About 1 in 6 Canadian HVAC Websites Is Broken. Is Yours?

The furnace quits at 7 p.m. on a cold night. The homeowner searches, finds your company on Google, likes your reviews and taps Website. Their phone shows This site can't be reached. They go back and tap the next company on the list. You never hear about it, because a call that never happened leaves no trace.

About one in six Canadian HVAC websites is broken. In October 2026 I tested the website listed for 4,581 independent heating and cooling companies across nine provinces. Of the 4,417 that gave a clear answer, 694 (15.7%) were broken for anyone trying to reach them: the domain no longer existed, the security certificate had expired, the homepage returned "page not found", or the address led to a parked page. And among the sites that did work, 27% had no tap-to-call link and no contact form on the homepage.

Fast answer. About 1 in 6 HVAC websites we tested in October 2026 sends visitors nowhere. Check yours from your phone in ten minutes: tap the Website button on your Google profile, look for the padlock, look up when your domain expires, tap your phone number, and send yourself a test enquiry.

I build websites for contractors, so read this with that in mind. But almost nothing below needs a new website. Most of these problems are fixed with a renewal, a setting, or a phone call to whoever hosts your site. The point of this article is to tell you which of them you have.

What We Found When We Tested 4,581 HVAC Websites

The companies come from our own research into HVAC businesses in 65 Canadian markets, gathered in October 2026 from company websites, Google, YellowPages, BBB, Facebook and provincial registers. For every independent company with a website listed anywhere, we requested the homepage once, the way a browser does, and recorded what came back. Chains and franchises were left out. (How we did it is further down.)

Lightly Coded scan of 4,581 Canadian HVAC websites, October 12, 2026. Another 164 sites blocked our checker or timed out, so they are left out of the shares rather than counted as broken.

The biggest group, by far, is domains that no longer exist at all: 551 addresses still printed on a listing somewhere, pointing at nothing.

Five Ways a Contractor Website Breaks

None of these is exotic. Each one has a plain cause, and each one costs you the same thing: the call.

The domain expired. This is the big one, and it's worse than a dead website. When a domain lapses, every email address on it stops too. CIRA, which runs the .ca registry, says an unrenewed .ca domain goes into an auto-renew grace period of up to 45 days, set by your registrar, during which it "may cease to function." Then it is deleted and spends 30 days in redemption, where "any websites or email addresses associated with the domain name will cease to function" but you can still buy it back, often with a recovery fee. After that it goes on CIRA's To Be Released list and anyone can register it. The usual cause is boring: renewal reminders going to the email of a nephew who built the site in 2016, or a card on file that expired.

The security certificate expired. A certificate is what puts the padlock in the address bar. When it lapses or doesn't match the address, Chrome shows a full-page warning, Your connection is not private, and most homeowners will not click past a warning about their own security to book a furnace tune-up. This is getting easier to trip over. Under a CA/Browser Forum ballot that took effect March 15, 2026, a publicly trusted certificate can now last at most 200 days, falling to 100 days in March 2027 and 47 days by March 2029. If your certificate is renewed by hand, it will lapse more often each year. Ask your host to confirm it renews automatically.

The homepage is gone or the server is failing. A 404 on the homepage usually means a site was moved or rebuilt and the old address wasn't pointed at the new one. A 500-series error means the server or the software behind the site is failing. Either one also affects Google: its documentation says it removes pages that return "not found" from its index, and drops pages that keep returning server errors.

The address shows a parked or for-sale page. Thirty-one addresses showed a domain marketplace's listing, a host's "account suspended" page, or a builder's "coming soon" screen. A suspended page usually means an unpaid hosting bill. A for-sale page means the domain is already gone, and someone else now controls what your old customers see when they type it.

The site works, but nobody can act on it. Of the 3,652 working homepages we could read, 36% had no tap-to-call link and 59% had no form, and 27% had neither. On a phone that means copying a number by hand or hunting through menus, at the moment a homeowner is most ready to call. Safari on the iPhone does turn a phone number typed as text into a link on its own, so not every one of those numbers is dead on every phone. But a number inside an image or a banner graphic never is, and a real tap-to-call link is a one-line fix.

Note for anyone whose site still starts with http://. 297 working sites (8.1%) had no HTTPS at all, so Chrome labels them "Not secure." Google has also said that starting with Chrome 154, which it scheduled for October 2026, Chrome will ask a visitor's permission before opening any public site that doesn't support HTTPS. A homeowner's first visit to your site would open with a warning.

Province by Province

Lightly Coded scan, October 12, 2026. *Fewer than 100 sites: treat as a rough indication only. Nova Scotia was not part of this sample.

Read the gaps between provinces with care. Our sources differed by province (Quebec's list leans on the RBQ register, Ontario's on directories like YellowPages that keep old listings for years), so part of Ontario's higher figure is likely stale listings rather than worse websites. The national figure is the sturdier one. But a stale listing is still a leak: if it carries your phone number and a dead web address, a homeowner who taps the link sees an error under your name.

How to Check Your Own Website in 10 Minutes

You need your phone and nothing else. Do these in order; the first one catches most problems.

Tip 1: Tap your own Website button, on your phone, off Wi-Fi. Turn Wi-Fi off, search your company name on Google, and tap Website on your Business Profile. That is the exact path a homeowner takes. Your office computer can hide a problem because it may have the site saved, so the phone test is the honest one. If what loads is an error, a warning or a for-sale page, everything else on this list waits until that is fixed.

