviews · number below = average readiness score

05 Geography

Nine in ten businesses are on New Providence.

The study reaches three islands. Nassau / Paradise Island holds 91.7% of businesses and sets the national pattern. Grand Bahama and Abaco are small samples but tell a sharp story: WhatsApp is recorded at 0% in both Family Islands. In places where direct messaging would matter most for businesses far from a storefront, we couldn’t confirm a single open WhatsApp door. Small samples, and low numbers read as “not detected,” not proof of absence. Even so, the contrast with Nassau is hard to miss.

Average doors, readiness score, and WhatsApp by island. As of April 2026.
IslandBusinessesAvg doorsScoreWhatsApp
Nassau / Paradise Island2,3871.4041.621.2%
Grand Bahama1981.1039.60.0%
Abaco191.1646.90.0%
By island · as of April 2026. Family-Island samples are small. Treat as directional.

For institutions

Reading this for a program?

The sector gaps, the benchmarks, and the interventions that move them (a national GBP-claiming campaign, sector workshops, an annual tracker) are laid out for institutions.

The institutional read Download the 2026 report

This is the reading. The full analysis is in the 2026 report.

Industry by industry, door by door, with the complete methodology and data tables. Free, in exchange for an email.

Download the report