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Nearly Half of All U.S. Small Businesses Don’t Have Websites

I read this the other day and found it surprising – here’s the original article on Entrepreneur. the number of small businesses that don’t have websites is about 46%, and 22% of all small businesses said they never planned to get one.

That resolve will probably come back to bite them. Even if their business seems to have no use whatsoever for a site, that doesn’t mean that potential customers aren’t searching for companies like theirs every day in search engines and social media. A study in late 2014 showed that 80% of Americans do online research before making a purchase.

The use of hardcopy phone books is steadily declining – most of my clients have stopped advertising in them altogether because of the high expense, too.

As more of these site-less business’ competitors get online, the likelihood that they’ll be harmed by not having at least a minimum web presence – a simple site listing services, company information, location, contact info, etc. – will just increase.

The biggest reason given for not having a website was lack of relevancy for their business or industry, followed by cost. Next up were reliance on a social media platform – which can be disastrous if your account gets shut down for any reason – then lack of technical knowledge on how to maintain a site.

Cost is important – but a professional-looking, mobile-friendly website should be looked at as a business investment. As far as technical knowledge, WordPress is a great platform with a fairly shallow learning curve. A simple information site, which may work fine for some of these businesses, is pretty low in terms of needing technical knowledge.

And for maintenance, that’s what our maintenance service WP Minder is for; we take care of all the little details of maintaining sites so business owners don’t have to.