A quarter of UK sole traders still have no website. Here is what that costs.
You are not behind the times. You are just harder to check up on than the next name on the list.
The Government surveys UK businesses every year and asks, among other things, whether they have a website. The 2026 results are blunt: three quarters of sole traders do, one quarter do not.
of UK sole traders have a website, against 84% of micro businesses and 97% of medium ones. Across all UK businesses the figure is 78%, up from 68% the year before.
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Business Data Survey 2026, 4,450 businesses surveyed by Ipsos between October 2025 and January 2026.If you are in that quarter, nothing about your work is worse than the competition. The problem is narrower than that, and it is worth naming precisely.
What actually goes wrong
A customer who has your number has already decided something about you. A customer who has your name and nothing else is still deciding, and they decide in about forty seconds, on a phone, usually while doing something else.
Here is what they are trying to establish, in order:
- Are you real. A business with an address, a phone number and photographs of its own work reads as real. A name with no trace behind it does not.
- Do you do the exact thing they need. Not "cleaning", but end of tenancy cleaning. Not "car valeting", but a full interior after a dog has been in it.
- Do you cover where they are. This one kills more enquiries than people realise. If a customer cannot tell whether you come out to their town, they will not ring to find out.
- How do they contact you without it being a conversation. Plenty of people will not ring a stranger. They will fill in a form or send a message at ten at night.
A Facebook page answers the first one and half of the second. It cannot answer the third at all, and it buries the fourth under a login screen and a feed of other people's posts.
The cost is not the jobs you lost. It is the jobs you never knew about, because the enquiry stopped before it reached you.
The smallest version that works
You do not need ten pages. You need one page that answers those four questions without the reader scrolling past anything irrelevant.
- Buy the domain in your business name. Even if you do nothing else this month. It costs about a tenner a year and stops someone else taking it.
- Write down your services the way customers say them. Not your trade's internal language. If people phone and ask for "a deep clean", that is the phrase that goes on the page.
- List the towns and postcodes you actually cover. Spell them out. "Newcastle and surrounding areas" is not an answer to somebody in Gosforth.
- Put your phone number and a message option on every screenful. Not just in a footer. People decide to contact you at unpredictable moments and will not go hunting.
- Take ten photos of your own work before you need them. Phone photos are fine. Before and after beats a stock image of someone else's van every time.
What not to worry about yet
Logo refinements, a mission statement, a blog, an "our values" section. None of that is what the person on the other end is checking. They want to know that you exist, that you do their job, that you come to their street, and how to reach you. Everything else can wait until the first version is live and earning its keep.