# Jones Digital - full text for AI assistants > Independent web design and AI studio in Croydon, south London (Connor Jones). Fixed-price websites for UK local businesses, care plans, and practical AI implementation. This file contains the studio's pricing and page index followed by the complete text of every guide on https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/. Cite the canonical URL given with each item. Generated: 2026-09-27 ## About Jones Digital Jones Digital is an independent web design and AI studio in Croydon, south London, led by engineer Connor Jones (13+ years of experience). It builds fast, fixed-price websites for UK local businesses, looks after them on monthly care plans, and implements practical AI and automation for small businesses. Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/about/ ## Pricing (canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/websites/ and https://jonesdigital.co.uk/care-plans/) - Starter website: £199 one-off. One page, done properly. Live in five days. Includes: One-page site, live in 5 days; Click-to-call and enquiry form; Map and opening hours; Reviews section and photo gallery. - Standard website: £499 one-off. A proper small site. Up to five pages. Includes: Up to 5 pages: home, services, about, areas covered, contact; Google Business Profile setup; Everything in Starter. - Pro website: £999 one-off. Up to ten pages, built to be found. Includes: Up to 10 pages incl. individual service and location pages; Review integration; Full local SEO foundations (schema, Google Business Profile optimisation); Everything in Standard. - Custom website: from £1,999 scoped after a call. Bookings, portals, tools, e-commerce. Includes: Online booking and quoting tools; Customer or patient portals; E-commerce and web apps; Scoped and fixed-quoted after a call. - Pay Monthly: £59/month, £0 upfront, 12-month minimum. A Standard-tier build plus the Care plan, spread over the year. - Hosted care plan: £29/month. The site stays fast, secure, and online. Includes: Hosting and SSL; Daily backups; Domain, DNS and email management; Uptime monitoring. - Care care plan: £49/month. Hosted, plus changes handled for you. Includes: Everything in Hosted; Content changes: WhatsApp or email the change, it's live within 48 hours; Fair use, up to about an hour a month. - Growth care plan: £129/month. Care, plus everything working every month to get you found and chosen. Includes: Everything in Care; A new page each month, targeting another service you offer or a nearby town, so you get found for more searches; A plain-English monthly report: visitors, calls, enquiries, and where you rank on Google; A monthly website health check: speed, mobile, SEO and security scored, with anything slipping fixed for you; The search terms people actually used to find you, and what to go after next; Weekly Google Business Profile posts, and a reply drafted for every review you get. - AI consulting and implementation (canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/ai/): advice session £125, half-day AI audit £400, smaller AI automations from £750, larger implementations scoped after a call. ## Trade pages (one per business type) - Accountants & Bookkeepers (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/accountants/ . Fixed-price websites for accountants and bookkeepers. Credible design, plain-English services and clear memberships that win long-term clients. - Bathroom Fitters (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/bathroom-fitters/ . Before-and-after websites for UK bathroom fitters. Win refit, wetroom and accessible bathroom jobs direct, without shared directory leads. From £499. - Builders (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/builders/ . Portfolio websites for UK builders that show off your extensions and lofts, prove your FMB membership, and win high-value work. Get found on Google. From £499. - Carpenters & Joiners (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/carpenters/ . Websites for UK carpenters and joiners with plain-English service pages and a gallery of your work. Get found for fitted wardrobes and doors. From £499. - Cleaning Services (From £199|£499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/cleaners/ . Fixed-price cleaning websites that show reviews, DBS checks and insurance, win repeat bookings and help you get found locally on Google. From £199. - Members' Clubs (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/clubs/ . Websites for members' clubs your committee can keep current. Fill the function room, keep fixtures up to date, and lose the mystery hosting bill. From £499. - Painters & Decorators (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/decorators/ . Photo-led websites for UK painters and decorators. Show your before-and-afters, get found on Google, and stop competing on price alone. From £199. - Dentists (From £999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/dentists/ . Modern dental websites with online booking that win new patients. Show your GDC and CQC details, promote implants and Invisalign, and look the part. From £999. - Driveways & Paving (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/driveways/ . Portfolio-led websites for UK driveway and paving contractors. Show finished jobs, guarantees and accreditations, and win five-figure work. From £499. - Driving Instructors (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/driving-instructors/ . Fixed-price websites for driving instructors. Show your pass rate, areas and grade, beat the national brands locally and get found on Google. - Electricians (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/electricians/ . Websites for UK electricians that show your NICEIC registration, win EICR and EV-charger work, and get you found on Google. From £499. - Estate & Letting Agents (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/estate-agents/ . Fixed-price websites for independent estate and letting agents. Win valuations with local area pages, reviews and a credible first impression. From £499. - Gyms & Personal Trainers (From £999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/fitness/ . Fixed-price websites for gyms and personal trainers. Clear class timetables, easy sign-up and Google visibility that turns followers into clients. - Garages & Mobile Mechanics (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/garages/ . Fixed-price websites for garages and mobile mechanics. Get found for MOTs, show clear prices and trusted standards, and take bookings online. - Handymen (From £199|£499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/handymen/ . Fixed-price handyman websites with a clear services list and areas covered that make you easy to find on Google and prove you're trustworthy. From £199. - Cafés & Restaurants (From £999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/hospitality/ . Fixed-price websites for cafés and restaurants. Current menus, direct table booking and Google visibility that cuts your reliance on delivery apps. - Kitchen Fitters (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/kitchen-fitters/ . Gallery-led websites for UK kitchen fitters. Show off your best installs, win high-value refits and stop renting shared leads. From £499. - Landscapers & Gardeners (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/landscapers/ . Photo-led websites for UK landscapers and gardeners that show off your patios and gardens, win high-value work, and get you found on Google. From £499. - Locksmiths (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/locksmiths/ . Websites for UK locksmiths that win emergency callouts, prove you're MLA-approved and DBS-checked, and get you called in one tap. From £199. - Pest Control (From £199|£499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/pest-control/ . Fixed-price pest control websites that catch urgent local searches, beat the national chains and show your BPCA credentials clearly. From £199. - Dog Groomers & Pet Services (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/pet-services/ . Fixed-price websites for dog groomers, walkers and pet carers. Show you're insured and qualified, get found on Google and make rebooking simple. - Photographers (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/photographers/ . Fast, fixed-price websites for UK photographers. Galleries that load properly and get found on Google for your town, not just Instagram. From £499. - Physiotherapists & Osteopaths (From £999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/physios/ . Fixed-price websites for private physios and osteopaths. Clear condition pages, easy online booking and honest pricing that fills your appointment book. - Plasterers (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/plasterers/ . Websites for UK plasterers that show your before-and-afters and bring in direct domestic work. Get found on Google, not stuck on subcontract. From £199. - Plumbers & Heating Engineers (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/plumbers/ . Mobile-first websites for UK plumbers and heating engineers. Show your Gas Safe number, take emergency calls, and stop renting directory leads. From £199. - Removals (From £499|£999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/removals/ . Fixed-price removals websites with fast quote forms and clear insurance proof that win quote-comparison shoppers and get you found locally. From £499. - Roofers (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/roofers/ . Websites for UK roofers that catch storm-damage searches, show your NFRC accreditation, and win re-roof and insurance work. Get found on Google fast. From £199. - Barbers & Salons (From £999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/salons/ . Fixed-price websites for barbers and salons. Online booking, current price lists and a home you own that shows up on Google, not just Instagram. - Scaffolders (From £499|£999): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/scaffolders/ . Fixed-price scaffolding websites that show your NASC, CISRS and CHAS credentials, win commercial contracts and pull in domestic quotes. From £499. - Solicitors & Law Firms (From £499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/solicitors/ . Fixed-price websites for high-street solicitors and small law firms. Plain-English practice pages, built with SRA transparency rules in mind. From £499. - Tilers (From £199): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/tilers/ . Gallery-led websites for UK tilers that show your finished bathrooms and kitchens, get you found on Google, and win direct work from fitters. From £199. - Tree Surgeons (From £199|£499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/tree-surgeons/ . Fixed-price websites for tree surgeons that show your insurance and