We Read 100 Romanian Company Websites. Here Is What We Found.

It began as an internal exercise. The Lighthouse PR team spent two weeks reading the websites of 100 Romanian businesses.

It was an assessment of whether the website was doing the job it exists to do.

The findings were both predictable and alarming. Predictable because the patterns are clearly visible enough across the Romanian business landscape to anyone paying attention, and certainly very alarming.

Alarming because the gap between what these websites need to compete in a market where every prospective customer, partner, investor, and employee evaluates digitally first, is wider than most of the businesses involved appear to realise.

What We Found

The about page says nothing.

The majority of the ‘about us’ pages reviewed contained language so generic it could have been written for any organisation in any sector in any country. The standard blurb - years of experience, committed team, customer-focused approach, quality at the centre of everything we do.

Not one of those phrases tells a prospective client anything they need to make a decision. The about page is the second most-visited page on most business websites after the homepage. Communicating nothing on it is a missed opportunity.

The homepage that leads nowhere.

Within seconds of arriving on a homepage, a visitor should know what the business does, who for, why it is the best available choice, and what the visitor should do next.

Fewer than a quarter of the websites reviewed achieved this. The majority presented homepages that were visually competent but communicatively inert — beautiful imagery, headlines too broad to mean anything, and calls to action so tentative they generated no momentum toward a commercial relationship.

The services page that does not sell.

Services were listed rather than explained — named without the context that gives the name commercial meaning. Benefits were described in the abstract rather than demonstrated through specific outcomes. The language was the organisation's language rather than the client's — describing what the business does rather than what the client receives as a result. The services page that does not sell is the services page written by the people who provide the service and never reviewed through the eyes of the person who might buy it.

The news section stopped in 2022.

Sixty-three of the one hundred websites had a news or blog section. Fewer than twenty had published content in the previous six months. A dormant news section is worse than no news section — it signals to every visitor that the organisation has had nothing to say for two years. The published content reflected the same generic quality visible elsewhere: announcements rather than insights, descriptions of activity rather than demonstrations of expertise.

The contact page that creates friction.

A form with too many required fields. A phone number without a name. An email to a generic inbox. No indication of when a response would arrive or who would provide it. The contact page is the last step between a visitor who is interested and a prospect who is engaged. Making that step harder than it needs to be is the final failure of a website built around the organisation's convenience rather than the visitor's experience.

What Was Missing Everywhere

Three things were almost universally absent — and their absence explains the gap more precisely than any individual finding.

A clear point of view. The websites that stood out took positions, made arguments, and said things not every competitor would say. The majority had no discernible perspective — generic, interchangeable, and forgettable as a result.

Evidence. Claims without evidence are not persuasive — they are noise. The websites that built commercial confidence did so through specific case studies, real client outcomes, and data that illustrated capability rather than simply asserting it.

A human voice. The websites that built trust sounded like people — individuals with genuine expertise and genuine investment in the organisations they represented. The majority sounded like a business concept — corporate, impersonal, and stripped of the human specificity through which trust is actually built.

What This Means

The businesses reviewed are not, in most cases, worse than their websites suggest. Many are significantly better — with stronger teams, deeper expertise, more interesting stories, and more genuine client relationships than anything their digital presence communicates.

The gap between what these businesses are and what their websites say they are is a communications gap.

And it has a direct commercial cost, because in a market where digital evaluation precedes every other form of engagement, the business that is not communicating effectively online is losing ground before the first conversation has taken place.

The website is the most visited, most permanently available, and most commercially consequential communication asset the business owns. For the majority of Romanian businesses, it is significantly below the standard of the business it represents.

That gap is closeable. The question is whether the businesses involved are willing to read their own website with the same honest eyes that every prospective client brings to it.

Your website is not what you think it is. It is what your prospective clients think it is. Read it as they would — and then decide whether it is doing the job you need it to do.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.

About Lighthouse PR

Lighthouse PR works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners. We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.

Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.