Most advice about small business websites is about what to add. We wanted to know what is actually there. So we went back to the 699 independent US businesses from our first study, the ones with a website, and read each homepage for eleven plain signals: can a visitor tap to call, is there a contact form, are the hours on the page, is there a privacy policy, a link to reviews, structured data a search engine can read, and so on.
Half of them have no phone number you can tap. 50% carry a tel: link; the rest print the number as text or hide it on a contact page, on sites whose visitors are mostly on a phone. 9% link to their reviews anywhere on the home page. And 12% have none of the six things a local customer looks for first.
What is on the page
Share of the 693 homepages that could be read:
| Signal | Share |
|---|---|
| Served over HTTPS | 100% |
| A mobile viewport | 97% |
| Open Graph tags (a proper share preview) | 85% |
| A link to a social profile | 77% |
| A phone number you can tap to call | 50% |
| Opening hours on the page | 49% |
| A privacy policy | 45% |
| A contact form | 37% |
| LocalBusiness structured data | 34% |
| Terms or conditions | 28% |
| A link to leave or read reviews | 9% |
The top of the table is the platform's doing, not the owner's: HTTPS, a mobile viewport and share tags come free with every modern site builder, which is why they are near universal. The bottom of the table is the owner's doing, and it is where the gaps are. A privacy policy is on fewer than half. Structured data, the block that tells Google the business's address, phone and hours in a form it can read, is on about a third. A link to reviews, the single most persuasive thing a local business can show, is on one site in twelve.
Six basics, and how many each site has
Take the six a local customer looks for first: a tappable phone number, a contact form, opening hours, a privacy policy, structured data and a link to reviews. Count how many each homepage has.
| Of the six | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| None | 12% |
| One | 20% |
| Two | 25% |
| Three | 22% |
| Four | 15% |
| Five | 5% |
| All six | 1% |
57% have two or fewer. 5 sites of 693 have all six. None of the six costs money or needs a developer; they are settings and a page on any current builder, and together they take an afternoon.
By trade
Share of each trade's homepages carrying each of the six:
| Trade | Sites | Tap to call | Form | Hours | Privacy | Structured data | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants, cafes and bars | 107 | 33% | 25% | 50% | 27% | 32% | 4% |
| Hair and beauty | 103 | 47% | 29% | 57% | 31% | 35% | 5% |
| Trades and workshops | 113 | 54% | 40% | 61% | 37% | 37% | 8% |
| Dentists and clinics | 134 | 77% | 36% | 57% | 69% | 32% | 16% |
| Gyms and studios | 149 | 30% | 38% | 42% | 43% | 34% | 7% |
| Hotels and guesthouses | 69 | 70% | 61% | 20% | 65% | 41% | 9% |
| Hire and rentals | 18 | 50% | 56% | 44% | 61% | 33% | 11% |
Dentists and clinics lead on the phone number and the privacy policy, which fits a trade where the phone is the booking system and patient data is regulated. Restaurants are the surprise at the bottom of the tap-to-call column: the trade whose customers most often decide on the sidewalk is the one least likely to let them call from the page. Hotels are the only trade where a form is more common than a phone number. Nobody links to reviews, in any trade.
What this means if you run one of these businesses
The gap between a site that has two of the six and one that has all six is not design and it is not money. It is six decisions:
- Make the phone number a link. On a phone it dials; on a desktop it does nothing worse than before.
- Put the hours on the home page, as text, and keep them identical to your Google listing.
- A contact form that goes to an inbox someone reads. The first study found most of these sites cannot be booked online; a form is the minimum.
- A privacy page. California requires one of any commercial site that collects personal information from its residents, and the rest of the country's visitors expect it.
- Structured data. On a site built here it is written for you from your business details; on any other, the free generator produces the block to paste in.
- A link to your reviews, and the review link generator makes the one that opens Google's review box directly.
The website checker reads any address for most of the signals above, so you can see your own row of this table before changing anything.
How we did it
The sites are the 699 independent US businesses with a website from the first study, across seven trades. Each homepage was read once more in November 2026, with an identifying user agent and three seconds between requests, and only the homepage was read. 6 could not be read this time. No business is named; hosts are kept as hashes in the dataset.
Each signal is a yes or no read from the page's HTML without running scripts: a tel: link; a form with a text or email field, or an element named as a contact form; the words privacy or terms in a link; a link to Google's or Yelp's review pages or the words "leave a review"; JSON-LD whose type is LocalBusiness or one of its subtypes; openingHours in that data or a day name beside a time on the page; a link to a social network; Open Graph tags; a viewport tag; and whether the final address after redirects was https.
What the method misses: a form or a phone number injected by a script after the page loads, a review widget that does not link out, and a privacy policy linked only from an inner page. Each of those would undercount, so the true figures are a little higher than the ones here, and the shape of the table, which signals are common and which are rare, is the finding rather than any single decimal.
FAQ
What share of small business websites have a tappable phone number?
In this read of 693 US small-business homepages, 50% carried a tel: link. The rest print the number as plain text or keep it on a contact page.
How many small business websites have a privacy policy?
45% of the homepages linked to one. California's privacy law requires a posted policy of commercial sites that collect personal information from its residents, which in practice is any site with a contact form.
How many link to their reviews?
9%. A link that opens the review box, or a link to the Google or Yelp listing, was the rarest of the eleven signals in every trade.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes, with a link to this page and the date. They were measured in November 2026 on the same sample as the first two studies, and the method is above.