We measured the UK high street, one website at a time
We found 109,052 high street businesses across the United Kingdom on OpenStreetMap, in 15 trades. Only 24,311 of them list a website at all. We then fetched 7,645 of those websites the way a phone would, and 1,826 of them failed on at least one of 4 measurable faults: unreachable, unencrypted, not built for a phone, or too slow to hold a visitor.
- Last measured
- September 2026
- Written for
- uk small business website statistics
- Searched a month
- 90
Most numbers quoted about small business websites come from a survey, which asks an owner what they believe their own website is like. This does not. It fetches the site and scores what comes back, which is what a customer gets.
How it was done
OpenStreetMap holds the United Kingdom's shopfronts as tagged points, with a website field where somebody has filled one in. We pulled every business in 15 trades across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: plumbers, electricians, builders, roofers, garages, salons, bakeries, butchers, florists, gardeners, dentists, vets, gyms, cafés and painters.
Each business was assigned to the nearest town within 12 kilometres. Up to 12 websites a town were then fetched with an iPhone user agent, over one request, and scored on 4 faults an owner will recognise as their own: it does not load, it is not encrypted, it has no viewport tag so a phone renders it shrunk, or it takes longer to arrive than a visitor will wait.
Sites that answered 401, 403 or 429 refused our request and render perfectly well for a person. Counting those as broken would have inflated every number on this page, so they were dropped rather than scored.
What came back
22%
of UK high street businesses list a website at all
The rest are reachable only through a phone number, a Facebook page, or somebody else's directory listing.
24%
of the websites we fetched failed on at least one fault
Measured across 7,645 sites in 762 towns.
22%
do not tell a phone how to render them
No viewport tag, so the page loads at desktop width and has to be pinched open.
The fault that costs the most
Not fitting a phone is the expensive one, and it is also the cheapest to fix. A missing viewport tag is one line of HTML. Its absence means a visitor standing in the street gets a page rendered at desktop width, shrunk to fit, with a phone number too small to read and a form nobody can complete. Google has ranked mobile-first since 2019, so the same fault costs the ranking as well as the visitor.
Encryption is the second. A site served over plain HTTP is marked Not Secure in the address bar of every current browser, before a word of it is read. For a trade asking a stranger to let them into a house, that badge is not a technical detail.
What it means if you are the owner
The bar is low. A site that loads fast, fits a phone and states its trade and its town puts a business ahead of most of its street, for the price of a phone contract. That is the whole thesis of Sitesmiths: we build the site first, show it to you finished, and you pay from £47 a month with VAT included, or you pay nothing and keep walking.
You can have your own site measured on the same 4 faults, free, and you do not have to give us anything to see the result.