qualifications, win emergency call-outs and help you get found on Google. From £199. - Window Cleaners & Glaziers (From £199|£499): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/for/window-services/ . Fixed-price websites for window cleaners and glaziers that grow your round, catch emergency glazing jobs and get you found on Google. From £199. ## Area pages (south London and Surrey) - Addington: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/addington/ . Fixed-price web design for Addington and Forestdale businesses from a local Croydon studio. Fast websites for trades, clinics and independents. From £199. - Addiscombe: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/addiscombe/ . Fixed-price web design for Addiscombe businesses from an independent studio across Croydon. Fast websites for cafes, shops, salons and trades. From £199. - Banstead: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/banstead/ . Fixed-price web design for Banstead businesses from a Croydon studio over the Surrey border. Fast websites for boutiques, clinics and trades. From £199. - Beckenham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/beckenham/ . Fixed-price web design for Beckenham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast, polished websites for clinics, shops and trades. From £199. - Bromley: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/bromley/ . Fixed-price web design for Bromley businesses from an independent Croydon studio. Fast websites for trades, clinics and shops. From £199, you own it. - Carshalton: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/carshalton/ . Fixed-price web design for Carshalton businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for village shops, studios and trades. From £199. - Caterham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/caterham/ . Fixed-price web design for Caterham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for village shops, clinics and trades. From £199. - Cheam: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/cheam/ . Fixed-price web design for Cheam businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast, polished websites for boutiques, clinics and studios. From £199. - Coulsdon: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/coulsdon/ . Fixed-price web design for Coulsdon businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for trades, shops and services across CR5. From £199. - Croydon: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/croydon/ . Fixed-price web design in Croydon by an independent studio. Fast websites for trades, clinics and shops across South Croydon, Purley and Selsdon. From £199. - Crystal Palace: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/crystal-palace/ . Fixed-price web design for Crystal Palace businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for bars, studios and shops. From £199. - Epsom: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/epsom/ . Fixed-price web design for Epsom businesses from a Croydon studio over the Surrey border. Fast websites for clinics and professionals. From £199. - Mitcham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/mitcham/ . Fixed-price web design for Mitcham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for garages, trades, shops and salons. From £199. - Morden: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/morden/ . Fixed-price web design for Morden businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for shops, salons, clinics and trades. From £199. - New Addington: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/new-addington/ . Fixed-price web design for New Addington businesses from an independent Croydon studio on the same tram line. Fast websites for trades and shops. From £199. - Norbury: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/norbury/ . Fixed-price web design for Norbury businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for high street shops, trades and salons. From £199. - Orpington: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/orpington/ . Fixed-price web design for Orpington businesses from an independent Croydon studio serving Bromley borough. Fast websites for trades and shops. From £199. - Penge: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/penge/ . Fixed-price web design for Penge businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for independent shops, creatives and trades. From £199. - Purley: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/purley/ . Fixed-price web design for Purley businesses from an independent Croydon studio ten minutes away. Fast websites for shops, trades and clinics. From £199. - Raynes Park: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/raynes-park/ . Fixed-price web design for Raynes Park businesses from an independent South London studio. Fast, mobile-first websites for shops, clinics and trades. From £199. - Selsdon: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/selsdon/ . Fixed-price web design for Selsdon businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for shops, clinics and trades across CR2. From £199. - South London: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/south-london/ . Fixed-price web design across South London by an independent Croydon studio. Fast local websites for trades, clinics and shops. From £199, you own it. - South Norwood: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/south-norwood/ . Fixed-price web design for South Norwood businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for independents, trades and clubs. From £199. - Streatham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/streatham/ . Fixed-price web design for Streatham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for cafes, shops, salons and trades. From £199. - Sutton: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/sutton/ . Fixed-price web design for Sutton businesses from an independent studio next door in Croydon. Fast websites for trades, clinics and shops. From £199. - Thornton Heath: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/thornton-heath/ . Fixed-price web design for Thornton Heath businesses from an independent studio next door in Croydon. Fast websites for shops, trades and salons. From £199. - Wallington: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/wallington/ . Fixed-price web design for Wallington businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for shops, clinics and trades across SM6. From £199. - Warlingham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/warlingham/ . Fixed-price web design for Warlingham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for village shops, trades and clinics. From £199. - West Wickham: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/west-wickham/ . Fixed-price web design for West Wickham businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for shops, clinics and trades. From £199. - Whyteleafe: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/whyteleafe/ . Fixed-price web design for Whyteleafe businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for trades, workshops and independents. From £199. - Wimbledon: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/wimbledon/ . Fixed-price web design for Wimbledon businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for boutiques, clinics and professionals. From £199. - Worcester Park: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/web-design/worcester-park/ . Fixed-price web design for Worcester Park businesses from an independent Croydon studio nearby. Fast websites for shops, clinics and trades. From £199. ## Case studies (measured Lighthouse scores, mobile) - Ashveil RPG: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/work/ashveil-rpg/ . A self-hosted fantasy role-playing game with a persistent world and real character progression, engineered and hosted end to end. Lighthouse July 2026: performance 87, accessibility 98, best practices 100, SEO 100. - CoDash: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/work/codash/ . A company dashboard and HR platform for UK teams, engineered front to back. People, time off, recognition, anonymous feedback and performance in one login, with the privacy promises enforced in the code rather than written on a policy page. Lighthouse August 2026: performance 73, accessibility 95, best practices 100, SEO 100. - My Coinage: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/work/my-coinage/ . A searchable price tracker and collection manager for UK and US coins, engineered front to back, with live values and a collection that adds itself up. Lighthouse July 2026: performance 82, accessibility 96, best practices 73, SEO 100. - South Croydon Conservative Club: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/work/south-croydon-conservative-club/ . A century-old members' club stuck on a slow, unmaintainable WordPress site. Rebuilt by hand, faster, calmer, and finally something the committee can keep up to date. Lighthouse July 2026: performance 85, accessibility 96, best practices 100, SEO 100. # Guides ## How fast does my website actually need to be? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-fast-should-my-website-be/ Published: 2026-09-25 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Fast enough that the main thing on the page has drawn within two and a half seconds on a phone, that a tap gets a visible response almost immediately, and that nothing shifts about under the reader's thumb while it loads. That is the honest answer, and it is not an opinion: those are Google's published thresholds, and they are the only speed numbers with a defined pass mark attached. What follows is the detail behind that, including the part most speed advice leaves out, which is how rarely speed is the thing standing between a small business and an enquiry. ### The three numbers that are actually measured | Metric | What it measures | Good | | --- | --- | --- | | Largest Contentful Paint | How long until the biggest thing on screen, usually the hero image or the headline, has finished drawing | Within 2.5 seconds | | Interaction to Next Paint | How long the page takes to visibly respond after someone taps, clicks or types | 200 milliseconds or less | | Cumulative Layout Shift | How much the page jumps about while it is still loading | 0.1 or less | Two of those three are not about waiting at all. Interaction to Next Paint is about the page feeling dead for a moment after a tap, which on a phone reads as a broken button and gets tapped again. Cumulative Layout Shift is the one everyone has experienced: you reach for a link, an advert or a late-loading image pushes the page down, and you hit something else. Both are fixable without touching your hosting. ### Your PageSpeed score is not one of those