How the audit was done
We gathered sites that appeared in organic search results for local services—plumbers, dentists, salons—in 12 U.S. cities. We kept only the businesses’ own domains and left out directories and national chains. In August 2026 we ran a single Lighthouse mobile audit on each site, letting Google calculate the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and the overall performance score.
What the numbers reveal
- Median LCP: 8.9 seconds – the time it takes for the largest piece of content to appear.
- Google’s “good” threshold: 2.5 seconds.
- Sites that meet the threshold: 4 out of 139 (3 %).
- Median JavaScript payload: 1.2 MB before the page responds to a user.
- Median mobile performance score: 57.
Every platform we examined—WordPress, hosted site builders, other CMSs—showed the same pattern: excess code and third-party widgets dragging performance down.
Who’s to blame
A fragmented development process creates the problem. One developer drops a theme, another adds a chat widget, a third plugs in a booking tool, and each change gets evaluated in isolation. The result is a bloated JavaScript bundle and delayed rendering, even though no single addition looks alarming on its own.
A note of caution
We ran only one Lighthouse test per site, so performance could shift with network conditions, device hardware, or server load. Treat the figures as a snapshot, not a definitive verdict for every small business.
What to watch next
The data set behind the audit is publicly available—you can verify the numbers or run your own tests in a different city. The takeaway is clear: most small-business sites are far from mobile-ready, and fixing the problem will require a coordinated, performance-first approach rather than piecemeal feature additions.