21% of Anaheim Businesses Still Don’t Have a Website. Where Are Their Customers Going?

A guy in Anaheim told me he doesn’t need a website, because every job he’s had in eighteen years arrived as a recommendation, one person telling another person about him.

He isn’t wrong about the referrals. His phone rings, his week is full, and he has never paid for advertising in his life.

Referrals are the strongest of the excuses I hear for skipping a website, and the only one with a full schedule behind it.

So I asked him the only question I ever ask that guy. When your best customer tells her sister about you on a Tuesday night, what do you think the sister does about thirty seconds later?

He went quiet, because he already knew.

What I found in Anaheim

I sampled 4,381 businesses across 44 industries here, everything from restaurants to roofers to dental offices, then audited 2,945 of the sites attached to them.

78.8% have a website, which leaves 21% of this city with nothing for a customer to open when she goes looking. Nationally that gap is 17%.

Those are shops, offices and trucks that turn up in a search result with a name, a phone number and absolutely nothing to click.

Anaheim lands 19th of the 24 cities I track on that one number, a long way behind Scottsdale at 90.0% and a few steps ahead of Corpus Christi at 70.9%.

Scottsdale got up there by almost everyone having one, which killed the sales pitch I leaned on for six years.

Not a disaster. Not a city I’d brag about either.

Adoption is the one number in my report that isn’t really about craftsmanship. Everything else I check, speed and security and analytics, asks how good your website is once a customer arrives.

Adoption asks whether anything opens when she taps.

Word of mouth still looks you up

The referral guy had never thought about the step that happens right after the referral, and I don’t blame him, because it happens somewhere he’ll never see it.

A referral isn’t a sale. A referral is a name.

Your customer says “call my plumber, he’s great” and goes back to her evening, and her sister is left holding a name, a warm feeling and a phone.

What does anyone do with a name on a phone? She types it in.

I do it, you do it, and I did it last month with a mechanic my own neighbor swore by, which made me feel like a bit of a jerk, because the man came recommended by someone I trust completely.

I searched him anyway. So will she.

That search isn’t about doubt. It’s about the boring, ordinary questions nobody wants to make a phone call to ask.

1. Are you open on a Saturday, or am I burning a morning off work for this?

2. Do you cover my end of town, or is this a wasted call?

3. Do you even do the specific thing I need doing?

She finds you. Of course she finds you, your listing is sitting right there with your rating on it. She simply can’t answer a single one of those three questions from a listing.

So the referral doesn’t die on the spot. It goes soft, and the next name that shows up properly starts to look like a lot less work for the same result.

She also isn’t comparing you against nothing, which is the part that stings. She’s comparing you against whoever else turned up while she was looking, and your competitor gets to answer all three of those questions in pictures while you answer them in silence.

Easier beats better more often than any of us would like. I hate it too, and I’ve lost jobs to it.

Two groups who think they’re covered

Two kinds of owner surprised me while I was running this count, and both of them would tell you with a straight face that they’re already online.

Both of them still count as having a website in my data, a Facebook link and a dead domain alike, which is why I think the real gap in this city runs wider than 21%.

The first has a Facebook page and nothing else, so the listing points there and the box feels ticked.

Maybe. Your hours are buried three posts down under a photo of a truck, your phone number takes a tap and a scroll and a squint, and the page itself belongs to Facebook rather than to you, which means every decision about how it behaves is theirs.

Ever watched a post reach almost nobody? Ever had a page locked for a week over something you didn’t do?

The second group is in worse shape, because they don’t know about it yet. They paid for a website, it sits right there in their listing, and when I went out to load it, nothing came back at all.

Expired domain, dead hosting account, a renewal notice delivered to an email address nobody has opened since 2019.

A broken website does more damage than no website at all, I’d argue, because your customer never reads it as a technical problem with a hosting company she’s never heard of. She reads it as evidence about how carefully you run everything else, and honestly, can you blame her?