Tip 2: Check the padlock. In the address bar, look for the padlock (or the "tune" icon in newer Chrome). If it says Not secure, your site has no HTTPS. If you see Your connection is not private, the certificate has expired or doesn't match. Either way, the call goes to your web host or whoever built the site. For a fuller check, the free SSL Labs server test shows when your certificate expires.

Tip 3: Look up when your domain expires. For a .ca address, use CIRA's WHOIS lookup. For .com and anything else, use ICANN Lookup. Both show the expiry date and the registrar, the company you pay for the domain. Put that date in your calendar with a reminder a month ahead, log in to the registrar, turn on auto-renew, and check that the card on file and the contact email are current. ICANN requires registrars to send reminders about a month and a week before a .com expires, and CIRA's registrars send them too, but they go to whatever email is on the account.

Tip 4: Tap your phone number. On your homepage, tap the number. It should open your phone's dialler with the number filled in. If nothing happens, or the number is part of an image, ask for a tap-to-call link. Then check the number itself: it should be the line somebody answers, the same number as on your Google profile.

Tip 5: Send yourself a test enquiry. Fill in your own form with a different email address and see whether it arrives, how long it takes, and whether it lands in spam. If it doesn't arrive, that's a separate leak with its own fixes, covered in what to do if your contact form's emails are going missing.

Tip 6: Check every place your web address is printed. Your Google Business Profile, Facebook page, Instagram bio, YellowPages, BBB and HomeStars listings, your truck, your business cards and your invoice template. If you changed domains years ago, the old one may still be on half of them. To fix the Google one, open your Business Profile, choose Edit profile, enter the full address including https://, and save. Google says it reviews changes before they go live, so check back in a few days.

Tip 7: Do it again next month. Two minutes: the Website button, the phone number, one test enquiry. Most broken sites in our scan weren't hacked or abandoned on purpose. Someone simply stopped renewing something.

If you know a contractor whose site came up broken while you were searching for something else, send them this. It's an easier conversation than "your website's down."

Mistakes That Leave a Contractor Website Broken for Months

Letting someone else own the domain. If the domain is registered in your web designer's name or your old office manager's email, you can't renew it, move it or even see when it expires. The domain should be in the company's name, on an account you can log in to.

Treating "the website guy" as the reminder system. Hosting, domain and certificate are three separate renewals, sometimes with three separate companies. If nobody at your company knows the dates, nobody is watching them.

Testing only from the office. The desktop at work may still show a copy of the site from last week. Your customers use phones, on mobile data, arriving from Google.

Fixing the website and forgetting the listings. A rebuilt site on a new domain doesn't help the homeowner who taps the old address on your Facebook page or a five-year-old YellowPages listing. Update every listing the same day, and if you still own the old domain, point it at the new one rather than letting it lapse.

Assuming no complaints means no problem. A homeowner who hits a dead link doesn't email you about it. They call the next company. Silence is exactly what a broken website sounds like.

How We Did This, and What It Can't Tell You

The sample. 11,907 HVAC businesses researched for our own outreach in October 2026, across 65 markets in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. We kept the independent companies that had a website listed in any source (their own site, Google, a directory or a register) and removed duplicates by domain, leaving 4,581 websites.

The test. On October 12, 2026, one request to each homepage, following redirects, with a 15-second limit. Domains with no DNS record were re-checked against Google's and Cloudflare's public DNS servers before counting them as gone. Sites that returned an error were requested again as a desktop Chrome browser, so a server that only turns away automated tools was not counted as broken. Sites that blocked us or timed out (164) were left out of the shares entirely. A page counted as parked only when it redirected to a domain marketplace or a hosting-suspension page, or was a small placeholder page.

What it can't tell you. We tested the address that was listed, not every address a company might use. Some dead domains belong to companies that have moved to a new one. The listing still sends callers to an error, which is the leak this article is about, but it doesn't mean the company has no website. Tap-to-call links and forms were checked on the homepage only, so a form on an inner page isn't counted. And it is one test on one day, so a few sites may have been down only briefly. This is not a census of every HVAC company in Canada, and it says nothing about how good the working sites are, only whether they work.

Nothing in it identifies a business. We publish totals only. If you want to know about your own site, the ten-minute check above will tell you more than our data can.

The closest published study I could find is a US scan of 1,000 home-services contractor websites, released in August 2026 by Superior Marketing, which looked at whether sites had analytics and ad tracking. It found 22% of HVAC sites had no analytics at all. I couldn't find any Canadian study of whether contractor websites work.

Sources: CIRA — The domain name life cycle and Your domain name expired. What now?; ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy; CA/Browser Forum Ballot SC081v3 and DNSimple — SSL certificate validity changes 2026–2029; Google — HTTPS by default (October 28, 2025); Google Chrome Help — Check if a site's connection is secure; Google Search Central — How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers; Google Business Profile Help — Edit your Business Profile; Apple — Safari HTML Reference: supported meta tags; Contracting Business — New study finds HVAC marketing tracking gaps (August 2026). Scan data: Lightly Coded, October 12, 2026. Sources read October 2026.

Where Lightly Coded Fits

I build owned websites for contractors in Halifax and across Nova Scotia, and the boring parts are in the build: the domain registered in your company's name, certificates that renew automatically, a tap-to-call button on every page, and a form that stores every enquiry so nothing depends on one inbox. A coded contractor site is $1,950, and a service-area build covering several towns is $2,950, one-time, live in 3–4 weeks.

If your site passed the check, good. The next question is whether it's turning visits into calls, and the three things I check first on a contractor website is a quick way to find out. If it's working but your business isn't showing up on Google, that's a different problem with different fixes. For heating and cooling companies specifically, here's how we build HVAC websites, and what one HVAC site produced in its first three months. Or get in touch and tell me what you found.