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Research

What small business websites actually have

Surveys ask owners what their website does. We can count it. Across the published small-business sites built here: which have a shop, bookings, a blog, a menu, their own domain - and how many have ever received anything through the site.

Counted across 94 published websites of real customer accounts, averaging 6.8 published pages each.

What the sites do

Sell online (a shop)
18.1% (17)
Take appointments or bookings
6.4% (6)
Publish a blog
17.0% (16)
Publish a menu
2.1% (2)
Take rental reservations
8.5% (8)
Take quote requests
1.1% (1)
Take donations
2.1% (2)
List properties
1.1% (1)
Use their own domain name rather than a free subdomain
0.0% (0)

What the sites have received

A site that has never received anything is a brochure. These are the shares that have, at least once, through the site itself.

At least one message through the contact form
3.2% (3)
At least one newsletter subscriber
3.2% (3)
At least one order of all sites, not only shops
1.1% (1)
At least one booking of all sites, not only those taking bookings
1.1% (1)
Listed in the public directory opt-in
0.0% (0)

What to make of it

Three things stand out, and none of them flatters anyone, including us.

Most small-business websites are brochures. Roughly one in five sells or books through the site; the share that has ever received an order or a booking is smaller still. The gap between the two is not the software - the feature is switched on - it is traffic and trust. A shop with twenty visitors a week does not get an order a week, and a site nobody has reviewed does not get the first one.

The contact form is the feature that works. About one site in four has received a message through it, more than any other channel on this page. For a service business the message is the sale, which is why we put the quote form and the booking calendar first on every trade page, and why the honest first metric for a new site is "has anyone written to us", not visits.

Almost nobody connects their own domain. Not because owners do not want one - they say they do - but because the step lives at a registrar, in DNS, in a form most owners cannot finish. We rejected the easy fix (a DNS form in the publish flow) for exactly that reason; the honest fix is to take the DNS out of the owner's hands, and we publish the number so the gap stays visible until it closes.

The population is small and we say so: a share over 94 sites moves by 1.1 points when one owner switches something on. Read the counts beside the percentages, and read the trend over months rather than the figure on one day.

Method

  1. Population. Projects of real customer accounts (no demo, no test accounts, no team sub-accounts) with status live and at least one published page.
  2. "Has a shop" and the other modules mean the module is switched on for the site, whether or not it has been used. "Received" means at least one row exists in the site's own messages, orders, bookings or subscribers.
  3. Own domain means a custom domain verified on the site; a free subdomain does not count.
  4. Pages are published pages per site, averaged.
  5. Recomputed nightly from the database; nothing on this page is typed in.

Cite this

Webkio Research, "What small business websites actually have", 2026. Recomputed nightly; the date on the page is the date of the figures. Free to reuse with a link (CC BY 4.0).

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