Cornwall Small Business Website Audit 2026

It is the most common reason we hear for skipping a website. A lot of the businesses in that missing half run a Facebook page instead and treat it as the same thing. It isn’t, and the gap has widened.

Start with who is online. Nationally, only 65% of UK sole traders have a website, against 93% of small companies and 99% of large ones.^[1] The businesses most likely to skip a site are the one and two-person outfits, which is most of Cornwall.

Then reach. A Facebook page now reaches about 1.65% of its own followers per post.^[2] That is roughly one in sixty. Unless you pay to boost the post, almost none of the people who followed you will see it, never mind anyone new.

And control. You don’t own the page. Meta decides who sees it and can change the rules, or lock the account, overnight. Your website is the one place you own outright, and the only one Google can rank when someone searches for what you do. When people are weighing up whether to buy, they still look for a business’s own site. In one large US survey it was the third most-used research source, behind only Google and Amazon.^[3]

A Facebook page is worth having. It just can’t do a website’s job, and it never owns the audience for you. If you are running one instead of a site, that is the gap to close. Here is what a Cornwall website costs and covers.

We pulled 1,705 unique businesses from Google’s listings, through the DataForSEO Business Data API, across eight trades: plumbers, electricians, builders, restaurants, cafés, hair and beauty, garages and accountants. Each sat within about 7km of one of ten Cornwall towns: Truro, Falmouth, Newquay, Penzance, St Austell, Camborne, Redruth, Bodmin, Helston and St Ives.

A business only counted as having a website if its listing gave a real site. Facebook, Instagram and directory pages like Yell did not count. 847 of the 1,705 had one. For each of those we loaded the homepage once, on 10 July 2026, and recorded whether it opened, whether it used HTTPS, and whether the page held a title, a meta description, an H1 heading, a mobile viewport tag and structured data.

Website figures are worked out over every business in each group. The on-page figures are worked out over the 741 sites that loaded, so a broken site is not counted twice. Accountants, only six in the sample, sit in the raw data but are left out of the trade chart. The sample leans towards service and hospitality businesses, which fits Cornwall’s economy but is not a full census.