Where do these numbers come from?

RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026. Of the 662 businesses sampled, 489 sites loaded and 479 returned a PageSpeed result. The full method is in the original write-up.

Can I use these statistics in my article?

Yes. Quote the number with its label and link to this page as the source. Please keep the base (for example "of the 479 sites tested") with any percentage.

It is where we started and where we could check every business by hand. The sample covers trades, clinics, law firms and shops across the county, so it is a fair picture of small local businesses in a large US metro, not of national brands.

How often is this updated?

Once a year, with a fresh crawl. The date of the current crawl is in the source line under every number.

Original research · 2026

Local business website statistics, from 662 real sites.

Every number on this page comes from one crawl of small business websites in Orange County, tested the same way. Free to cite with a link.

Test my site free Read the full study

662
local business websites tested, one crawl, one method
RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026.
79%
of sites take more than 4 seconds to show their main content on a phone
RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026.
26%
have no tap-to-call link on the homepage
RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026.

Statistics · Speed on a phone

Speed on a phone

Measured with PageSpeed Insights, mobile, on every site that loaded.

79%
of sites take more than 4 seconds to show their main content on a phone
Google calls anything over 4 s "poor". Only 7% hit the 2.5 s "good" mark.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
8 s
median time to the main content on a phone (Largest Contentful Paint)
Half of local sites make a mobile visitor wait eight seconds or longer.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
61
median Lighthouse performance score out of 100, mobile
Only 7% scored 90 or more, the "good" band.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
7%
of sites score 90+ on mobile performance
33 of 479 sites tested. The other 446 are slower than they need to be.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
2.6 MB
median page weight of a local business homepage
44% ship more than 3 MB, a quarter more than 5 MB. Scripts outweigh the photos: 885 kB against 594 kB at the median.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
54%
of the bytes on the median page come from third parties: widgets, trackers, chat, builders
The code you did not write is most of what slows the page.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026

How we build fast sites →

Statistics · Ready to take a lead

Ready to take a lead

The basics a visitor needs to become a call or a quote request.

26%
have no tap-to-call link on the homepage
12% show a phone number that cannot be tapped. On a phone, that is a lost call.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
25%
have no quote form or booking on the homepage
A visitor who will not call has nowhere to go.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
59%
pass four basics: HTTPS, mobile viewport, tap-to-call, and a form or booking
Four in ten live sites miss at least one basic way to become a lead.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
20%
also have LocalBusiness schema and a Lighthouse score of 50+
One site in five does the basics for people, Google and AI at the same time.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026

How we fix conversion →

Statistics · Readable by Google and AI

Readable by Google and AI

What search engines and AI assistants can understand about the business.

22%
have no H1 heading, and 20% have more than one
The page never says, in one line, what it is about.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
25%
have no meta description
Google writes the search snippet for them, usually from the menu or the footer.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
42%
have LocalBusiness schema, the markup that tells machines who and where you are
The other 58% leave Google and AI assistants to guess.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
14%
refuse AI crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot at the firewall
Only 0.8% say so in robots.txt, so the refusal comes from a security setting, not a stated choice. Cloudflare is behind 54% of the refusals.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026

How we make sites readable by AI →

Statistics · Signs of neglect

Signs of neglect

What a visitor sees when nobody has looked after the site.

15%
of the websites listed for these businesses are dead or return an error
Expired domains, broken certificates, error pages. Measured across all 662.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
39%
run no analytics at all
They cannot tell which page, if any, brings the calls.
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026
28%
of sites that show a copyright year still show 2024 or earlier
An old year in the footer reads as "is this business still open?"
Source: RankMeHi, 662 Orange County sites, Sep 2026

How we design and maintain sites →

By city

The same tests, city by city.

Small samples: quote them as counts, not as rankings.

Website test results by city
City	Sites	Over 4 s on a phone	Median mobile score	LocalBusiness schema
Orange	74	44 of 53	59	21 of 54
Lake Forest	57	35 of 46	64.5	16 of 47
Newport Beach	49	31 of 37	57	23 of 38
Irvine	42	24 of 33	58	19 of 33
Laguna Niguel	30	16 of 18	62.5	6 of 19
Santa Ana	29	16 of 22	64	12 of 22
Costa Mesa	24	12 of 16	62	11 of 16
Anaheim	23	12 of 16	50	7 of 17
Mission Viejo	23	10 of 15	65	7 of 15
Huntington Beach	23	14 of 17	62	10 of 17
San Clemente	20	13 of 15	54	6 of 15

RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026. City from the OpenStreetMap address of each business; cities with 20 or more sites.

Questions

About these numbers.

: RankMeHi study of 662 Orange County business websites. Crawl 25 to 26 Sep 2026; PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 26 Sep 2026. Of the 662 businesses sampled, 489 sites loaded and 479 returned a PageSpeed result. The full method is in the original write-up.
: Yes. Quote the number with its label and link to this page as the source. Please keep the base (for example "of the 479 sites tested") with any percentage.
: It is where we started and where we could check every business by hand. The sample covers trades, clinics, law firms and shops across the county, so it is a fair picture of small local businesses in a large US metro, not of national brands.
: Once a year, with a fresh crawl. The date of the current crawl is in the source line under every number.