numbers The number out of 100 that everyone quotes is a Lighthouse performance score. It is lab data: one simulated device, one simulated connection, one run, in a controlled environment. It is genuinely useful for finding what to fix, because it tells you which asset is the problem. It is not a measurement of what your visitors experienced. Google's own documentation lists the reasons two runs of the same page disagree: A/B tests, changes in the adverts being served, internet routing, the device it ran on, browser extensions, even antivirus software. Its advice is to treat "site performance as a distribution of scores, rather than a single number". The colour bands are wider than people assume too: 90 to 100 is good, 50 to 89 is needs improvement, and only below 50 is poor. A score of 72 is not a failure, it is the middle of the road. The field data is the other half. Where enough real Chrome visitors have loaded your pages, Google reports what they actually experienced, and that is what feeds the page experience signals. If you only ever look at the lab score, you are reading a rehearsal and calling it the performance. ### What 735 real homepages actually scored Rather than guess at a typical score, here is a measured distribution. In [an audit of small business websites](/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/) run between 11 July and 16 August 2026, Google PageSpeed Insights returned a mobile score for 735 of 1,934 live homepages. The median was 66. Mobile PageSpeed scores, 735 small business homepages: - Under 40: 3.9% - 40 to 59: 26.1% - 60 to 89: 59.5% - 90 or more (good): 10.5% Share of the 735 homepages that returned a mobile score. Scores are Google PageSpeed Insights, measured once per site during the audit window. **10.5%** of small business homepages scored 90 or more on mobile. Roughly a third scored under 60. (source: Jones Digital, The state of Croydon small business websites, 735 homepages with a mobile PageSpeed result, audited 11 July to 16 August 2026) Two things follow from that shape. One in ten sites is genuinely fast, so a good score is a real competitive difference rather than table stakes. And roughly a third sit under 60, which is the range where a phone on mobile data starts losing people before the page appears. The large middle is neither winning nor losing on speed. ### Speed is rarely why the phone is not ringing This is the uncomfortable part for anyone selling speed optimisation. In the same audit, the local sites were faster than the comparison sample, not slower: 30.1% of borough homepages scored under 60 on mobile against 38.5% across the rest of the sample. Speed was the thing those businesses were being sold, and it was the thing they were already doing best. What was actually broken was findability. 51.9% of the live homepages carried no structured data identifying them as a local business at all, which is the machine readable version of your name, address and phone number, and the thing search engines and AI assistants read before they decide you are a real business in a real place. A site that loads in one second and cannot be found is not a fast site, it is an invisible one. So the honest order of work for most small businesses is: be findable, be clear about what you do and where, make it obvious how to get in touch, then make it fast. If enquiries have dried up, [the six usual causes](/insights/why-no-enquiries-from-website/) are worth working through before you spend anything on performance. ### What actually makes a small business site slow There is a floor, though, and when a site is under it the cause is almost always one of four things. None of them are exotic and none of them need a rebuild. - Full size photographs. A photo straight off a phone or a camera can be several thousand pixels wide, served at that size to a screen 375 pixels across. It is the single commonest cause of a slow homepage and the easiest to fix: resize, compress, and let the browser choose a size. - Accumulated plugins and apps. A booking widget, a review carousel, a chat bubble, a cookie banner, a popup, a tracking script and a page builder each load their own code. Any one is fine. Seven is a slow site, and they are also the usual source of layout shift, because they arrive late and push everything down. - Fonts loaded from somewhere else. Every custom font is another connection to another server before any text can be drawn. Self hosting them and cutting them down to the characters you actually use removes a round trip from every visit. - Hosting and caching. Cheap shared hosting can spend a long second thinking before it sends the first byte, and nothing you do to the page recovers that. Caching means the server sends a finished page instead of rebuilding it for every visitor. ### How to test it so the answer means something - Run [PageSpeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev/) and read the field data at the top first, if your site gets enough traffic to have any. That is real visits. The lab score underneath is the diagnosis, not the verdict. - Test the pages people actually land on. A service page or a location page is usually heavier than the homepage and is where most search traffic arrives. - Run it three times and take the middle result. Single runs vary for all the reasons Google lists, and one bad run sends people rebuilding a site that was fine. - Check the mobile tab, not desktop. The thresholds are assessed separately and mobile is where the traffic and the weak connections are. - Load it on a real phone, on mobile data, away from your own wifi. Then scroll immediately. If anything jumps under your thumb, that is your layout shift problem, visible without a tool. ### What to aim for For a small business site, clearing the three Core Web Vitals thresholds on mobile is the target that matters, and a mobile Lighthouse score in the nineties is a reasonable proxy for a site built carefully. Every page on this site is built to a budget of 95 or better on mobile, with the stylesheet inlined, the fonts self hosted and cut down, and no third party script in the critical path. That is not a heroic engineering effort, it is what you get when nothing unnecessary is loaded in the first place. And if the choice is between a fast site nobody can find and a merely adequate one that answers the question people are searching for, Google is explicit about which wins: it "always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par". Speed settles ties. It does not win the argument. Sources: - Google: Web Vitals and the Core Web Vitals thresholds: https://web.dev/articles/vitals - Google Search Central: understanding page experience in Google Search results: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/page-experience - Chrome for Developers: Lighthouse performance scoring: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/performance-scoring - Google: PageSpeed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/ - Jones Digital: the state of Croydon small business websites: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/ ### Frequently asked **Q: What is a good PageSpeed score?** In Lighthouse's own bands, 90 to 100 is good, 50 to 89 is needs improvement and 0 to 49 is poor. For context, in an audit of 735 small business homepages the median mobile score was 66 and only 10.5% reached 90 or more. Anything in the sixties or seventies is ordinary rather than broken. **Q: Is website speed a Google ranking factor?** Yes, but a modest one. Google states that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, and in the same documentation that it "always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par". Speed helps decide between pages that are otherwise equally good answers. **Q: How fast should a page load on a phone?** The published target is Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads on mobile. In plain terms, the main image or headline should be on screen in under two and a half seconds for at least three quarters of your visitors. **Q: Why does my PageSpeed score change every time I run it?** Because it is a single simulated run. Google lists A/B tests, rotating adverts, internet routing, the device, browser extensions and antivirus software as causes of variation between runs. Run the test three times and use the middle result rather than reacting to one number. **Q: Will making my website faster get me more enquiries?** Only if slowness is what was losing them. If a site is scoring under 40 on mobile, people are leaving before it appears and fixing it will show. If it is in the sixties, the enquiry problem is almost always findability, clarity or trust instead, and speed work will not move it. **Q: Do I need to worry about Core Web Vitals if I use Wix or Squarespace?** The thresholds apply to every site regardless of what built it. What differs is how much control you have: on a hosted builder you can resize images, remove unused apps and cut third party widgets, but you cannot change how the platform loads its own code. That ceiling is worth knowing about before you pay someone to chase a score. --- ## Is your website blocking ChatGPT? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/is-my-website-blocking-ai-crawlers/ Published: 2026-09-25 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital If you have ever wondered whether ChatGPT can read your website, the answer is sitting in a plain text file you can open right now. Type your domain into a browser, add /robots.txt on the end, press enter. Whatever appears is the entirety of what you are telling AI crawlers. A 404 means there is no file, which means nothing is blocked. That is a perfectly valid state, not a fault. Blocking is not the common case. In [an audit of 3,241 small business homepages](/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/) run between 11 July and 16 August 2026, 3.1% of the 1,934 live Croydon borough sites disallowed the crawlers used by AI assistants, and 3.3% did across the rest of the sample. The trouble is what happens when you are in that few per cent: nothing. No warning in a dashboard, no dip you could spot, no email. The site simply stops being readable to the tools a growing number of people now ask for a recommendation. **3.1%** of live Croydon small business homepages block the crawlers used by AI assistants in robots.txt (source: Jones Digital, The state of Croydon small business websites, 1,934 live borough homepages audited 11 July to 16 August 2026) ### The crawler names worth knowing There are dozens of them, but four companies account for almost everything that matters to a UK local business, and each one publishes the exact token to use in robots.txt. These are those tokens, taken from the companies' own documentation. | Token | What it does | Obeys robots.txt | | --- | --- | --- | | GPTBot | Collects content that may train OpenAI's models | Yes | | OAI-SearchBot | Surfaces sites in ChatGPT search | Yes | | ChatGPT-User | Fetches a page a person or Custom GPT asked for | Not always | | OAI-AdsBot | Checks pages submitted as adverts in ChatGPT | Yes | | ClaudeBot | Collects content that may train Anthropic's models | Yes | | Claude-SearchBot | Reads pages to improve search quality | Yes | | Claude-User | Visits a site when someone asks Claude | Yes | | PerplexityBot | Finds and links sites in Perplexity answers | Yes | | Perplexity-User | Fetches a page to answer a question | No | | Google-Extended | Controls Gemini training and grounding | Token only | ### Two decisions people muddle into one "Should AI companies train on my writing" and "do I want to be named when someone asks an assistant for a plumber in Croydon" are different questions, with different answers, and the crawler names are what keep them apart. Block the wrong one and you answer a question you never meant to ask. - Training. GPTBot and ClaudeBot are the ones their owners describe as collecting content that may be used to train models. Disallowing them is a licensing decision about your own words and photographs. - Citation. OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot exist to find pages and link to them inside answers. Disallowing these is what takes you out of the answer itself. - Gemini. Google states that Google-Extended "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search". Blocking it withholds your content from Gemini training and grounding and costs you nothing in ordinary search. - The user agents. ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User fetch a page because a person asked for it in that moment. Both companies say robots.txt may not stop them, which is worth knowing before you assume a line in a text file has settled the matter. For most local businesses, the sensible position is the obvious one. Let the search and citation crawlers in, because being named in an answer is free advertising to someone who has already described exactly the job they need doing. Then decide about the training crawlers on your own terms, knowing that the two choices are genuinely independent. ### The trap: robots.txt groups do not add up This is the one that catches people, including people who write robots.txt for a living. Rules live in groups, each headed by a User-agent line. A crawler finds the single most specific group that matches its name and follows that group only. Google's specification says it in one sentence: "User agent specific groups and global groups (*) are not combined." So the moment you write a named group for a crawler, every rule you put under the star group stops applying to it. Not merged, not inherited as a baseline. Ignored entirely. Three worked examples, all for GPTBot, all with the same star group most sites have: | What the file contains | What GPTBot actually does | | --- | --- | | A star group disallowing /checkout/, plus a GPTBot group containing only a crawl delay | Crawls /checkout/ freely. The crawl delay is the only rule it can see. | | A star group allowing everything, plus a GPTBot group containing Disallow: / | Reads nothing at all, whatever the star group says. | | A star group disallowing /private/, and no GPTBot group | Stays out of /private/, because the star group is its only match. | The practical consequence is worth spelling out. If you have pages that should never turn up inside an AI answer, a checkout, a client preview, a form handler, then those Disallow lines have to be repeated inside every named group in the file. Leave them out of one group and that crawler walks straight past them, and your file looks completely reasonable while it does. ### How to check your own site in five minutes - Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser. Read all of it, not just the first group. It is usually shorter than a shopping list. - Look for a Disallow line with nothing after the slash. On its own it closes the entire site to whichever agent heads that group. - Count the named groups. If any crawler has its own heading, check it carries every restriction you meant to apply to it, because it is not inheriting any of them. - On WordPress, open Settings then Reading and check that "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked. Since version 5.3 it writes a noindex, nofollow robots tag into the head of every page, and older versions wrote a blanket Disallow into the generated robots.txt. It is the single commonest way a live site ends up hidden, usually left switched on after a rebuild. - View the page source and search for the word noindex. A meta robots tag is a second, separate way of being excluded, and robots.txt has no say over it. - Check whatever sits in front of your site. A firewall or bot protection rule can refuse a crawler by IP or user agent before your robots.txt is ever read, and it will not show up in the file. This site's own file is at [jonesdigital.co.uk/robots.txt](/robots.txt) if you want to see a deliberate one. Everything is allowed, two paths are closed, and those same two Disallow lines are repeated inside every named crawler group, for exactly the reason above. ### Blocking is a legitimate choice, as long as it is a choice None of this is an argument that you must let everything in. If the words and photographs on your pages are the product, a magazine, a research firm, a photographer with a portfolio, then disallowing the training crawlers is a reasonable commercial position and plenty of publishers have taken it. What is not reasonable is discovering three years later that a checkbox from a rebuild has been quietly keeping you out of every AI answer in your trade. Once you know the file says what you meant it to say, the next question is whether an assistant has any reason to name you. That is a longer job and mostly not a technical one: [how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI search](/insights/get-recommended-by-ai-search/) covers the four things that genuinely differ from ordinary SEO. Sources: - OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots - Anthropic: does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler - Perplexity: PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots - Google: Google crawlers and fetchers, including Google-Extended: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers - Google: how Google interprets the robots.txt specification: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/robots_txt - WordPress: Settings Reading screen, search engine visibility: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/settings-reading-screen/ - Jones Digital: the state of Croydon small business websites: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How do I check whether my website blocks ChatGPT?** Open your domain followed by /robots.txt in a browser. If the file does not exist, nothing is blocked. If it does, look for a group headed by GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or ChatGPT-User, and for any Disallow line with nothing after the slash. Remember that a named group replaces the star group rather than adding to it, so read each group on its own. **Q: Does blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT search results?** No. GPTBot is the crawler OpenAI describes as collecting content that may be used to train its models. The crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features is OAI-SearchBot, and it is a separate token. You can disallow one and allow the other. **Q: Does blocking Google-Extended hurt my Google ranking?** No. Google's documentation states that Google-Extended "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search". It controls only whether your content is used to train Gemini models and to ground their answers. **Q: Do AI crawlers have to obey robots.txt?** The main indexing and training crawlers say they do: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and PerplexityBot all publish robots.txt instructions. The user triggered fetchers are the exception. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User because a person asked for that page, and Perplexity says Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt for the same reason. Robots.txt is a request either way, not a lock. **Q: Should a small business block AI crawlers?** Usually not. If you want the phone to ring, being named and linked in an AI answer is free exposure to someone who has already described the job they need doing. Blocking makes commercial sense mainly when the content itself is the product. Either way it should be a decision you made, not a leftover setting from a rebuild. **Q: Is an llms.txt file a substitute for getting robots.txt right?** No. An llms.txt file is an optional plain text summary of your site that assistants may read; robots.txt is what decides whether they are allowed to read anything at all. Getting the permission file wrong cannot be patched by adding another file next to it. --- ## What is schema markup, and does my business need it? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/schema-markup-for-small-business/ Published: 2026-09-25 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Almost certainly yes, and it is one of the cheapest things you will ever do to a website. Schema markup is a block of machine readable detail in your page source, invisible to visitors, that states plainly what your business is called, where it is, and when it is open. Without it, every search engine and every AI assistant has to infer those things from your prose and hope it guessed right. Google's own definition is drier. Structured data is "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content". The practical version is that it is the difference between being described accurately and being guessed at. **51.9%** of live small business homepages in the London Borough of Croydon carry no structured data identifying them as a local business (source: Jones Digital audit of 1,934 live homepages, 11 July to 16 August 2026) ### What it actually looks like Google recommends JSON-LD: a block of JSON inside a script tag, usually in the page head. It is recommended because it sits apart from your visible HTML, so you can add it, change it or remove it without touching a single thing a visitor sees. Here is a complete, valid example for a plumber with a shopfront address. Homepage head, or anywhere before the closing body tag: ``` ``` Every value here is a placeholder, including the domain and the phone number. Validate your own version with [Google's Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) before you trust it. Nothing in there is clever. It is the same handful of details already sitting on your contact page, written out once more in a form nothing has