Anaheim Finishes Last on the Three Checks Nobody Can See

Anaheim, you’ve earned a compliment. Then things get awkward.

Your websites are quick.

I ran 2,359 Anaheim sites through a phone speed test, and you averaged 59 out of 100. Only New York City beat that, and it came in at 60. Every other city I collected finished behind the pair of you.

Then I checked three other things, the kind a customer would never notice in a hundred visits, and Anaheim came dead last on all three.

Not near the bottom. Not in some unlucky cluster. Last of 24, three times over.

I’ve been sitting with that pattern for a couple of weeks now, and I don’t think it’s laziness, and I really don’t think it’s cheap web designers either.

The three you’re losing are the three nobody can see.

The one you can feel

A slow website tells on itself. You pull up your own homepage in a parking lot on a bad signal, watch a blank screen while your thumb hovers, and the annoyance sticks with you all afternoon.

Sound familiar? Of course it does, and because the aggravation belongs to you personally, sooner or later someone gets it fixed.

Someone shrinks the photos, someone switches hosting companies, someone finally kills that slideshow nobody ever liked.

Is 59 a good score? Not remotely, because Google doesn’t hand out a passing grade until you hit 90, and anything under 50 drops into the poor bucket.

But 58 is my average across the whole dataset, so Anaheim sits above the pack. If you want to push yours higher, I’ve written up what actually moves the number.

Why does that one get fixed? Slow might be the only problem on this entire list that an owner experiences personally, on their own phone, standing in their own parking lot.

Three checks, three last places

Three of the checks a customer never sees, and Anaheim lands 24th on all three.

• The padlock shows up on 92.5% of Anaheim sites, against 94% nationally, and Denver tops every city with 96.3%.
• Only 86.1% of your sites push an insecure visitor over to the secure copy, against 88% nationally, and Kelowna leads that one with 91.4%.
• Analytics turns up on 52.6% of them, against 58% nationally, and Kelowna takes that one as well with 63.4%.

My security section explains what the padlock and the redirect checks actually are, while the individual city rates all come out of the explorer, and I’ll show you how to pull them yourself at the end.

How bad is it really?

Before you spiral on me, look at how tight those security numbers actually are. Denver wins the padlock check with 96.3%, and Anaheim brings up the rear with 92.5%.

That’s a gap. It isn’t a canyon.

Your city isn’t some lawless corner of the internet, because the overwhelming majority of Anaheim businesses carry the padlock, exactly like the overwhelming majority everywhere else.

So why does it still bother me? The shape of the thing.

One city finishing 24th on all three of the checks a customer can’t see, while sitting 2nd on the one check they feel in their hand, isn’t something I’m willing to call a coincidence.

What the padlock actually does

HTTPS is that little lock icon next to your web address, and it scrambles everything traveling between your website and the person reading it.

Google’s own explainer is blunt enough. The lock stops strangers from listening in or tampering with what gets sent, which is a polite way of describing names, phone numbers, and whatever else people type into your quote form.

When it goes missing, Chrome tells your customer. You get tagged “Not secure” right beside your address, and anyone who taps that label reads that the site doesn’t use a private connection.

Would you hand your cell number to a page wearing that? I wouldn’t, and I do this for a living.

Having it isn’t using it

Getting the certificate is step one, turning it on for every last visitor is step two, and Anaheim slips further on the second step than it ever does on the first.

86.1% of sites in your city bump an insecure visitor across to the secure version, dead last of 24. The quietest failure on the whole list.

Who counts as an insecure visitor? The guy who typed your address in from memory, the one clicking a link off a directory nobody’s updated since 2019, and the loyal customer who bookmarked you before you ever bought a certificate.

All three land on the bare version of your site, collect a browser warning on your behalf, and you never hear a word about it.

The fix usually takes about ten minutes and costs absolutely nothing. Your host almost certainly has a switch for it buried somewhere in the dashboard, and I cover the rest of the basics in my website security guide.

Nobody’s watching the door

Just over half of Anaheim sites have analytics installed, which drops you into last place of 24 for a third time.

Analytics is that free scrap of code telling you how many people showed up, which pages they actually bothered to read, and exactly where they gave up and left.

Without it you’re operating a store with the security cameras switched off and nobody at the register counting heads. How long would you put up with that in a building you’re paying rent on?

Reading the numbers now and then sits on the same short list as backups and updates, the jobs a website needs long after the launch.

One piece of this bothers me considerably more than the rest, and it loops directly back around to your speed score.

Anaheim’s loading times are the good ones in my data, so how would an owner there ever know whether a particular fix actually accomplished anything?

You can’t feel a conversion rate. You can’t feel every visitor quitting the services page on the second scroll.

Those problems only surface inside a reporting tool, and when the tool was never installed in the first place, they sit around quietly getting comfortable.

Washington DC runs analytics on more of its sites than you do, and plenty of those owners still can’t put their hands on the login. Installed and read are two separate wins.

My guess is that speed gets handled because slowness shouts at the owner. Everything else whispers, and a good chunk of your city has nothing plugged in to hear it.

The pattern runs wider than three

Once I noticed the pattern, I couldn’t stop finding it everywhere else in the Anaheim numbers.

The description under your name in Google results, the gray line of text every searcher reads before deciding whether to click you, sits at 73.7% in Anaheim, 23rd of 24. Links out to your social profiles come in at 61.8%, also 23rd.

Now put that beside the contact form on the homepage, the one thing on the list an owner looks at every time they visit their own site. Anaheim hits 28.8%, 8th of 24, which beats my national average of 28%.

Google reviews land level, with 87.9% of Anaheim businesses holding at least one against 88% across my whole dataset. I’ve got no complaints there, and I’ve written up how I ask customers for them.

See the split? Visible things tend to get done, invisible things tend to get skipped, and the rankings lean in that direction more often than they don’t. One big exception is coming in a second.

What my numbers don’t tell you

I owe you some honesty about the limitations here.

I look at front doors. My audit hits the homepage of each business, from the outside, one single time, and it can’t tell who built the site, when anybody last touched it, or whether the owner happens to run some tracking setup my checks don’t recognize.

So treat 52.6% on analytics as a floor, not a verdict.

Anaheim isn’t a disaster overall, either. The city scores 71 out of 100 and lands 17th of 24, tied with Corpus Christi, Miami, New Orleans and Toronto, inside a spread that runs only from 70 up to 75. I went through that score check by check in the report card I wrote for Anaheim.

Not showing up at all is the most visible failure there is. Only 78.8% of Anaheim businesses have a website, and that lands 19th of 24, so plenty of visible work is going begging too. I chased that one down on its own, because the referral your customer sends you looks you up before it calls.

Go pull the numbers yourself

Please don’t take my word for any of this.

The report has an explorer built right into it, so pick Anaheim from the city list, leave the industry box completely alone, and it prints every rate with the sample size sitting right beside it.

Every Anaheim figure I’ve quoted here, plus a pile I skipped over entirely. Sample size matters enormously on numbers like these, and I’d much rather you saw it for yourself than took my word on faith.

Two things before you close this tab.

Type your own web address into your phone without the https on the front and watch what happens. Does the page snap across to the secure version, or does your browser quietly start warning strangers about you?

Then go open your analytics. Any analytics. If you can’t turn up the login, or you’re not sure you ever set one up, you already know how that check went.

Anaheim, your 59 out of 100 on a phone is the second best mark of any city I’ve audited, which tells me you care about this more than most places do.

Rather have me look? My free website audit does exactly this, one site at a time.

Either way, go fix the three nobody grades you on out loud, then tell me what you found. I’ll bet money the redirect one surprises you.