I Scored Small Business Websites in 24 Cities. Anaheim, We Need to Talk.

Anaheim, pull up a chair. I’m buying the coffee for this one.

I’ve been counting small businesses across 24 cities, 423,009 of them, and somewhere in that pile your city ended up with a grade stuck to it.

You came 17th.

Out of 24, so not last, and I’d like that on the record before you close the tab on me.

I like Anaheim and I’ve got no axe to grind with the place. But I pulled 4,381 of your businesses into the sample, then audited 2,945 of their websites and ran 2,359 of them through a speed test on a phone. The numbers say what they say.

Let me walk you down the table.

What the grade is built from

Ten checks, each one weighted, added up into a score out of 100.

Does the site work on a phone, and does it load before an impatient stranger gives up on you? Is the connection secure? Has anyone left a review?

Then the quiet ones: a page title, a summary line for Google, the bit of code that tells search engines what a page is about (schema), links to your social profiles, a blog, and traffic tracking.

There’s nothing clever in there, and that’s on purpose, because every one of them is something a robot can check from the sidewalk without ever walking through your front door.

That limit matters by the end of this, so hang onto it.

The report tracks a few other things beside the score without folding them into it: how many businesses have a website at all, who bothers to put a contact form on the homepage, and who moves visitors over to the secure address without being asked.

Anaheim scored 71.

Where you sit on the table

Anaheim’s 71 ties it with Corpus Christi, Miami, New Orleans and Toronto. Count down from the top of that table and you land 17th of 24.

Scottsdale leads the whole thing at 75, while Windsor and Montreal sit at the bottom on 70.

So the entire table, first place down to last, runs from 75 to 70, and I checked that three times because I assumed I’d broken something.

Nobody is running away with this. You’re not in a different league from Scottsdale, you’re a handful of ordinary habits behind them, and most of those habits cost nothing beyond an afternoon of someone’s attention.

Some of this is good, actually

Before I start complaining, credit where it’s owed.

Anaheim’s average phone speed is 59 out of 100. I lined all 24 cities up myself, and only New York City came out ahead of you.

Speed is the one thing on this whole list your customers feel immediately, before they’ve read a single sentence of whatever you wrote for them.

The national average is 58, and Google files anything from 50 to 89 under “needs improvement”, so nobody’s popping champagne over here. Second out of 24 is still worth a small celebration, and I didn’t see it coming.

You’re solid on contact forms too. 28.8% of Anaheim homepages have one, a shade ahead of the national 28%, and that puts you 8th of the 24 cities I graded.

Still a minority, and I find that bleak. Who builds a website in 2026 and then makes a curious stranger dial a phone number to say hello?

Reviews are a split decision. 87.9% of the Anaheim businesses I sampled hold at least one Google review, which is level with the 88% I found nationally.

The count is where you slip. Anaheim averages 151 reviews at 4.5 stars against 179 at 4.6 across the whole sample, so you’re a little quieter and a little harsher than everyone else.

Want more of them? I wrote up how I ask customers for reviews without being weird about it.

Three places you finish last

Now the part I didn’t enjoy typing.

I ranked all 24 cities on every check I track, and Anaheim came out last on three of them: analytics, secure connections, and secure redirects. I took all three apart one at a time after this, because none of them show up from the sidewalk.

Analytics first. 52.6% of the Anaheim sites I audited have any traffic tracking at all, against 58% across the sample. Kelowna sits at 63.4%, the best I found anywhere.

So the rest of the sites I opened can’t answer a single question about who turns up: which advertising worked, which page quietly loses people, or whether the redesign you paid for changed anything at all.

Do you know which page on your site loses the most visitors? Most owners I ask don’t, and it’s almost never the page they guess.

Then the padlock. 92.5% of the Anaheim sites load over HTTPS, the scrambled connection your browser marks with a little lock beside the address, against 94% nationally.

And 86.1% send a visitor who typed the old unlocked address over to the locked one automatically, where the national rate is 88%.

Two of those three are really the same problem wearing a different hat, and whoever fixes one of them for you will fix the other in the same afternoon. Both belong on the short list of things someone has to keep an eye on after launch, alongside the certificate that quietly expires on you.

That one stings a little, because it isn’t a design problem and it certainly isn’t a budget problem. Every host I’ve used in years hands you the certificate for nothing. I’ve switched this on for clients dozens of times and stopped charging for it years ago, because taking money for it started to feel rude.

Two more sit one rung off the bottom. 73.7% of Anaheim sites write a meta description, the one-line summary Google prints under your name in the results, and 61.8% link a social profile. Both of those leave you 23rd of 24.

If you want the longer version of the padlock story, I wrote up what that little lock is actually protecting.

The number I’d fix first

If you made me pick one figure on this whole report card, I wouldn’t hesitate.

78.8% of Anaheim businesses have a website, so 21% don’t. Nationally that number is 17%.

Rank the cities on that one number and Anaheim drops to 19th of 24. Scottsdale is up at 90.0% and Corpus Christi down at 70.9%, so yes, someone’s behind you.

Twenty-one in every hundred. In a city the rest of the world already knows by name.

I’m not going to pretend I can tell you what that costs a city in points, but I can tell you exactly what it costs the owner.

Speed doesn’t matter when there’s nothing to load, and analytics can’t follow visitors who never had anywhere to arrive. Every other fix in this post quietly assumes a website already exists.

A business with no website isn’t losing an argument about design. It’s absent from the conversation completely.

So where do those customers go? Straight to the shop that did build one.

If Anaheim were my client, I’d start right there and I wouldn’t spend long arguing about it.

What can’t my score see?

Now the honest part, because a report card handed over with no caveat attached isn’t worth very much to the person holding it.

My score grades what a machine can see from the outside. It has no idea whether your copy is any good, whether your phone rings on a Tuesday, or whether you’ve been booked solid since March on word of mouth.

A list of checks can tell you a website is technically healthy. It can’t tell you the site is persuasive, and those are different qualities.

A site can pass every check on my list and still be a bad website, and a shop with no website at all can be having the best year it has ever had.

So don’t read a 71 as “Anaheim businesses are bad.” Read it as a city leaving points on the table it doesn’t have to leave sitting there.

Go look it up yourself

I don’t want you taking my word for a single number in this post, so I built you a way around me.

Open the explorer on the report, pick Anaheim, and leave the industry blank. It prints every Anaheim rate I quoted here with its own sample size beside it. It works the other way around too, one industry and no city at all.

Sample sizes are the entire point, because a percentage with no count sitting beside it isn’t worth arguing about.

There are 44 trades inside the Anaheim sample, and I’ve kept this post at the city level on purpose, because your salon number and your law firm number have very little to say to one another. Trade to trade the spread is wider than city to city, and even the industry that finished top of my whole table left points sitting there.

So go pull the city card and read the rates with their counts sitting right next to them, then open your own website on your phone and run it against the same list I would if you’d hired me to do it.

Padlock? Analytics? A contact form a stranger could actually find?

If you’d rather not squint at it yourself, I’ll run the checks and send you what I find. And if you’d rather hand the whole mess to someone else, that’s the work I do here.

If you’re already beating your own city, come and tell me, because I’d love an excuse to write a happier report card next year.

First place is a 75. You’re on 71.

Anaheim, I want to be in town the year you swap those.