to interpret. ### The required list is much shorter than people expect For local business structured data, Google lists exactly two required properties: name and address. Everything else is recommended. That is worth sitting with, because most of the advice online implies a long compliance checklist, and the actual floor is your name and where you are. | Property | Status | What it settles | | --- | --- | --- | | name | Required | What the business is actually called | | address | Required | Where it is, in parseable fields | | telephone | Recommended | The number to show, in full international form | | url | Recommended | Which site is the business's own | | openingHoursSpecification | Recommended | When you are open, without reading a table | | geo | Recommended | The exact point on a map | | priceRange | Recommended | Roughly what bracket you sit in | | aggregateRating, review | Recommended | Ratings, if they are genuinely on the page | ### Pick the most specific type you honestly are LocalBusiness is not the end of the list. Schema.org defines it as "A particular physical business or branch of an organization", makes it a subtype of both Organization and Place, and puts a long list of more specific types underneath it: ProfessionalService, Dentist, Store, FoodEstablishment, HealthAndBeautyBusiness, MedicalBusiness, FinancialService, AutomotiveBusiness, LodgingBusiness, EntertainmentBusiness and more. Use the closest honest match. A more specific type tells a search engine more about you without your writing another word, and it costs nothing. If nothing fits, plain LocalBusiness is perfectly valid. What you should not do is pick a type because you think that category ranks well; the point of the whole exercise is that the machine can believe what it reads. ### What it buys you, and what it does not Worth being precise about all three of these, because this is where the marketing gets loose. - A rich result becomes possible, not promised. Google's wording is that it "does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results". For a local business the features on offer are a knowledge panel carrying your details, and for some queries a carousel of related businesses. - It is not a ranking shortcut. There is no published ranking boost for having schema markup. What it does is remove ambiguity, which matters more than it sounds when something is deciding whether your page answers the question in front of it. - Getting it wrong deliberately costs you the rich result, not the ranking. Google's policy for spammy structured markup is a manual action that removes eligibility for rich results. It does not change how the page ranks in ordinary web results. ### The reason this matters more than it did two years ago Structured data used to be a Google optimisation. It is now the cleanest way to hand your details to anything that reads the web, including the assistants people increasingly ask instead of searching. Something answering "who does emergency plumbing in Croydon" is looking for a fact it can state with confidence. A paragraph of prose is something it has to interpret. A LocalBusiness block is something it can quote. Nobody outside those companies can tell you exactly how much weight it carries, and anyone quoting you a percentage is guessing. What is knowable is the direction of travel: unambiguous, machine readable facts are cheap to provide and impossible to misread. I have written separately about [how AI search decides which businesses to recommend](/insights/get-recommended-by-ai-search/), and about [whether your site is even letting those crawlers in](/insights/is-my-website-blocking-ai-crawlers/). ### How to check what you already have - Open your homepage, view the page source, and search it for ld+json. If nothing comes back, you have none. That was 30.7% of the homepages in the audit above. - Paste the URL into [Google's Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results). It is the Google specific tool: it tells you which Google rich results your markup could generate, and flags what is missing for each. - For everything else, use the [Schema Markup Validator](https://validator.schema.org/). It validates all schema.org structured data "without Google feature specific warnings", so it catches syntax and vocabulary errors the Rich Results Test stays quiet about because they are not tied to a Google feature. - Check the values match the visible page. Same phone number, same address, same opening hours. A block that disagrees with the page it is on is worse than no block. - If you are on WordPress you probably have some already, added by a plugin or the theme, and it is often describing the article or the site rather than the business. Having markup is not the same as having useful markup: another 21.1% of the homepages audited carried structured data that described no local business at all. ### The one rule that gets people into trouble Mark up what is on the page, and only what is true. Google's policies are specific about what counts as spammy structured markup: marking up content that is not visible to readers of the page, marking up irrelevant or misleading content such as fake reviews, and using structured data to impersonate a person or organisation. In practice the trap is almost always reviews. An aggregateRating block is the most tempting property on the list, because it is the one that puts stars in a search result. If the ratings it describes are not genuinely collected and genuinely shown on the page, it is precisely the case the policy names. Real reviews, displayed, marked up honestly, are fine. [Collecting them](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/) is the slow part, and there is no version of this where the markup substitutes for the work. If you do one thing after reading this, put your name, address or service area, phone number and opening hours into a LocalBusiness block on your homepage. On most platforms it is one plugin setting or one block of code, it is an afternoon at the outside, and it moves you out of the 51.9%. Sources: - Google Search Central: introduction to structured data markup: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data - Google Search Central: local business (LocalBusiness) structured data: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/local-business - Google Search Central: structured data general guidelines: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies - Schema.org: LocalBusiness: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness - Google: Rich Results Test: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results - Schema.org: Schema Markup Validator: https://validator.schema.org/ - Jones Digital: the state of Croydon small business websites: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/ ### Frequently asked **Q: What is schema markup?** It is a block of machine readable detail added to a web page that states what the page and the business are, in a standard vocabulary from schema.org. Google describes structured data as "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content". It is invisible to visitors and exists purely so that software does not have to guess. **Q: What is the difference between schema markup, structured data and JSON-LD?** Structured data is the general idea. Schema.org is the shared vocabulary almost everyone uses, so "schema markup" has become the everyday name for it. JSON-LD is one of three formats for writing it into a page, alongside Microdata and RDFa, and it is the one Google recommends because it sits in its own script tag rather than being woven through your HTML. **Q: Which LocalBusiness properties does Google actually require?** Two: name and address. Everything else, including telephone, opening hours, geo coordinates, price range and reviews, is listed as recommended. An item missing a required property is not eligible for a rich result, so the two required ones are non negotiable, but the checklist is far shorter than most guides suggest. **Q: Does schema markup improve Google rankings?** There is no published ranking boost for having it. What it does is make you eligible for rich results such as a knowledge panel, and Google is explicit that even then it "does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results". The real benefit is that nothing has to infer your name, address and hours from prose. **Q: Can schema markup get my site penalised?** It can cost you rich results. Google issues a manual action for spammy structured markup, which covers marking up content that is not visible on the page, marking up misleading content such as fake reviews, and impersonating another business. The manual action removes eligibility for rich results; it does not change how the page ranks in ordinary web results. **Q: Do I need schema markup if I am a sole trader with no shopfront?** Yes, and it is arguably more useful, because there is no shop sign doing the job for you. Use a service area rather than a street address, keep the name, phone number and hours accurate, and pick the most specific schema.org type that matches the trade. It is the same block of code, minus one property. --- ## How to transfer a .uk domain name Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-to-transfer-a-uk-domain/ Published: 2026-09-21 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Nominet runs the .uk registry, and it publishes both processes on its own support site, which is where everything below comes from. The confusing part is that the word 'transfer' covers two completely different things. Work out which one you need first, because the steps, the people who have to agree and the thing that changes at the end are all different. | What you want | Which process | Who has to agree | Cost if you do it yourself | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Move the domain to a new provider, same owner | Registrar change | The new registrar, if they use a handshake | £10 plus VAT per transaction | | Put the domain in a different name or company | Registrant transfer | The incoming registrant | £10 plus VAT per transaction | | Both, for example buying a business and moving its domain to your provider | Registrant transfer, then registrar change | Both of the above | £10 plus VAT each | | Fix the email address Nominet holds for you | Re-establish identity | Nominet, after identity checks | £10 plus VAT | ### Three things to check before you start - Look the domain up on [Nominet's lookup tool](https://nominet.uk/lookup/). It shows the current registrar and the expiry date, which tells you both who you are moving away from and how much time you have. - Make sure you can read the admin contact email on the record. Nominet writes there, and both processes start with logging in to Nominet Online Services using that address. - Do