Those owners believe they have a website. Their customers already know they don’t.

When did you last open your own site on your phone, on data, with the wifi switched off?

Want to check my work? Pick Anaheim in the explorer and it prints every check I ran with its own sample size sitting next to it, so you can see how many businesses each percentage is built on.

Choose a single industry instead and you get the same card. I’d rather you pulled the numbers yourself than took my word for any of them.

The sites that do exist are quick

Let me say something nice about this city, because adoption is only half of the story.

Anaheim sites load fast. The city averages 59 on Google’s mobile speed test, and when I lined up all 24 city cards side by side, only New York City came out ahead.

Google only calls a score good once it clears 90, and treats anything under 50 as poor, so I’m not handing anybody a trophy here. But second out of 24 is still second out of 24.

Your visitor feels that. She taps your link on a lunch break, on one bar of signal, and your page appears before she abandons the whole idea.

About 28.8% of homepages here carry a contact form, which I make 8th of 24 and a shade above the 28% the country manages. Can a stranger message you without picking up the phone?

The city scores 71 out of 100 overall and sits 17th of the cities I checked, with Scottsdale leading the whole table at 75.

Where Anaheim finishes last

Now the half I’d rather not print, since I make my living in this city.

I went back through those same 24 city cards, and Anaheim comes last on three separate checks. Every one of them runs on websites that already exist. So the sites this city does build are quick, and plenty of them are quietly neglected.

Only 52.6% of sites here have analytics running, the free snippet of code that tells you which searches and which pages actually brought you a customer. Nationally 58% have it.

Just 92.5% of them load over HTTPS, the padlock in the address bar that keeps whatever a customer types into your form private. The country sits at 94%.

And only 86.1% redirect the old insecure address to the secure one, so a bookmark saved in 2016 still delivers her somewhere safe. Nationally that’s 88%.

Two more checks land Anaheim 23rd on that same list: the one-line description under your name in search results (73.7%) and links out to your own social profiles (61.8%). Neither one is complicated to fix, which is the frustrating part.

None of it is dramatic on its own. Put the three together and Anaheim has an adoption problem and a maintenance problem, and I’m not going to pretend it only has one.

Is yours in that pile? You can tell in about a minute. Load your site, look for the padlock, and ask whoever built it whether anything is recording where your visitors came from.

What my numbers don’t show

Let me be straight with you about what I can’t see from the outside.

I counted whether a business lists a website at all. I didn’t count its revenue, and the two aren’t remotely the same thing.

Some of that 21% are having the best year they’ve ever had. A guy with a twenty-year book of clients and a schedule full through October doesn’t need me, and I’m not going to stand here and tell him he does.

My audit also runs off public business listings, so if your site is alive and well but your listing points somewhere else entirely, I scored you as having nothing.

Which is how your next customer would have scored you too, so I’m not losing much sleep over that one.

The entire count is also a snapshot taken in August, so any business that finally launched something last week still appears in my data as missing. I’d be delighted to be wrong about a few hundred of you.

So where are those customers going?

Nowhere dramatic, and the lack of drama is why this quietly costs people years instead of weeks.

They’re going to the third result down, the one with hours on it, a phone number that dials when you tap it, and enough of a page to make a stranger feel safe handing over a credit card.

They were never your customer, so you’ll never miss them, and no angry email arrives to tell you it happened. You just have a slightly quieter year than you should have had, you blame the economy, and I have done exactly that myself more than once.

Try something tonight. Search your own business name on your phone.

Not on the laptop where you’re logged into everything and Google already adores you. On the phone, the way she’d do it, standing in her kitchen with your name in her head and about thirty seconds of patience.

Then tell me what came back. If it made you wince, I build sites for people here in Anaheim, and I’ll look at what you’ve got for free before you start anything.

And if it looked good? Ignore every word of this and go enjoy your Saturday, because you earned it.