BDRIBahamas Digital Readiness Index

Digital presence health · as of April 2026

When a door looks open but isn’t

Having a digital door is not the same as maintaining one. A handful of pages and sites in the index exist in name but no longer work. Nearly every one can be fixed in under an hour, at no cost.

Most of what exists is healthy

Start with the good news, because it is the larger story. Of the 1,034 businesses with a website, 80% are active and healthy. The businesses that invested in a site are, for the most part, keeping it running. That is the baseline the rest of this reads against.

The opportunity is in the smaller share that started a digital presence and could not sustain it. These are not businesses that lack awareness. They built a door and stopped maintaining it, and a door that no longer works sends a different signal than no door at all.

The Facebook gap: active pages versus recorded links

Facebook is where the difference between “listed” and “live” shows most clearly. The index recorded 1,104 Facebook URLs, but only 722 (27.7% of all businesses) were confirmed as active pages. That 27.7% is the figure used throughout the index: the conservative count of pages a customer can actually reach.

The rest of those links are the headroom. Some are outdated URL formats that still lead to a working page; some are data-collection artifacts that never pointed anywhere; a portion are pages that were genuinely retired. For an industry where, by the index’s reading, the sale often starts on Facebook, a recorded link that no longer resolves is worth a quick check.

Where no door is neutral, a broken one sends an active signal, so the fastest wins are often the doors a business already thinks are open.

The simplest fix in the whole index: SSL

Among detected websites, 137 are active but have no SSL certificate. Without it, browsers show a “Not Secure” warning, enough to give a cautious customer pause. In 2026 an SSL certificate is free and installs in minutes through most hosting providers. It may be the single lowest-effort improvement anywhere in the index.

A further group of website links (333 across the database) did not resolve when checked: unreachable, returning a “not found,” timing out, or erroring. Some are momentary outages caught at the time of the crawl; others are domains that lapsed. Either way, the recorded address points somewhere that isn’t answering, and confirming it is a short task.

The fixes are hours, not weeks

The encouraging pattern across every broken door is how small the repair is. Claiming a profile, installing SSL, updating hours, reconnecting a page: each is free and takes minutes to an hour. None needs a developer or a budget.

That makes this a practical place to start. The presence already exists; the work is checking that it still opens.