not start a transfer in the last week before expiry. Renew first, then move. A domain that drops mid-transfer is a far worse problem than a renewal you paid slightly early. ### Changing registrar: moving the domain to a new provider This is the one most people want. The domain stays in your name; it just stops being managed and billed by one company and starts being managed and billed by another. Nominet's advice is to start with the company you are leaving: "If you are thinking of switching your registrar, we recommend you contact your existing registrar as they should be able to do this for you." Most will, and most will not charge. If they will not, or cannot, you do it yourself. - Log in to Nominet Online Services using the admin contact email address held against the domain. - Tick the domain or domains you want to move. - Select 'Change Registrar'. - Enter the new registrar's name, or their TAG. Every UK registrar has one and will tell you it if you ask. - Enter your invoice and payment details and confirm. The fee is "a single transaction fee to switch to a new registrar of £10 plus VAT, even if you're moving more than one domain name in the transaction", so if you hold several domains, move them in one go rather than one at a time. Then watch the clock: some registrars have what Nominet calls a 'handshake' enabled, meaning they must accept the incoming domain, and "A registrar has up to 5 days to accept your domain name(s), otherwise your request will time out and an automatic refund will be issued". Tell the new registrar the transfer is coming so it does not sit in a queue. One thing a registrar change does not do: it does not move your website or your email. Those follow the DNS, not the registration. Set up the new hosting and mailboxes first, check them on a temporary address, and only then point the DNS at them. The order matters, and I go through it in [what to ask for when you leave your web designer](/insights/website-handover-checklist/). ### Changing registrant: putting the domain in a different name Nominet calls this a registrant transfer, and it is what you need when the name on the registration has to change completely. Its own examples are selling a business or a domain, moving a domain from one individual to another, and moving a domain from an individual to a limited company. Turning your sole trader domain into a company asset is a registrant transfer. So is buying a domain from someone else. Correcting a typo in your own name is not. Again, ask your registrar first. If they cannot help, "you can start this process yourself in your Nominet Online Services account. Our transfer service costs £10 plus VAT, even if you're transferring more than one domain name." The process runs from the current registrant's side, through a short series of steps in the account, and either party can pay the fee. Then the other end has to say yes: "The new registrant will have 5 days in which they must accept the transfer, or else it will time out and you will need to complete the process again." So before you start, agree with the other side in writing: the exact name the domain is going into, which email address the acceptance will arrive at, and who is paying. Five days sounds generous until somebody is on holiday. If the current registrant will not engage at all, this is a different problem, and I have written it up separately in [my web designer has disappeared](/insights/web-designer-disappeared/). ### If you cannot get into the email address on the record This blocks both processes, and it is common when a domain was set up years ago by someone who has since moved on. Nominet's position: "If you no longer have access to the email address that we have listed against your domain name registration, and are unable to update this through your registrar, you will need to re-establish your identity in order to update your contact details." There is a re-establish identity form inside Nominet Online Services, and "There is a fee of £10 plus VAT to re-establish your identity and update the email address that we hold against your domain name." Do this first, then the transfer. ### What changes on 9 February 2027 Nominet is standardising .uk on the same registry protocols the rest of the world uses, and it has published the transition date as Tuesday 9 February 2027. Three changes are worth knowing about as a domain owner, although none of them needs anything from you today. | Today | From 9 February 2027 | What it means for you | | --- | --- | --- | | IPS TAG | Accreditation | A rename. Nominet says "The change from TAG to Accreditation is one of naming, rather than any substantive detail beneath" | | Nominet's own transfer process | Standard EPP Pull transfer | The gaining registrar pulls the domain, as with .com and other gTLDs | | No authorisation code | Optional Transfer Authorisation Code (TAC) | A code valid for 14 days, invalid once used, if your registrar requires one | | WHOIS | RDAP | The public lookup changes format; registrant details still are not published without consent | ### Do not lose it while you are moving it A .uk domain expires on the anniversary of its registration, and from that moment it runs down a fixed clock: renewable for 30 days in the Expiry Grace Period, still renewable from 30 to 90 days in the Redemption Grace Period although it appears on the daily drop list, queued for deletion from 90 to 95 days, and deleted at 95 days, at which point anyone can register it. Nominet also warns that "Your registrar may follow a different process to this, which may result in your domain name and associated services being suspended before the times stated below". You can renew up to ten years ahead. If the domain is your business name, do that and stop thinking about it. **£10 plus VAT** the fee Nominet charges to change registrar, or to transfer a registrant, per transaction, no matter how many domains are in it. Your registrar may do it for nothing. (source: Nominet, The UK Domain support pages, checked 21 September 2026) ### Who to ask when it goes wrong Nominet's domain support team takes questions from registrants directly, not only from registrars, at domainsupport@nominet.uk or +44 (0) 330 236 9470, Monday to Friday from 8:00am to 6:00pm UK time, closed on bank holidays. If you are stuck between two providers each telling you it is the other one's job, calling the registry is usually what unsticks it. If you are moving your domain because you are moving away from whoever built your site, the domain is only one item on the list. The rest of it is in [what to ask for when you leave your web designer](/insights/website-handover-checklist/), and the reason this all matters is in [do you actually own your website](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/). If you want the new site built and the move handled for you, that is what I do, from [£199](/websites/). Sources: - Nominet, The UK Domain: can I switch registrar?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/can-i-switch-registrar/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: how do I transfer my domain?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/how-do-i-transfer-my-domain/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: lost access to your email account: https://www.theukdomain.uk/domain-support/lost-access-to-email-account/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: what if I don't renew my domain by expiry?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/what-if-i-dont-renew-my-domain-by-expiry/ - Nominet registrars: preparing for standardisation: https://registrars.nominet.uk/registry/dot-uk/preparing-for-standardisation/ - Nominet domain lookup: https://nominet.uk/lookup/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How much does it cost to transfer a .uk domain?** Nothing, if your registrar does it for you, and many do. If you have to do it yourself through Nominet Online Services, Nominet charges £10 plus VAT as a single transaction fee, whether you are changing registrar or changing registrant, and whether the transaction covers one domain or several. **Q: How long does a .uk domain transfer take?** Usually days rather than weeks. On a registrar change, a gaining registrar that uses a handshake has up to five days to accept, after which the request times out and is automatically refunded. On a registrant transfer, the incoming registrant has five days to accept. In practice both complete quickly once everyone knows it is coming. **Q: Can my current provider refuse to release my .uk domain?** They can decline to run the process for you, but they cannot keep a domain registered in your name. If the domain is in your name and you can access the admin contact email, you can change registrar yourself through Nominet Online Services without their involvement. If the domain is registered in their name, that is a registrant transfer and they do have to agree. **Q: Do I need an authorisation code to move a .uk domain?** Not today. Unlike .com, .uk has not used authorisation codes, only the registrar's TAG. That changes at standardisation on 9 February 2027, when transfers move to the standard EPP model with optional Transfer Authorisation Codes that are valid for 14 days and invalid once used. --- ## My web designer has disappeared: how to get your website and domain back Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/web-designer-disappeared/ Published: 2026-09-21 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital The emails bounce, the phone goes to voicemail, and the website is still up but nobody can change it. This happens more than you would think, and the instinct is to chase the website first. Do not. Chase the domain. The domain is your address and usually your email too, and if it lapses or moves while you are arguing about a login, you have a much bigger problem than a stale homepage. Here is the order I would work through it, using the routes Nominet and the registrars publish on their own pages. This is general information about those published processes, not legal advice. ### First, work out what you actually control Before you send a single chasing email, spend twenty minutes finding out where everything sits. Most of this you can check yourself without asking anyone. - Look the domain up on [Nominet's own lookup tool](https://nominet.uk/lookup/). It tells you which registrar the domain sits with and when it expires. Write both down. - Work out which email address the domain notices go to. Nominet writes to the admin contact on the record, and whoever reads that inbox effectively holds the domain. - Try to log in to your hosting. If you have ever received an invoice from a hosting company directly, you probably have an account there. - Try to log in to the site itself, and note whether it is a builder such as Wix or