This paper aims to measure the quality of all Romanian cities’ websites in 2019 and 2022, before and after the disruptive event of COVID-19. Since the official websites are the core instrument of e-governance, the changes in the quality of Romanian cities’ websites reflect the changes in the development of urban e-governance in Romania. The COVID-19 lockdowns and contact restrictions and the moving of most activities into the online environment had the potential to impact the performance of Romanian cities’ websites significantly and catalyze the progress of local e-governance. The quality of Romanian cities’ official websites was measured using an adapted survey instrument proposed by Holzer and Kim and Manoharan, Melitski, and Holzer. The tool covers five critical criteria of website quality or performance: personal data security, usability, content, services, and citizen participation. The research results may seem contrary to expectations: the improvements of websites have been incremental rather than transformational. Although our research provides only a case study, we may assert that the reform of traditional administration remains a step-by-step process. Our study’s main contribution consists in showing that the progress of e-governance is an incremental process even in a situation of emergency that requires the moving of most activities into the online environment.

(1) Background: Research on datafied political communication has concentrated on national electoral settings, although local government produces comparable behavioral trace data outside any electoral calculus. This study asks whether smaller local authorities, despite lower resources, outperform larger ones in participatory provision and citizen-initiated engagement. (2) Methods: In an exploratory regional design, we combine scoring institutional websites on five subdimensions (Information, Consultation, Deliberation, Decision, and Monitoring) with Facebook engagement metrics for 23 local public authorities in Romania’s North-East region, collected over a standardized 30-day window, and test whether population size predicts digital participatory performance. (3) Results: Population size does not positively predict the provision of participatory tools, but the aggregate association is not statistically significant (ρ = −0.25, p = 0.26) and the magnitude of the aggregate inverse trend depends on the weighting applied to the five subdimensions. The reversal established inferentially is confined to a single subdimension: Decision. Small cities are more likely to provide a basic decision-related tool (Fisher’s exact p = 0.017), which shows whether such a mechanism exists rather than its level of development. Small cities also generate more comments and shares on an ordinary day. Expressed relative to website audience, which is more than three times larger in the county-seat cluster, small-city engagement rates are higher on every indicator. The observation window nonetheless overlaps a time of national elections, so the Facebook results remain indicative rather than conclusive. (4) Conclusions: The results show that administrative-proximity drives digital engagement more effectively than resources, though the mechanisms of this were inferred rather than measured and the findings require replication in an electorally quiet period and on larger samples.