We checked 50 Nanaimo business websites.

Fifty good businesses. One checklist.

We searched Google Maps in Nanaimo for five kinds of local business and took ten of each: trades (plumbing, roofing, electrical, landscaping), restaurants and cafes, health clinics (physio and dental), local shops, and professional services (accountants, bookkeepers and lawyers). We skipped national chains.

These are not struggling businesses. Their average Google rating is 4.8 stars, and 44 of the 50 sit at 4.5 or higher. People like them. The question was whether their websites keep up.

On October 21 and 22, 2026 we opened every homepage at phone size and checked the same things on each one:

• Does the business have its own website?
• Does the page fit a phone screen, and is it secure (https)?
• Can you tap the phone number to call?
• Does the page title, the blue headline Google shows in search results, say Nanaimo?
• Is there a search description, the grey text under that headline?
• Is there a next step besides calling: book, reserve, ask for a quote, shop or send a message?
• How heavy is the homepage?

We are not naming anyone. This is about patterns, not callouts.

Phones are mostly handled.

A few years ago this would have been the whole story. Not anymore. 43 of 44 sites fit a phone screen with no sideways scrolling, and 42 of 44 are secure. The one that failed the phone test did not have a layout problem. It showed a blank white screen.

The trades did best. All ten plumbers, roofers, electricians and landscapers had a phone number you can tap and a search description. When a pipe bursts, people call, and these businesses have clearly figured that out.

Small gaps, everywhere.

Four of the 50 businesses had no website of their own. Two had none at all, and two send people from Google to a Facebook or Instagram page instead. The other 46 listings led to 44 websites, because two pairs of businesses share one. Here is how those 44 sites did.

The odd ones.

• Heavy homepages. A typical homepage in the study was about 1.5 MB. Nine were over 3 MB, five were over 5 MB, and the biggest was about 17 MB, mostly full-size photos. On a phone with one bar of signal, that is a long wait before anyone sees a menu or a number.
• The wrong town. Two businesses listed in Nanaimo on Google have another city in their page title. To a search engine, that page is about somewhere else.
• The blank screen. One web address points to a site hosted somewhere else and shows it inside a frame. On a phone, nothing showed up at all.
• Old footers. Five sites still say © 2024 or earlier. One says 2018. Visitors notice, even when nothing else has gone stale.

Restaurants had it hardest.

Restaurants and cafes are where people search from their phone, hungry, a few blocks away. They were also the weakest group by a wide margin.

• Four of the ten had no website of their own: two had nothing, and two pointed Google to a social page.
• Of the six that did, none had Nanaimo in the page title.
• Five of six had no search description.
• Four of six had no phone number you can tap. Three did not show a phone number on the homepage at all.

Some of that is on purpose. A busy kitchen does not always want the phone ringing, and online reservations can do the job. But if someone searches "brunch Nanaimo" and your page title just says your name, you are leaving the most important word out.

Ten minutes, one phone.

None of these fixes are expensive. Most are an afternoon. Here is the same check we ran, so you can run it yourself:

1. Open your site on your phone and tap your phone number. If it does not start a call, fix that first.
2. Google your business name. Read the blue headline and the grey text under it. Do they say what you do and where you are?
3. Find your next step in five seconds. Book, reserve, get a quote, buy. If you have to hunt for it, so do your customers.
4. Check your Google listing's website link. Make sure it goes to your own site, not just a social page you do not control.
5. Scroll to your footer. If the year is old, something else probably is too.

Method: snapshot from October 21 and 22, 2026. Homepages only, checked at phone size (375 px wide). Page weight counts what loaded from the business's own server, so the real number can be higher. The next-step check was automated and generous: any book, reserve, quote or shop link, or a contact form, counted.