Decoding Websites: Inferring Financial Distress in SMEs from Coding Style

This paper proposes to examine whether financially distressed Small and Medium-sized Enterprises display distinctive latent coding styles in their websites compared with healthy firms. By leveraging a large dataset of HTML tags from corporate homepages, the study aims to investigate structural and technical design features as potential indicators of financial conditions. The research hypothesizes that specific website configurations may correlate with financial vulnerability, sug- gesting that technical website design could serve as a novel, non-financial signal of distress. By combining web analytics with statistical modeling, this study seeks to contribute to the growing literature on digital traces as predictors of firm perfor- mance.