WebAIM published results (opens in new window) of their seventh automated accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top one million web sites across the globe. Automatic accessibility testing is perfect for such large scale testing, but we need to understand that automatic tools only cover parts of relevant Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and their success criteria, so we only get a partial state of (in)accessibility that is biased based on the capabilities.
Nevertheless, such large scale tests presents a perfect trend analysis opportunities and seeing less WCAG failures year after year is a good sign. Especially when we also see that page complexity rises at the same time. Basically, if page complexity weren’t rising – we would most probably see that there were even less automatically detected accessibility issues on them.
Shopping websites are almost 40% less accessible than other websites
According to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provided the site category, at least. I am not familiar with the details and as far as I see we need to have some error margin with the numbers provided by AI, but AI seems to be quite robust when finding patterns and I like to think that WebAIM did some quality assurance to be more confident about the categorization.
Table under Site Categories (opens in new window) shows that Shopping came last, with 71.2 errors on average which translates to 39,8% worse state of accessibility if we compare it to the average home page.
This is bad news for all e-commerce in general, and especially for e-commerce that operates in Europe. Leaving people out, inaccessibility is usually also a sign of poor usability and worse accessibility is also a bad legacy when it comes to European Accessibility Act that includes e-commerce in it’s core scope.
Shopify takes lead as the e-commerce platform and seemingly offers best accessibility even when it’s still bad
Shopify in 2025 was found to power more than 28 thousand websites and had on average about 70 errors. But in 2024 it was only powering about 18,4 thousand websites and had on average 60 errors. That’s almost 10 thousand more websites using Shopify, quite a leap.
Woocommerce in 2025 was found to power 26 thousand websites and had on average about 75 errors, while in 2024 it powered about 24 thousand websites and had on average about 75 errors.
It is a major leap in adoption of Shopify and even this large adoption still keeps Shopify as the best e-commerce platform when it comes to accessibility, when we compare it to Woocommerce and Magento.
Accessibility of e-commerce is still way back when we compare it with average errors found and if you are planning to use or using Shopify or Woocommerce or Magento please consider accessible themes from the start and train your organization in accessibility.
Accessible theme does not guarantee accessibility, there are a lot of other things to consider, even if you don’t touch design or code!
Product management, self-care, support, third parties used (like cookie consents, billing, invoicing, support, chat, email, multimedia players,…) are an essential part of user journey and need to be accessible as well.
Conclusion
I assume that lot’s of large e-commerce are custom made or perhaps hiding their framework due to security, so framework numbers are just showing a simplified situation.
Even with limitations of automated accessibility testing we can see the trends and as far as I can see, the numbers for shopping category look very bad. Especially when we as a society should understand that accessibility is not only a human right but also a key part of doing good business.
Next time you as a e-commerce stakeholder invest money into advertising – consider how many people actually land on your pages just to leave the site, even if they wanted to do business with you. But as your site was not accessible and usable they gave up and spent their money with a competitor that recognize accessibility as one of the key pillars of modern business.
