How fast are Chester County and Main Line small business websites?

Slower than they should be. I ran 199 small business websites from Chester County and the Main Line through the mobile test behind Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and only 19 scored “good.” The typical site scored 62 out of 100 and took 9.6 seconds to show its main content on a simulated phone.

The results at a glance

• ·19 of 199 sites (10%) scored good, 90 or higher out of 100. 128 (64%) need improvement, and 52 (26%) scored poor, below 50.
• ·The median score was 62. The middle half of the sites scored between 47 and 74.
• ·The main content took a median of 9.6 seconds to appear. 161 sites (81%) took longer than 4 seconds, the point Google rates poor, and 95 took longer than 10.
• ·Many sites show their age. Of the 757 homepages that print a copyright year, 172 (23%) still show 2024 or earlier, and 86 still show 2021 or earlier.
• ·The basics mostly hold. 4% of the 1,289 homepages that loaded had no working secure (HTTPS) connection, and 4% had no layout for phones.

Why the test is harder than your office Wi-Fi

Most owners only ever see their own site on a fast connection, where almost anything feels quick. Lighthouse’s mobile test simulates a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection, which is closer to a customer checking your hours from a parking lot. The wait that stood out was for the largest image or block of text near the top of the page. Google calls that wait good at 2.5 seconds or less and poor above 4, and the typical site here took 9.6.

Why speed matters beyond patience

Google says plainly that “Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems,” though it still shows the most relevant page first, even when its page experience is weak. Its guide to its AI search features, which it says are rooted in the same ranking systems, tells site owners to provide a good page experience, including by reducing latency. That reaches more customers every year: in BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 45% of consumers said they had used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.

How I ran the test

I took every place in OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-built open map, that is tagged as a business and lists a website in Chester County, Lower Merion Township, Radnor Township or Narberth. That came to 1,560 listings. I set aside chains, franchises and health systems (anything carrying a brand tag, or a website listed three or more times), plus social media and delivery pages, which left 1,461 independent websites.

On Nov. 2, 2026, a script loaded every homepage and recorded whether it had a working secure connection, a layout for phones, and the latest year printed after a copyright mark. Then I ran 200 sites, picked at random, through Lighthouse 13.6, the open-source Google tool behind PageSpeed Insights, with its standard mobile settings, one site at a time. One site returned an error, which leaves 199 scores.

A few limits are worth knowing. These are lab scores from a simulated phone, not measurements of real visitors. My test computer is faster than Google’s servers, so if anything the scores lean generous. A footer year is a rough signal, and sites that print the current year automatically look newer than they are, so the 23% is a floor. OpenStreetMap is large but incomplete, and 150 sites didn’t load for my script, including 48 that block automated visitors, so they are left out of the percentages. I am not naming any business.

Three things to do this week

1. Run your homepage through pagespeed.web.dev and read the Mobile tab, not Desktop.
2. Resize and compress large photos before you upload them. The biggest image near the top of the page is often the main content the test waits for.
3. Remove plugins, pop-ups and embedded widgets your site no longer uses, then run the test again and compare.

If your score comes back in the red, send me your site for a free audit and I will tell you what is slowing it down.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License.