380 Years of Business, One Working Website: We Measured 23 Somerset Hair Salons

There is a salon on County Street that has been cutting hair since 1969. Fifty-seven years. It has outlasted the mall, the recession, two rounds of downtown redevelopment, and every marketing agency that ever cold-called it. Somebody's grandmother went there. Somebody's mother goes there now.

Its website does not resolve.

Not "loads slowly." Not "looks dated." The domain that public directories still list for it returns nothing at all. What is actually live is a booking page on a third-party platform, and that page takes 18.9 seconds to paint its largest element on a phone.

That is not a criticism of a business that has done something right for fifty-seven consecutive years. It is a description of what happens when a shop that was built entirely on word of mouth gets handed to the internet without a plan. We wanted to know how common it was, so we measured every salon and barber shop we could find in Somerset.

What we measured#

Twenty-three independent hair salons and barber shops with street addresses in Somerset, MA (02725 and 02726), compiled from public business directory listings. National chains and franchises excluded.

Every web presence we found was run through Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile, plus our own structural crawler for the things Google's score does not tell you: whether the phone number is tappable, whether there is a contact form, whether the business has any analytics at all.

The presence breakdown#

Of 23 businesses:

Two more had a domain listed in directories that no longer resolves at all. One is reachable only through a Facebook page. We excluded that one's speed numbers from every aggregate below, because measuring facebook.com measures Facebook, not the salon.

The speed data#

Eleven web presences were measurable. Here is all of it, worst last, anonymised.

Median mobile LCP: 9.6 seconds. Google's threshold for "good" is 2.5s. Not one of the eleven met it. Nine of the eleven were past 4.0s, which is Google's threshold for "poor."

Every one of those numbers is a lab estimate. Google had no real-visitor field data for any site in this sample, which is itself a finding: field data requires a certain volume of traffic, and these sites are not getting it.

Two other numbers worth sitting with. Only 3 of 10 crawlable sites had a tappable tel: phone link — meaning on seven of them, a customer standing in a parking lot has to memorise ten digits and retype them. And 4 of 10 had any analytics installed at all, so more than half of these owners have no idea whether their website has ever produced a single customer.

One thing everybody got right: 10 of 10 crawlable sites had a mobile viewport tag. Nobody is serving a desktop-only site anymore. That fight is over and the small businesses won it.

The part that actually matters#

The instinct, when you show an owner this data, is to sell them a website. That is usually the wrong first move, and the reason is in the numbers above: the businesses with the worst web presence are also the ones with the longest customer relationships. They do not have a demand problem. They have a discoverability problem, and those are not the same thing.

He is right, and it is very good news for a 51-year-old salon with no website. The customer searching "haircut near me" on a phone in Somerset is not reading a homepage. They are looking at a map result, a star rating, a photo, and a button that says Call. If those four things are correct and current, you are competitive with a shop that paid good money for a website that takes 21 seconds to load. We measured that one. It is Site J.

You do not need e-commerce. You need to be findable, callable, and open.

What to do Monday, cheapest first#

Free, four minutes — make your phone number tappable. This is the one we give away every time, because seven of the ten sites we crawled fail it and it is a one-line change. Find the phone number on your homepage and wrap it:

<a href="tel:+15086780000">(508) 678-0000</a>

That is it. On a phone, it becomes a button that dials. Untappable numbers on a mobile page are pure leaked revenue, and you are paying nobody to fix it.

Free, thirty minutes — claim and finish your Google Business Profile. Hours, phone, address, category, and at least ten photos of actual work. If you have been in business since 1975, say so in the description. Nobody with a six-month-old salon can compete with that sentence.

Free, ten minutes a week — ask two customers for a review. Not a campaign. Two people, in the chair, who already like you.

Low monthly cost — put a booking link where the phone number is. Three of the businesses we measured have no website and no problem, because their entire online presence is a booking page that works. That is a legitimate strategy, not a consolation prize. Just check the speed of whatever platform you land on: two of the three booking pages in our sample were among the slowest things we measured.

Free to check — does your domain still resolve? Type it into a browser right now. Two of these businesses have a domain printed in directories that leads nowhere. If yours expired, someone can buy it. That is worth an afternoon of somebody's attention.

The rebuild is last, not first. If your LCP is 15+ seconds, a new site is genuinely worth it. But do the four free things above before you spend a dollar, because they will outperform a slow new website every time.

Reproduce this yourself#

Paste your own URL into pagespeed.web.dev, switch to Mobile, and look at one number: Largest Contentful Paint. Under 2.5s is good. Over 4.0s means the majority of people tapping your listing are looking at a blank screen long enough to change their mind.

We publish the method because a number you can check yourself is worth more than a number we assert.

If you run a shop in Somerset, Swansea, Westport, or Fall River and you want to know exactly where yours sits in this data — including the named version, which we do not publish — the audit is free and takes about a day.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner · 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com

Measured 17 August 2026. Every business criticised here is anonymised, permanently. They did not ask to be graded in public, and being an example is not a punishment.