Five suburbs ranked in WalletHub's top 100 small cities

Elmhurst is the highest ranked among five suburbs that cracked personal finance website WalletHub's list of the top 100 of the "Best Small Cities in America."

Also ranked are Highland Park, Wheaton, Park Ridge and Glen Ellyn.

Using 43 weighted metrics in five categories, WalletHub examined more than 1,300 cities throughout the country with populations between 25,000 and 100,000. The five categories included affordability, economic health, education and health, quality of life and safety.

The site used data from "the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Areavibes, TransUnion, TripAdvisor, County Health Rankings, Yelp, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, ATTOM Data Solutions and other WalletHub research" to determine the rankings, according to the report.

The metrics include data like the number of coffee shops and bars in the quality of life category. In the safety category, it includes the number of motor vehicle fatalities in a town's jurisdiction, but doesn't take into account the number of actual crashes. Violent crimes and property crimes also were taken into account.

Among the Illinois towns in the top 100, Elmhurst came in at No. 45, followed by Highland Park at No. 50, Wheaton at No. 59, Park Ridge at No. 61 and Glen Ellyn at No. 64.

Elmhurst ranked highest in affordability, economic health and quality of life among the five Illinois suburbs in the top 100. Glen Ellyn was highest in safety. Wheaton had the highest ranking of the five towns in education and health.

Using the weighted scores provided by WalletHub, all five of those suburbs scored between 67.15 and 67.93.

The highest scoring town in the report was Sammamish, Washington at 72.55. The lowest ranked town among 1,322 in the survey was Pine Bluff, Arkansas with a WalletHub score of 35.92.