Squarespace, WordPress, or a hand-built site. - Check your bank statements. Whether you pay the designer, or pay a platform and a registrar directly, changes what you can do on your own. - If the designer traded as a limited company, look it up on Companies House and check whether it is still active. The important distinction is between the registrar, meaning the company that bills and manages the domain, and the registrant, meaning the name the domain is actually registered in. Different problem, different fix, and getting them the wrong way round wastes weeks. ### If the domain is registered in your name This is the good case, and it is more common than people expect: plenty of designers register domains properly in the client's name and simply manage them. You do not need the designer at all. Nominet's guidance is to ask your current registrar to move it for you first, and if they will not or cannot, you can do it yourself. In Nominet's words, "If your current registrar is unable to complete the move for you, you can move your domain name to a new registrar using Nominet Online Services." - Log in to Nominet Online Services using the admin contact email address on the domain. - Tick the domain or domains you want to move. - Choose 'Change Registrar'. - Enter the new registrar's name or their TAG. Any UK registrar will tell you theirs if you ask. - Enter the invoice and payment details and confirm. Nominet charges "a single transaction fee to switch to a new registrar of £10 plus VAT, even if you're moving more than one domain name in the transaction". Some registrars have what Nominet calls a 'handshake' enabled, meaning they have to accept the incoming domain: "A registrar has up to 5 days to accept your domain name(s), otherwise your request will time out and an automatic refund will be issued." So tell the new registrar it is coming. ### If the domain is registered in the designer's name Now you need a registrant transfer, which is Nominet's term for changing the name a domain is registered in rather than just who manages it. It covers exactly this situation along with selling a business or moving a domain from an individual to a limited company. The catch is that it is not something you can do unilaterally: the process runs from the current registrant's side, and "The new registrant will have 5 days in which they must accept the transfer, or else it will time out and you will need to complete the process again." The fee is the same £10 plus VAT, and either party can pay it. So the designer, or whoever is left at the company, has to co-operate. In practice a short, calm, written message works better than a legal-sounding one: say which domain, say you want a registrant transfer to your name, offer to pay the £10 plus VAT yourself, and give a date. Put it in writing so you have a record if this ends up somewhere more formal. If they respond at all, this is usually over in a week. ### If you have lost the email address on the record A common dead end: the domain is in your name, but the contact email is an old address at the designer's domain, so every reset link goes somewhere you cannot read. Nominet publishes a route for this. "If you no longer have access to the email address that we have listed against your domain name registration, and are unable to update this through your registrar, you will need to re-establish your identity in order to update your contact details." There is a form for it inside Nominet Online Services, and "There is a fee of £10 plus VAT to re-establish your identity and update the email address that we hold against your domain name." ### Do not let it expire while you are sorting it out This is the part that turns an annoying problem into an expensive one. A .uk domain expires on the anniversary of its registration and then runs down a fixed clock. Nominet also warns that "Your registrar may follow a different process to this, which may result in your domain name and associated services being suspended before the times stated below", so treat the expiry date itself as the deadline, not the end of the grace period. | Stage | When | Can you still renew it? | | --- | --- | --- | | Expiry Grace Period | Expiry to 30 days after | Yes | | Redemption Grace Period | 30 to 90 days after | Yes, but it is on the daily drop list | | Pending Delete | 90 to 95 days after | No, it is queued for deletion | | Deleted | 95 days after | No, anyone can register it | **95 days** from expiry to the day a .uk domain is deleted and anyone in the world can register it. It is only renewable for the first 90, and your registrar may suspend it sooner. (source: Nominet, The UK Domain, what if I don't renew my domain by expiry) ### If they will not respond at all Nominet runs a Dispute Resolution Service for .uk domains, and since 7 July 2026 it is administered by WIPO: "While the policy and overall direction of the DRS remains with Nominet, all new complaints must be submitted through WIPO's website." Be clear-eyed about what it is for. You have to show two things: that you have rights in a name that is the same or similar to the domain, such as a trade mark or an established trading name, and that the registration is an Abusive Registration. It is not a general contract dispute service, and a designer who registered a domain in their own name as part of a normal service arrangement does not automatically meet that test. | Stage | What happens | Cost | Timing | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Complaint and response | A case manager validates the complaint, the other side may respond | Free | Response due in 15 working days | | Mediation | Both parties are opted in automatically, and it is voluntary | Free | About 10 working days | | Summary decision | Only available where there was no response | £200 | Expert decides within 15 working days | | Full expert decision | All other cases | £750 | Expert decides within 15 working days | | Appeal | A panel of three experts | £3,000 | Lodged within 10 working days | The remedies are transfer, suspension or cancellation of the domain. Nominet's own pre-complaint checklist includes checking Companies House to see whether a limited company respondent is still active, which tells you how often this situation is exactly the one you are in. If the amount at stake is a £15 domain renewal and a rebuild, the £750 route rarely makes sense. If the domain is the name of your business and has been for fifteen years, it might. ### If the company has been dissolved If Companies House shows the designer's company as dissolved, the domain may no longer belong to anyone you can negotiate with. Government guidance is blunt: "Property, cash and any other assets owned by a company when it is dissolved automatically pass to the Crown." That is bona vacantia. In England and Wales, outside the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the Treasury Solicitor deals with it; in Scotland it is the King's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer, and in Northern Ireland the Crown Solicitor's Office. There are two ways back. The company can be restored, and then "the company comes back to life, bona vacantia no longer exists and the asset belongs to the company again". Or, if you were a former member, shareholder or liquidator, you can buy the asset from the Bona Vacantia Division at open market value. Neither is quick. For most small businesses in this position, the practical answer is to check whether the domain is still renewable, and if it is genuinely gone, choose a new domain and redirect your marketing rather than spend months on a restoration. ### Getting the website itself back Two separate questions here: can you get the files, and are you allowed to reuse them. On the files, if you pay the hosting company directly you can usually get a copy by proving you own the account. If the site is on a builder, the answer is mostly no. Wix says plainly that "In order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers", and that "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms". Squarespace will export site content to an .xml file and products and contacts to .csv, but not the design, and "It's not possible to export images or uploaded videos from your site in bulk". On the permission question, UK copyright law says the author of a work is its first owner, with an exception where the work was made by an employee in the course of their employment. A freelance designer is not your employee, so unless you have an assignment, the copyright in what they made is theirs. And under section 90(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, "An assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor". Paying an invoice is not an assignment. Your own words, your own photos and your own logo are still yours; the code and the layout may well not be. That is one more reason a rebuild is often the cleaner path. ### The order I would actually do it in - Renew the domain, or get it renewed, before anything else. Nothing on this list matters if it drops. - Look it up, record the registrar, the expiry date and the contact email, and screenshot it. - Send one clear written request with a deadline: registrant transfer or registrar change, the domain name, an offer to pay the fee. - If the domain is in your name, move it to a registrar you control through Nominet Online Services. - Get control of DNS, then stand up a replacement site somewhere new and test it on a temporary address. - Switch DNS to the new site, and keep the old email working through the move. - Only then consider the DRS, and only if you have rights in the name and the money at stake justifies it. If you are at step four and want the mechanics in detail, I have written them up in [how to transfer a .uk domain](/insights/how-to-transfer-a-uk-domain/). If your designer is contactable and you are simply moving on, the calmer version of this is [what to ask for when you leave your web designer](/insights/website-handover-checklist/). And the reason this keeps happening is worth understanding too: [do you actually own your website](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/). If you need the replacement built, that is what I do, from [£199 sites you own](/websites/). Sources: - Nominet, The UK Domain: can I switch registrar?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/can-i-switch-registrar/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: how do I transfer my domain?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/how-do-i-transfer-my-domain/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: lost access to your email account: https://www.theukdomain.uk/domain-support/lost-access-to-email-account/ - Nominet, The UK Domain: what if I don't renew my domain by expiry?