LeadFly, a Watford web studio that builds websites for tradesmen, have published some original research tabout the wesbites of independent UK tradesman businesses.

Of 788 independent tradesman businesses with a website on file, 71% of those sites returned no working page. Among the 29% that did load, 83% were not mobile friendly and 71% were not secure.

Homeowners now find and judge a tradesman online before they ever pick up the phone. So we wanted a hard number for how the independent end of the trade actually looks on the web. We took 788 tradesman businesses that already had a website address listed and scanned each one. The results below are the raw findings, with the sample described plainly so the numbers can be trusted and cited.

The key findings

• 71% of listed tradesman websites were dead or broken. Of 788 businesses that had a website address, 558 returned no working page: 57% were completely unreachable and a further 14% returned an error.
• Only 29% served a working page. Just 230 of the 788 sites actually loaded something a customer could use.
• 83% of the working sites were not mobile friendly. They had no mobile viewport, so they do not resize for a phone, where most trade searches now happen.
• 71% of the working sites were not secure. They had no HTTPS, so browsers flag them as ‘Not secure’ to every visitor.
• Half were built on old or missing web standards. 50% used an outdated or absent doctype, a marker of code written many years ago.
• 46% were a single page. Nearly half of the working sites were one page with no room to rank for services or areas.
• 19% still ran jQuery 1.x, a JavaScript library last current around 2013, and 8% still used Adobe Flash, which no browser has supported since 2020.
• Some were built in Serif WebPlus and Microsoft FrontPage, tools discontinued years ago, with copyright dates on the pages going back as far as 1997.

The 788 sites at a glance

Why this matters for the trade

Independent tradesmen compete on trust, and more of that trust is now formed online than on the doorstep. A dead link, a ‘Not secure’ banner or a site that will not open on a phone quietly sends work to whoever looks more credible, which is often a national directory charging the tradesman for the privilege. The gap this research exposes is also the opportunity: the bar is so low that a fast, secure, mobile-first site puts an independent trade business ahead of most of its local rivals overnight.

Research by LeadFly Websites, 2026.