The state of Ontario golf course websites.

of public courses link to online tee time booking

90%

send golfers to a tee time marketplace to book

2.7%

tell search engines they’re a golf course

8.7%

median homepage weight

1.1 MB

• 90% of public and semi-private Ontario golf course websites link to online tee time booking.
• 27% let golfers book without leaving the course’s own website. 53% send them to the course’s tee sheet on a booking vendor’s website.
• Only 3% point their main booking button at a tee time marketplace. Ontario courses overwhelmingly sell tee times through their own tee sheet.
• 9% of course websites describe themselves as a golf course in schema.org structured data, the markup search engines and AI assistants read. 17% use any local business type.
• 46% of sites with a membership page let golfers apply or enquire online.
• The median homepage weighs 1.1 MB, but 17% weigh 5 MB or more.
• 97% load over HTTPS and 94% are set up for phones with a mobile viewport tag.

Most golfers who want a tee time go to the course’s website and look for a button. We followed that button on the homepage of every public and semi-private course and sorted sites by where it lands. Private clubs are left out here, since they take bookings from members only.

A booking engine is the course’s own tee sheet, rented from a vendor. A marketplace sells tee times for many courses side by side, and usually takes a fee or some of the course’s tee times in return. Two Canadian engines, Tee-On and Lightspeed Golf (Chronogolf), run most of Ontario’s online booking.

Most golfers look a course up on their phone. A site without a mobile viewport shows a shrunken desktop page. A site without working HTTPS shows a “Not secure” warning in the browser.

Time to first byte is how long the server takes to start sending the page. The median course website answered in 128 milliseconds. 7.1% took a second or more before anything could appear on screen.

Page weight is how much a phone has to download to show the homepage. The median is 1.1 MB, and a quarter of sites are over 2.8 MB. Images make up 29% of all the bytes we measured.

Structured data is the markup that tells Google and AI assistants what a page is about: that this is a golf course, where it is, and when it’s open. Few courses use it, which leaves the answers to whatever those tools can piece together.

Memberships, tournaments and events bring in much of a club’s revenue outside green fees. Of the sites with a membership page, 46% let someone apply or enquire online, without printing a form or calling the pro shop.

Booking is measured on public and semi-private courses. Counted per course, so a group sharing one website counts once for each course. Regions are assigned by the nearest major town.

The fixes are rarely big. A booking button that keeps golfers on the course’s own site, a phone-friendly page that loads quickly, and a few lines of structured data go a long way. So does letting members apply online.

If you run a course and want to know how yours compares, we’re happy to take a look. See our work on tee time booking, websites and search and AI visibility.

We used the same data to build a directory of Ontario courses you can book direct, grouped by region. Booking with the course itself means the whole green fee goes to the course.

Course list. We started from Golf Canada’s facility directory, the same data behind Golf Ontario’s Find a Course, and kept its 617 outdoor courses in Ontario. We added named golf courses mapped in OpenStreetMap that the directory doesn’t list. Websites come from the directory, from OpenStreetMap, or from the course’s own domain in its directory links. That gave 802 courses, 528 with a website. Courses that share a website (groups and multi-course clubs) were checked once, for 525 websites.

The crawl. On October 14, 2026 a script fetched each homepage, six sites at a time, no more than three requests at once to any site, with a pause between requests and a 15 second timeout. It identified itself as byCarvalhoResearch/1.0 with a link to this page, read robots.txt first, and skipped anything it disallowed. It reads the HTML the server sends and doesn’t run JavaScript. 424 sites answered with a page we could read. 56 blocked automated visits or asked for a browser check, 10 showed nothing without JavaScript, 34 didn’t load (dead domains, errors, timeouts) and 1 redirected straight to a booking platform. Percentages are of the 424 readable sites, except booking, which covers the 292 sites of public and semi-private courses (Golf Canada’s course type). 90 sites were private clubs and 42 had no type listed.

HTTPS

The homepage loads over HTTPS with a valid certificate, after any redirects.

Mobile viewport

The page has a viewport meta tag with width=device-width, which tells phones to lay it out for a small screen.

Response time

Time to first byte for the homepage HTML, measured once per site from London, Ontario.

Page weight

Bytes transferred for the homepage HTML plus the scripts, stylesheets, fonts and images it references, as compressed on the wire. Lazy-loaded images and files added by JavaScript aren’t counted, so real weights are often higher.

Tee time booking

The most prominent booking link or button on the homepage, classified by the domain it goes to. When it stays on the course’s site, we opened that page to see whether a booking engine is built in.

Structured data

schema.org types in JSON-LD or microdata on the homepage. Local business types include GolfCourse, SportsActivityLocation, SportsClub, Resort, Hotel and Restaurant.

Membership application

We followed the homepage’s membership link. It counts when that page has an online store, a link to apply online, or a form with at least four fields. A PDF to print and mail doesn’t count, and neither does a newsletter sign-up.

Events and tournaments

A link to a tournament, outing or events page from the homepage.

Limits. One visit per site, from one place, on one day. A link checker can’t see a booking engine that only appears after JavaScript runs, so some “no booking link” sites may take bookings in a pop-up. Courses missing from both sources aren’t covered; NGCOA Canada’s member list needs a login, so we didn’t use it. The scripts and raw results are kept so the study can be run again next season.

Disclosure. byCarvalho builds websites and booking software for golf courses, and some Ontario courses in this data are our clients. Findings are reported in aggregate and no course is named.

byCarvalho. “The State of Ontario Golf Course Websites, 2026.” October 14, 2026. www.bycarvalho.com/research/ontario-golf-course-websites

Journalists and researchers are welcome to use these figures with a link to this page. For questions or a regional breakdown, email hello@bycarvalho.com.