EAGLE SOLUTIONS
In short: On 52% of the 81 working Harghita company websites I found no company ID anywhere, on 49% tracking cookies start before consent, and the median mobile Lighthouse score is 57.5. Of the 100 companies, 13 have no website of their own.
What state are Harghita company websites actually in? In September 2026 I measured the websites of 100 companies in the county with the same script: the 50 largest companies and 50 small and medium-sized businesses. I collected measurable facts: is the certificate valid, is the company ID shown, does tracking start before consent, and how fast does the page load on a phone.
This article covers the big picture and the method; I will publish the details topic by topic in separate articles. I do not name any company or website anywhere, only aggregate numbers. I wanted a realistic picture of where the region stands, without pointing at anyone.
The main numbers at a glance
- Of the 100 companies, 13 have no website of their own. All 13 are among the largest, which is 26% of the top 50.
- Of the 87 websites measured, 6 showed no content: they returned an error page or had an invalid certificate. I ran the content checks on the remaining 81 working websites.
- On 84% of the homepages there is no company ID (neither a tax ID, CUI, nor a Trade Register number). Checking the contact and legal subpages as well, 52% still have it nowhere.
- On 49%, at least one tracking cookie is set before the visitor clicks anything. On 42% I found no cookie banner.
- 13 websites (16%) still run Universal Analytics, the old Google measurement tool, which no longer collects data but still sets its cookies.
- 40% have no privacy policy link on the homepage.
- 13% of the websites with a valid certificate do not redirect from the unencrypted http address to https.
- In the mobile Lighthouse test the median is 57.5 points, and 3 websites out of 78 scored above 90. On simulated slow 4G, the largest content element (LCP) takes 13.3 seconds to appear at the median, and the median homepage weighs 4.1 MB.
How I measured
I ran the measurement on 27 September 2026. The sample has two halves:
- 50 large companies: the 50 largest companies in Harghita County from the Termene 2025 revenue ranking;
- 50 small and medium-sized businesses from different sectors: accommodation, healthcare, hospitality, retail and services.
For each company I measured the homepage with my own Playwright-based script, in mobile view. I checked the certificate, the redirect and the server response headers with separate requests. I read the cookies four seconds after the page loaded, without clicking anything. I searched for the company ID using CUI and Trade Register number patterns, and where it was not on the homepage, on up to 8 contact, about or legal subpages too. I measured speed with the Google Lighthouse mobile profile. As a reference point, my own website scored 95 with the same tool.
The limits of the measurement:
- The small-business half contains only companies with a working website: when building the sample, I replaced websites that did not work. So the share of broken websites cannot be compared between the two groups.
- Lighthouse is a lab test on simulated slow 4G, not real user data. On a good connection everything is faster, but the ranking of the websites relative to each other stays.
- I looked for the company ID only on the homepage and up to 8 subpages. If it sits somewhere deeper, I did not find it.
- The online store sample is small, 12 stores, so I only draw cautious conclusions there.
Harghita company websites: large and small
I expected the large companies to have tidier websites. The numbers say otherwise:
- No company ID anywhere: 55% of the large companies, 50% of the small businesses.
- Tracking without a cookie banner: 26% of the large companies (8 of 31), 12% of the small businesses (6 of 50).
- No http → https redirect: 22% of the large companies, 8% of the small businesses.
- Median homepage size: 6.4 MB for the large companies, 3.3 MB for the small businesses. Even so, the median Lighthouse score barely differs: 56 versus 58 points.
A larger turnover does not mean a better website. At a large company the website was often built years ago, nobody has been responsible for it since, and marketing adds another tracking code every now and then.
What works well
Some things are in good shape. Of the 87 websites, 82 have a valid certificate, and most of them use a free Let's Encrypt certificate, so HTTPS no longer costs money. 69% of the 81 working websites have a meta description, and 56% show some sign of multilingual content (a language switcher or hreflang markup), which matters in a bilingual county. On 10 of the 12 online stores I found the ANPC alternative dispute resolution (SAL) link.
What does this mean for your website?
Most of the gaps are cheap and simple to fix: one line in the footer, a properly configured cookie banner, a redirect rule, a few resized images. The problem is that nobody checks them. If you want to check your own site, the checklist of legal requirements for a company website in Romania and the 7 steps to a faster WordPress site are a good starting point.
If you would rather not deal with it yourself, send me your website address and I will check it with the same measurements. And if you want to put an existing website in order, this is the first step of a website takeover.
