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: no A grades
Not one of the 169 sites earned an A from Mozilla Observatory. Of the 96 that Lighthouse could score for speed, 11 reached 90 or better on mobile. Speed and security are the two things that are both measurable and fixable.
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 lock icon in the address bar, which encrypts the connection. Thirty-six percent still scored an F, because Observatory grades the security headers behind the lock, such as a content security policy, and those were missing. Observatory reads headers; it is not a penetration test.
SEO basics
The audit also looked for a sitemap, the simple file that tells search engines what pages exist. It is one of the easiest things to get right, and every site I build comes with one.
Why: most of them run on templates
The reason is structural. More than half of the sites ran on a template platform or site builder rather than custom code. 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.
On Mozilla Observatory's security-header grade, the three template platforms averaged a D, an F, and a C-, and on mobile speed they averaged 60, 48 and 60 out of 100. 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 fast on a phone, earns a real security grade, and has clean SEO starts ahead of nearly everything around it locally, 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 →
Or text me your address and I will tell you what I see.
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.