I wanted a real picture of how small-business websites on the south coast actually perform, so I measured them. I ran 169 Coos County small-business websites through Google Lighthouse, which scores speed, accessibility, best practices, and SEO, and Mozilla Observatory, which grades security. Here is what came back.
The headline number: zero
Across all 169 sites, not a single one scored both fast and secure. Not one. Speed and security are the two things that are both measurable and fixable, and every business in the sample was missing at least one.
Speed: 61 out of 100 among the sites we could score
Among the 96 sites Lighthouse returned a score for, the average mobile speed was 61 out of 100. On the phone, where most local searches actually happen, that is the difference between a page that feels instant and one a visitor abandons before it loads. Google treats speed as a ranking signal, so slow sites lose twice: once in the rankings, and again with the people who do not wait.
Security: a B at best
On Mozilla Observatory, the highest security grade in the entire sample was a B, and not one site earned an A. Eighty-eight percent had HTTPS, the basic lock icon in the address bar. Thirty-six percent still scored an F, because the lock was the only thing they had: no real headers, no content security policy, no defense behind it. A lock on the door is not the same as locking it.
SEO basics: 2 percent
Only 2 percent of the sites had a working sitemap, the simple file that tells search engines what pages exist. Most were leaving the easiest SEO win on the table.
Why: most of them are renting
The reason is structural. More than half of the sites were rented from a template platform rather than built. WordPress alone was 63 of the 169, with Squarespace at 13 and Wix at 10, and the pattern in their scores is hard to miss.
The three rental platforms averaged a D, an F, and a C. The Squarespace sites clustered together near the bottom, and the Wix sites landed within a few points of one another. Templated software tends to produce templated results. For comparison, the custom-coded sites I build, and the ones I checked alongside them, averaged 94 on mobile with an A-plus security grade.
What this means for your business
This is not a knock on any of these businesses. It is an open lane. In a market where almost no one has done the work, doing it well puts you ahead fast. A site that loads in under a second, earns a real security grade, and has clean SEO can outrank nearly everything around it locally, often within weeks, because the competition simply is not trying.
You do not have to take my word for where your own site stands. The same checks I used are built into a free tool on this site. Run a free audit of your site →
Methodology: 219 Coos County small businesses surveyed across nine towns. 50 had no website. The 169 with a site were graded by Mozilla Observatory. Google Lighthouse returned a mobile score for 96 of them, and the speed average above is drawn from those 96. Platform identified by site fingerprint. Scored in 2026.