Nearly a third of small-business websites fail basic checks
Nearly a third of UK businesses do not have a website. Not a bad website. No website at all.
Every figure is cited on screen. Company examples are fictional specimens.
Music: Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0
Transcript
- 0:01
Nearly a third of UK businesses do not have a website. Not a bad website. No website at all. That is the government’s own figure, and it has barely moved in years.
- 0:16
It is not the big firms. Ninety-nine per cent of large businesses have a site. It is the small end. Three quarters of micro businesses, and only sixty-five per cent of sole traders. So a third of people working for themselves are invisible online.
- 0:37
These are not failing businesses. They have customers, vans, invoices, a phone that rings. What they do not have is any way of being found by somebody who starts with a search. Every job they never hear about goes to whoever does have a website.
- 0:56
Now turn that round. If you build websites, or sell IT support, or do marketing, that missing third is your entire market. And it is a market you cannot find by searching, because searching is the exact thing they are missing from.
- 1:15
But they are findable somewhere else. Every limited company is on the public record, with its trade, its address and its age, whether it has a website or not. Match that against who does have a site, and what is left is a list of businesses that need one.
- 1:36
The businesses hardest to find online are the easiest ones to find on paper.
About this film
Nearly a third of small-business websites fail basic checks runs 1:43, read by Cillian and appears on Leadistry's Blog page. The full narration is above in 6 sections, so you can read it instead of watching if that is quicker. Every figure shown on screen comes from the Companies House public record or a named published source, and the companies used as examples are fictional specimens rather than real customers.