Central Coast business websites in 2026: what we found when we checked 690 of them

Most local businesses are found first on a phone, through a search or a map. We wanted to know what a customer actually lands on when they tap through. So on November 12, 2026, we visited the website of every independent business in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties that lists a website on OpenStreetMap, the public map that anyone can edit and many apps draw from.

We left out chains, government offices, schools and nonprofits, and kept one listing per website. That gave us 690 businesses: restaurants and cafes, shops, dentists and clinics, contractors and auto shops, salons, law and real estate offices, and a handful of wineries and breweries. We loaded each homepage once, honored every site’s instructions for automated visitors, and ran each working site through Google PageSpeed Insights on its mobile setting.

We report shares, not names. No business is named or ranked.

Leaving aside the 25 listings that point to a Facebook page or another platform instead of a website, 94 of 665 web addresses failed. The largest group, 61 addresses, belongs to domains that no longer exist on the internet at all. Another 20 returned an error page such as “page not found,” six failed the security check every browser runs before it shows a page, and seven never answered.

We checked a sample of the dead domains by hand. The causes are ordinary. Some domain registrations have lapsed. Some listings contain a typo. Some businesses have moved to a new address or closed. Whatever the reason, a customer who taps that link reaches nothing, and the listing keeps sending people there until someone corrects it.

The share varied by town. Among listings that name a town, nearly one in four Salinas web addresses failed (16 of 66), compared with 12.4% in the city of Santa Cruz and 2 of 35 in the city of Monterey. Salinas also had the most listings that send people to a Facebook page or similar instead of a website: 11 of 77. These town samples are small, so read the differences as a reason to check, not as a ranking.

We did not count 49 more sites as broken: 35 turned away our automated visit, 13 were off limits under their own rules for automated visitors, and one we could not judge. A person using a browser may well reach those sites.

Google’s test loads a page as a mid-range phone would on a slow mobile connection, and times how long it takes for the main content (usually the large image or headline at the top) to appear. Google’s guidance treats 2.5 seconds or less as good for this measure and anything over 4 seconds as poor.

Only 11.3% of the 513 sites we could test met the 2.5-second mark. More than three in four (77.8%) took longer than 4 seconds. On Google’s overall 0 to 100 performance score, the median site scored 64, and one in ten (10.3%) scored 90 or higher.

This is a demanding test, and real visitors on fast phones and home Wi-Fi will often see pages sooner. We used it because it applies the same yardstick to every site. Google publishes speed figures from real visitors only when a site has enough Chrome traffic, and just 32.9% of these sites did, so for two out of three businesses the lab test is the only public measure there is.

Speed matters because the customer leaves before the page does anything for the business. We have written about what a faster website is worth and what it takes to get there.

Among the 522 sites that opened, the foundations were largely sound. 95.6% ended on a secure connection, 95.6% had a page title and 89.1% told phones how to size the page.

The gaps sit in the details that help a search result turn into a call:

• A summary for search results. One in three homepages (33.1%) has no short description written for the search result, so Google picks its own text from the page.
• Business details search engines can read. 30.8% of homepages describe the business, its address and hours in the structured format that search engines and AI assistants read directly. Our guide to structured business details explains what that involves.
• A phone number you can tap. 43.3% of homepages have a phone link that starts a call when tapped. The rest make a phone visitor copy the number or go looking for it.
• A current footer. Of the 304 homepages that show a copyright year, 16.4% show 2023 or earlier. It does not affect search, but it can make a site look unattended.

Health practices were the most likely to put a tappable phone number on the homepage. Personal services, such as salons and gyms, had the highest share of listed addresses that failed: one in four.

We also recorded the platform behind each working site where the page made it visible. WordPress is the most common named platform. Squarespace, Wix and Shopify follow, with Shopify concentrated among shops.

No platform guarantees a fast or a slow site. The figures above describe what local businesses use, not which one to choose.

Every check in this study can be repeated on your own business in under fifteen minutes.

1. Search for your business on Google Maps, Apple Maps, Yelp and Facebook, and tap the website link on each. If any of them lands on an error, correct the listing.
2. Confirm your domain renewal date with whoever registered it, and set it to renew automatically.
3. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting and note how long the main content takes to appear.
4. Open your site on your own phone and tap your phone number. It should start a call.
5. Search for your business name and read the description under your result. If it is not the sentence you would choose, write one.

If you would rather have someone else look, our free SEO audit covers the same ground for your site.

We drew the list from OpenStreetMap through its public query service, taking every business in the three counties whose listing includes a website. We dropped listings tagged as part of a brand, any website shared by four or more listings, and offices that are not businesses. Each business was assigned to one county by its map location and to one category by its map tag.

On November 12, 2026, our crawler identified itself by name, read each site’s robots.txt file first and skipped any site that asked not to be visited. It loaded each homepage once, at low volume, and read the page code for a title, a search summary, phone sizing, structured business details, a tappable phone link and a copyright year. Sites that could not be reached on the first pass were tried again. Each working site then received one Google PageSpeed Insights mobile test.

Keep these limits in mind when you quote the figures:

• The study covers businesses whose public map listing names a website. It cannot say what share of all local businesses have a website, and the map is maintained by volunteers, so coverage is uneven. San Benito County had only 20 qualifying listings.
• Our chain filter relies on map tags and repeated websites, so a few regional chains may remain.
• We checked one homepage per business on one day. A site that was down for maintenance that day counts as failed.
• The speed figures come from a single simulated mobile visit, not from real customers.
• We did not measure Google Business Profile details such as listed hours, websites or review counts, because we have no licensed source for that data.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. We will share the de-identified dataset and our collection method with reporters and researchers on request.