Most Of The Smallest UK Businesses Still Don't Have A Website

The majority of very small businesses in the UK still don’t have a website, according to new research from GoDaddy.

No less than 60 per cent of very small businesses – which represent a fifth of SMBs in this country, and are companies with five employees or less – don’t have their own website and are therefore missing out on presence and sales.

And unsurprisingly, those business owners who do have a site are more confident about their future – 60 per cent of them felt they could grow by up to 50 per cent in the next three to five years.

That’s a marked contrast to those without a website, as 54 per cent of them feared they would fail to grow their business at all within that same period of time.

So why don’t some very small business owners have a website? 35 per cent said that their company was just too small to require a website, and 19 per cent said a lack of time was the reason they hadn’t yet implemented a site.

19 per cent also felt that the cost of running a website was the factor which was preventing them from taking the plunge online.

All that said, a third of very small businesses are planning to create a site within the next two years.

Stefano Maruzzi, VP EMEA, GoDaddy, commented: “There are over 5 million small businesses in the UK, with a further 500,000 new businesses set to be added this year alone. While we take it for granted in this digital age that everyone is online, the reality is many of the smallest businesses are still to make the leap.

“Large and medium-sized companies learned a long time ago that the most effective way to reach customers globally was through the Internet. It seems that many of their smaller peers are about to do the same, which will change how they grow, how they communicate and perhaps even what they sell. That could have a big impact on small business growth and transformation in the UK, as well as economic growth as a whole.”