UK Small Business Websites 2026.

London first, then a fair spread across England.

We sorted each business by the place written in our research notes into London, four broad parts of England, and the three other nations. London came first with 72 businesses (23.3% of the UK sample). The south and east of England, the north and the Midlands followed, each with dozens of businesses, from trades and cleaners to studios, shops and clinics.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are in the sample too, but in numbers too small to report on their own. 49 businesses (15.9%) gave no single place, usually because they sell online across the UK or work for clients abroad.

The regions are broad on purpose. Splitting the sample into counties would leave groups of two or three businesses, which tells nobody anything.

Britain messages. Its homepages show it.

21.1% of UK homepages carried a WhatsApp link, against 3.2% in the US and 2.5% in Canada. For tradespeople in particular, a WhatsApp chat with photos of the job is how many quotes already start, and their websites are catching up with that.

It shows in the numbers. 52.0% of UK homepages had no tap-to-call link, about the same as the US, but counting WhatsApp too, 48.0% had no one-tap way to reach the business. Only 30.9% had neither a form nor tap-to-call, the lowest of our three editions. Forms were still missing from 58.8% of homepages.

The regional groups are small, but the differences are large. Homepages in the south and east of England were the most likely to have a form; homepages in the north of England were the most likely to make the number tappable, and London homepages the least.

Only regions with at least 30 homepages measured are shown.

WordPress country, with Wix in second place.

44.1% of British homepages ran on WordPress, compared with 34.5% in the US. Our written notes agree, putting 45.6% of UK sites on WordPress, and 24.8% built with a page builder such as Elementor or Divi.

Among the site builders the order differs from America. Wix (8.8%) was ahead of Squarespace (6.9%) in the UK, where in the US Squarespace was more than twice as common as Wix. Marketing systems resold by agencies, common in the US, were rare here.

A WordPress site on shared hosting often carries the business email on the same account. That is worth knowing before anyone cancels a hosting plan: the website can move, but the mailboxes have to move first.

More long-serving sites, and more that have slipped.

Some of the British sites we checked had served their owners for many years, and it showed in a few places. 13.7% of UK homepages were not set up for phones, the highest of our three editions; nearly all of these had no mobile viewport setting at all, which is a sign of a site designed before phones were the main screen.

17.2% of sites in our notes still showed placeholder or demo content, and 8.9% of the UK domains we could test were down, parked or showing a holding page on 1 November, again the highest of the three. Our notes recorded 4 UK sites with spam pages injected into them, a small number, but each one a business that probably did not know.

The positive side: 98.0% of UK homepages that loaded had a working secure address, the best of our three editions.

Instagram first, Facebook stronger than in America.

Our notes on where each business keeps its real photos, films and reviews named Instagram for 48.5% of UK businesses and Google reviews for 27.2%. Facebook came up for 22.7%, more than in the US (16.4%), often as the page where a trade business posts finished jobs. WhatsApp itself came up in 9.1% of UK notes.

YouTube mattered less than in America (24.3% against 33.7%). For many of the British businesses we studied, the best material was a phone camera roll and a Facebook page of jobs, which is plenty to build a site from.

These counts come from written notes, so they are a floor.

Lighter at the heavy end.

The median UK homepage downloaded 2.13 MB on its first load as a phone. Only 15.7% went over 5 MB, the lowest share of our three editions, and the heaviest tenth started at 7.4 MB against 9.8 MB in the US. The median homepage made 58 requests.

London was the exception within the UK, with a heavier median homepage (2.67 MB) than the north or the south and east of England. The London group has more studios and creative businesses, which tend to open with large photography and video.

A short check for a British small business site.

Take your phone, switch off Wi-Fi and open your own homepage. Each point below is something we saw on real UK sites this autumn, and most take minutes to put right.

How the UK numbers were made.

This edition follows the method of the main report, limited to businesses whose market is in the United Kingdom. A business counts once. Its region comes from the place written in our research notes, sorted into London, the south and east of England, the south west, the Midlands, the north of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; where two places are named, the first counts.

258 UK business domains were opened once on 1 November 2026 in headless Chrome set up as a phone (390 by 844 pixels, touch, iPhone browser identity), from one server. 204 loaded fully and make up the homepage figures. 34 blocked automated visits or did not finish loading and are left out rather than guessed.

The sample is small businesses that replied to Astra Labs about their website, so it leans toward owners already thinking about a new one. Our own clients' sites are excluded, and we never publish which business had which result.