One in Three New England Small-Business Websites With a Phone Number Doesn't Let Customers Tap to Call, Study Finds Ahead of Small Business Saturday

Ahead of Small Business Saturday on 28 November, BusinessMarketing.Pro, a website of Archieboy Holdings, LLC of Marlborough, Massachusetts, ran its free website check-up on the home pages of 300 small businesses across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, 50 in each state. The businesses were drawn at random from public chamber of commerce member directories. Every check applies fixed rules to what is on the page; no AI was used. The study names no business, and nobody in it was contacted.

The good news is that the basics are mostly in place. Of the 274 home pages that loaded, 98 percent are set up for phones and 96 percent are served securely. Almost every page has a phone number, email address, form or contact link somewhere on it. The gaps are smaller, and they are the kind a customer notices:

• Phone numbers customers can't tap. Of the 218 home pages that show a phone number, 76 (35 percent) do not make it a tap-to-call link, so someone on a phone has to copy the number by hand.
• No phone number at all. 49 home pages (18 percent) show no phone number anywhere.
• Old dates in the footer. Of the 172 sites that show a copyright year, 51 (30 percent) show 2024 or earlier. The oldest says 2000.
• No main heading. 69 home pages (25 percent) have no main headline telling visitors and search engines what the business does.
• No description for Google. 65 home pages (24 percent) have no search description, the one- or two-sentence summary Google can show under a business's name.
• Page titles too short to help. 60 home pages (22 percent) have a page title under 30 characters, often just the business name, and 4 have no title at all.
• Websites that no longer work. 6 of the 300 websites listed in chamber directories (2 percent) did not load at all: three domains no longer exist, two home pages return "page not found" and one returns a server error.
• Not secure, or slow. 10 home pages (4 percent) are not served securely over HTTPS, and 16 (6 percent) took more than two and a half seconds to start loading.

"Nothing we found is a disaster, and that is the point. Most of these are ten-minute fixes: make the phone number tappable, add a one-line description for Google, update the date in the footer. On Small Business Saturday a lot of customers look a shop up on their phone first, and small things like these decide whether they call," said Bo Bennett, PhD, founder of Archieboy Holdings, which runs BusinessMarketing.Pro.

Any business owner can run the same check-up on their own website free at businessmarketing.pro/check-up. It takes a website address and an email address, and in a few minutes it emails the site's top three fixes in plain English and a podcast that suits the business. There is nothing to sign up for and no card to enter.

How the study was done

The sample came from the public member directories of twelve chambers of commerce: the Worcester Regional Chamber (Massachusetts), the Middlesex County Chamber (Connecticut), the Southern Rhode Island and East Bay chambers (Rhode Island, including members just over the line in Massachusetts), the Greater Nashua, Greater Manchester, Greater Portsmouth and Lakes Region chambers (New Hampshire), the Addison County and Rutland Region chambers (Vermont), and the Portland Regional and Belfast Area chambers (Maine). Members in consumer, trade and professional-service categories that listed a website were shuffled at random, and each was assigned to a state by its business address. Before the first 50 per state were taken, the list was screened by hand to remove banks, chains, franchises, car dealerships, large firms, nonprofits and public bodies. Each home page was checked once on 3 November 2026 from a server in the eastern United States, using the free check-up's fixed-rule home-page audit, plus three fixed checks added for this study: whether a phone number is shown, whether it is a tap-to-call link, and the copyright year. 20 websites turn away automated visitors and could not be checked, and 6 did not load, so the figures above are shares of the 274 home pages that loaded. As a control, 20 results chosen at random were checked by hand against the live pages in an ordinary web browser, and all 20 matched. "Tap-to-call" means the phone number is a telephone link that a phone dials when tapped. Only the home page of each site was checked.

About BusinessMarketing.Pro

BusinessMarketing.Pro offers a free website check-up for small businesses and shows owners how to run their marketing, from press releases and website check-ups to podcast interviews, social posts and ads, through PrivateChief Business. It is one of the websites of Archieboy Holdings, LLC, an online publishing and software company in Marlborough, Massachusetts, founded by Bo Bennett, PhD.