I build websites for small businesses in this area, so I have an obvious interest in this subject. That is exactly why every number here is checkable and the method is written out below. You can repeat most of it on your own phone in about ten seconds.

How this was done

Business locations came from OpenStreetMap, the only openly licensed source of local business data that does not charge per lookup. I pulled every business in Porter, Lake and LaPorte county within 22 miles of Valparaiso, which came to 1802 independent businesses once chain branches were removed.

674 of those had a website recorded. I opened each one in Chromium driven by Playwright, with an iPhone user agent and a 390 by 844 viewport, waited for the network to settle, and recorded seventeen measurements: whether it loaded at all, whether it declares a mobile viewport, how wide the page actually renders, whether the phone number is a tappable link, how many kilobytes it pulls, how long it took, how much text renders under 12 pixels, and whether it has a title, a description, a main heading, alt text, a favicon, HTTPS, or a layout built from HTML tables.

Chain branches are excluded throughout, by business name and by website host. That matters more than it sounds. A Hampton Inn lists a hilton.com deep link, and that link either redirects or refuses an automated browser, so an earlier run of this scored 24 of 31 hotels as broken. They are not broken. They are chains, and a corporate booking page is not a local business website in any useful sense. 482 chain rows were removed.

What was actually wrong

Most sites had more than one problem, so these do not add up to 800.

The four that cost real money

1. The domain is gone: 166 sites

This is the big one, and the one almost nobody knows about. A domain registration lapses, nobody renews it, and the website simply stops existing. The business keeps operating. The Google listing keeps pointing at the dead address. Anyone who looks them up and clicks through gets a browser error page.

I checked these against DNS rather than trusting the browser, because a site can fail to load for a dozen boring reasons. A domain with no nameservers and no address record is not a slow site or a bad afternoon. It is gone.

2. A page too heavy to open on mobile data

The median page pulled 1.9MB. 185 sites pulled more than 3MB and 103 pulled more than 5MB, for one page. Away from wifi that is the difference between a customer reading your hours and a customer going back to the search results. The median load took 3.3 seconds and the slowest tenth took over 5.3 seconds.

Almost all of it is photographs uploaded at camera resolution and then displayed small. It is the easiest thing on this list to fix and almost nobody has.

3. A phone number you cannot tap: 91 sites

The number is printed on the page as plain text rather than as a link. On a desktop that is invisible. On a phone it means a customer has to memorise seven digits, leave your site, open the dialler and type them in. Every one of those steps loses people.

4. Nothing for Google to show: 161 sites

161 sites have no meta description, so Google writes the grey summary line under your name itself out of whatever text it can scrape. 130 have no main heading. 9 have no page title at all, which means the blue link in search results shows a file name or nothing.

Town by town

These are the 15 towns where I found at least twelve independent businesses. "No site" means no website recorded anywhere I could find it. "Dead" means the recorded address returned nothing. "Phone faults" means it loaded but something about it is broken at phone width.

Each town has its own page with the detail behind these numbers:

• Gary
• Valparaiso
• Merrillville
• Crown Point
• Highland
• Michigan City
• Schererville
• Chesterton
• Winfield
• Griffith
• Hebron
• Portage
• Cedar Lake
• Hobart
• Lowell

The bigger half: no website at all

Everything above concerns businesses that have a website. The larger group is the 1128 businesses in this area where I could not find one, which is 62.6% of every independent business I found.

What to fix yourself, today, for nothing

None of this needs me. Do these five things and you have fixed most of what I measured.

1. Open your own site on your own phone. Not on a laptop. If you have to pinch to read it, that is the whole problem, and every customer has it too.
2. Tap your phone number. If it does not start a call, ask whoever runs your site to wrap it in a tel: link. It is a one line change.
3. Find your domain renewal date and put it in your calendar, with the registrar login stored somewhere you will find it in three years. This is the failure that took out 166 sites in this study.
4. Resize your photographs before uploading them. Sixteen hundred pixels wide is plenty for any website. Straight off a phone camera it is four times that and roughly sixteen times the file size.
5. Search your own business name and read what Google prints underneath it. If that grey line is nonsense, you have no meta description.

What this cannot tell you

• OpenStreetMap coverage is uneven. Gary and Highland are thoroughly mapped, Portage and La Porte are not, so their counts here are smaller than the towns really are. A small count means thin data, not a small town.
• I loaded one page per site, the home page. A site with a good home page and a broken menu reads as clean here.
• A handful of sites block automated browsers, and from outside those look identical to a dead site. That is why every dead-domain claim was re-checked against DNS and nothing else was counted as dead.
• This is a snapshot taken in September 2026. Domains get renewed and sites get rebuilt, so anything here could be out of date by the time you read it.
• I am not neutral. I sell websites. Check the numbers rather than trusting the conclusion.