The poor-website filter: how web designers find their next clients
Around 1 in 3 UK small-business websites fails basic checks. The poor-website filter finds those firms, graded from the live HTML, each with a verified email. Here is how web designers work the list.
Around 1 in 3 UK small-business websites fails basic checks. No mobile layout. No HTTPS. One page. A copyright footer stuck years in the past. Behind each of those sites is a trading business that is losing work to competitors who look credible online. The poor-website filter finds them: it grades every verified company website from the live HTML, and lets you keep only the firms whose site is letting them down.
What the filter checks
We fetch each verified company website and read the HTML itself. Not a screenshot. Not a guess:
- Mobile layout. Does the page adapt on a phone, or is it a fixed desktop grid?
- HTTPS. Does the site load securely, or warn every visitor away?
- Page count. A real site, or one orphaned page?
- Copyright staleness. A footer that stopped in 2019 tells you when somebody last cared.
- Legacy builders. Fingerprints of platforms that stopped being maintained years ago.
Each site comes back modern, dated or poor, and the grades refresh monthly. In any search, "website graded dated or poor" is one click on top of industry and location.
Why this beats a no-website list
The old dream was a list of companies with no website at all. We used to sell that flag, and we retired it, because a firm with no web presence has published no email address. There is nothing to verify and nobody to write to. The full story is in how to find companies with no website.
The poor-website firm is different in the one way that matters. The site exists, so the verified email exists. Every lead the filter returns comes with the director's name, the verified website and a verified business email as standard. 1 credit = 1 lead, and a company we cannot verify never ships and never charges.
There is a second advantage: the opening line. "You have no website" is a pitch every list-buyer has already sent. "Your site does not work on a phone" is a specific, checkable fact about their business. One reads as spam. The other reads as attention.
The pipeline that works the list
The strongest setup for a web designer is a Pipeline that runs weekly without help:
1. Source: your trades and sectors, your region, poor-website filter on. The signal watch keeps delivering new matches as sites decay and new firms appear. 2. Steps: enrich, verify the email accepts mail, skip anyone you have contacted before. 3. Emails: a short intro naming the specific problem, a three-day wait, one chaser. Sent from your own mailbox, inside its warm-up allowance. 4. Replies: stop the sequence instantly and land with you, sorted by intent.
You can build that by hand, or let your AI lead-gen employee draft the whole thing from a two-minute chat. It reads your own site, asks a couple of questions, and writes the search and the emails in your voice. Drafts only. Nothing sends until you say so.
What to write
Keep the first touch factual and kind. The owner may have built that site themselves:
- Name the observation: "your site does not adapt on a phone, and most local searches happen on phones".
- Offer one concrete thing: a mockup, a 15-minute call, a one-page rebuild price.
- Stop. Two short paragraphs beat a fee menu every time.
Worked scripts, with subject lines, are in the 2026 poor-website guide, and the full weekly agency routine is in the web design agency playbook.
Count your patch first
Counting is free. Start free with 25 leads, run your trades and your postcodes through the poor-website filter, and see how many firms in your area are one honest email away from being your next client.
Filter 5 million UK companies by SIC code, region and incorporation date, enriched and ready to contact.
Run it on your free 25 →