My homepage shares four numbers about why a website matters. Web design sites love statistics, but plenty of them never say where the numbers came from, and some of the most repeated ones don’t hold up when you go looking for the original study.
So here’s where mine come from, how each study was done, and what I think it means for your business.
80% of consumers search for local businesses online every week
SOCi’s 2024 Consumer Behavior Index surveyed U.S. consumers about how they find and choose local businesses. 80% said they search online for local businesses at least once a week, and 32% said they do it every day or several times a day.1
The tools they used most were Google Search and Google Maps, with Facebook in third.
What it means for you: your customers are already looking. When someone searches for what you do, your website is often the first thing they see, and if you don’t have one, they move on to a business that does. The same survey found that nearly two in three people (63%) had run into wrong information in a business listing, which is a good reason to keep your hours, address, and phone number accurate everywhere they appear.
Design is the first thing people mention when judging credibility
In 2002, Stanford researchers working with Consumer WebWatch asked 2,684 people to compare the credibility of real websites and explain their ratings in their own words. The “design look” of a site came up more than anything else, in 46.1% of the comments.2
You may have seen the claim that “75% of people judge a company’s credibility by its website design,” usually credited to Stanford. I couldn’t find that number anywhere in Stanford’s published research, so I don’t use it. The real finding is strong enough on its own: when people decide whether to trust a website, how it looks is the first thing they talk about.
What it means for you: a dated or broken website doesn’t just look bad. It makes people question whether your business is still open, careful, and worth their money. The study is more than 20 years old, so treat it as a long-standing finding rather than a current measurement.
76% of people who search nearby visit a business within a day
Google ran a diary study in 2016 with 1,000 smartphone users, 634 of whom searched for something local. It found that 76% of people who searched on their phone for something nearby visited a business within a day, and 28% of those searches led to a purchase.3
What it means for you: local searches come from people who are ready to act. They aren’t browsing for fun. They want a plumber, a lunch spot, or a lawyer, and they’ll pick one quickly. Being easy to find, with a site that works well on a phone, puts you in that short list.
About 1 in 6 small businesses have yet to establish a website
Clutch surveyed 406 U.S. small business owners in August 2025. 83% now have a website, up from 64% in 2018. That leaves 17%, about 1 in 6, without one. Adoption is still climbing: 12% launched their site within the past year.4
The most common reason for not having a website was “not relevant to my industry” (34%). Only 16% named cost, down from 26% in 2018.
What it means for you: if you’re in that 1 in 6, you’re now the exception, and your competitors with websites are picking up the customers who search first. And “not relevant to my industry” is worth a second look. As the first number shows, your customers are searching online whether your industry feels digital or not.
How I checked these numbers
Every figure here comes from the original study or the organization that ran it, not from a list of statistics on someone else’s blog. I’ve linked each one below for your reference.
If a number can’t be traced back to its source, it doesn’t go on my site. Honesty is one of the seven virtues in The Code I run my business by, and that includes the small print.
Sources
- SOCi, “Consumer Behavior Index,” 2024.
- B.J. Fogg et al., Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and Consumer WebWatch, “How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility?,” October 2002.
- Google, “How Mobile Search Connects Consumers to Stores,” Think with Google, May 2016.
- Clutch, “The State of Small Business Websites in 2025,” August 2025.