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/what-if-i-dont-renew-my-domain-by-expiry/ - Nominet, resolving .uk domain disputes (DRS): https://nominet.uk/uk-registry/domain-disputes/ - Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 11: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/11 - Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 90: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/90 - GOV.UK, bona vacantia: dissolved companies (BVC1): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/bona-vacantia-dissolved-companies-bvc1/bona-vacantia-dissolved-companies-bvc1 - Wix Help Center, exporting or embedding your Wix site elsewhere: https://support.wix.com/en/article/exporting-or-embedding-your-wix-site-elsewhere - Squarespace Help Center, importing and exporting content: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814028-Importing-and-exporting-content ### Frequently asked **Q: Can my web designer hold my domain name hostage?** They can make it awkward, but .uk has published routes that do not depend on their goodwill. If the domain is registered in your name, you can change registrar yourself through Nominet Online Services for £10 plus VAT. If it is registered in their name, you need a registrant transfer, which they have to accept within 5 days, and if they will not engage at all the Nominet Dispute Resolution Service exists, although it requires you to show rights in the name and an abusive registration. **Q: How do I find out who my .uk domain is registered with?** Use Nominet's lookup tool at nominet.uk/lookup. It shows the registrar holding the domain and the expiry date. Registrant contact details are not published without consent, so if you need those you have to make a data release request to Nominet rather than read them off a public record. **Q: What happens to my domain if the web design company has been dissolved?** Anything the company owned when it was dissolved passes to the Crown as bona vacantia, which in England and Wales is handled by the Treasury Solicitor. You can either restore the company, which returns the asset to it, or, if you were a former member, shareholder or liquidator, buy the asset from the Bona Vacantia Division at open market value. Check the position on Companies House first, and in the meantime make sure the domain does not lapse. **Q: Should I just buy a new domain and start again?** Sometimes, yes. If the old domain is unrecoverable or the cost of fighting for it is out of proportion to the business it brings, a new domain plus a rebuild is often faster and cheaper than a dispute. The real cost is the links and the recognition you lose, so it is a worse trade for a fifteen year old business name than for a two year old one. Secure the new domain in your own name before you tell anybody. --- ## What to ask for when you leave your web designer Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/website-handover-checklist/ Published: 2026-09-21 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Most handovers go wrong in the same two ways: people ask for the wrong things, and they ask at the wrong time. The wrong things are usually files, which are often worthless or nonexistent. The right things are logins and control. And the right time is before you have told anyone you are leaving, when the request still looks like ordinary housekeeping rather than the opening move in an argument. So here is the list I would send, as one email, with a sentence at the top saying you are tidying up your records. If you already cannot reach them, skip to [my web designer has disappeared](/insights/web-designer-disappeared/), which is the recovery version of this page. ### The list, in one email | Ask for | Why it matters | What done looks like | | --- | --- | --- | | Domain registrar account access, or the domain moved into my own account | Without it you do not control your address or your email | You can log in and see the domain, and the registrant name is yours | | Confirmation of who the registrant is, in writing | The registrant is the legal holder, not whoever pays the invoice | A line naming your name or company as registrant | | DNS control, or a full export of the current DNS records | Every switch depends on being able to repoint records without downtime | A screenshot or export of A, CNAME, MX and TXT records | | Hosting control panel login, or a full copy of the site files and database | This is the site itself on a self-hosted build | A zip of the files and an SQL dump, or the cPanel login | | CMS admin login at owner level | Contributor access is not ownership and can be revoked | Your own account, role 'owner' or 'administrator' | | Email accounts and mailbox data | Email usually rides on the same domain and breaks first | Where mail is hosted, how many mailboxes, and who pays for them | | Primary ownership of the Google Business Profile | Managers can be removed by the owner; owners cannot | Your Google account listed as Primary Owner | | Google Analytics and Search Console access, with history | Years of data, and the only record of what was working | Admin on the property, not view-only on someone else's | | Logo and design source files, plus any font and image licences | Licences are often bought in the agency's name and do not transfer | Vector logo files and the licence documents or receipts | | Third party accounts in your name: booking, payments, chat, review tools | These carry customer data and recurring charges | Login reset to your own email address | | A written assignment of copyright in the work you paid for | Under UK law an assignment has to be in writing and signed | One signed line or paragraph, dated | ### Access first, files second If you only get three things, get the domain, the DNS and primary ownership of your Google Business Profile. Those three are the ones that are genuinely hard to replace and genuinely damaging to lose. A website can be rebuilt in days. A domain in someone else's name, a profile where you are only a manager, and a set of DNS records nobody can edit will stop your phone ringing while you sort them out. On the Google Business Profile in particular, check the role rather than assuming: managers can be removed by an owner at any time, and plenty of businesses discover on the day they leave that the agency is the primary owner of the listing they have spent years collecting reviews on. If you are not the primary owner, ask for a transfer now. If the profile was never verified properly in the first place, [how to verify your Google Business Profile](/insights/verify-google-business-profile/) covers that. ### Copyright: the bit people skip Paying an invoice for a website does not, by itself, make you the owner of the copyright in it. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says "The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it", with one big exception: where a work "is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner". A freelancer or an agency is not your employee. So unless something says otherwise, the designer owns the design. And it cannot be fixed by a handshake, because the same Act is explicit that "An assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor". That is a low bar. It does not need a solicitor; it needs a sentence. Something like: "[Designer] assigns to [your business] all copyright and design rights in the website, graphics and code produced under our agreement, with effect from [date]." Signed, dated, kept with your records. Two things you almost certainly do already own, whatever the contract says: your own words and your own photographs, if you supplied them. Stock images and licensed fonts are the opposite case. Those are usually licensed to whoever bought them, and a licence bought in the agency's name does not automatically become yours, which is why the licences are on the list above. ### What you can actually get off a website builder If your site is on Wix or Squarespace, temper the file request, because much of what you would want does not exist in portable form. This is not the designer being awkward, it is the platform. | | Wix | Squarespace | | --- | --- | --- | | The site itself | Not exportable. Wix says the site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers" | Site content exports to an .xml file | | Blog posts | "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms" | Included in the .xml export | | Products | Store product list exports to CSV | Products export to a .csv file | | Contacts and mailing lists | CMS collection content exports to CSV | Contacts export to .csv, individually or in bulk | | Images and video | No bulk export | "It's not possible to export images or uploaded videos from your site in bulk" | | The domain | Can be transferred away with an EPP code | Can be transferred away or pointed elsewhere | So on a builder, the realistic ask is: the domain, the text, the product and contact CSVs, your images downloaded one by one or supplied from the originals, and the login until you have finished copying. Then you rebuild rather than migrate. Plan for that from the start instead of discovering it on the last day. ### The order of operations on switch day - Renew the domain first, for two years if you can. Nothing else on this list matters if it expires mid-move. - Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds a day or two before the switch, so changes propagate in minutes rather than hours. - Build and check the new site on a temporary URL. Never point the domain at something you have not seen working. - Deal with email before you touch anything. If mailboxes move, set up the new ones and copy the mail across first; the MX record is the last thing you change, not the first. - Export the full DNS record set and rebuild it at the new host exactly, including TXT records for SPF, DKIM and any domain verification. These are the records people forget, and forgetting them is why the email starts bouncing. - Map your old URLs to new ones and set 301 redirects for every page that changes address, so the rankings and links you have built follow you. - Switch the DNS, then watch. Test the site, send and receive a test email, and submit the new sitemap in Search Console. - Keep the old hosting running for 30 days. It costs very little and it is the only easy way back if something turns out to be missing. Do not cancel anything until the new setup has been live and working for a couple of weeks. Cancelled hosting is usually deleted hosting, and the one file you did not copy will be on it. ### If they will not hand it over Ask once, politely, in writing, with a date. Most of the time that is enough, because most designers are not obstructive, they are just busy. If you get nothing back, the recovery routes are set out in [my web designer has disappeared](/insights/web-designer-disappeared/), and the mechanics of moving a .uk domain without their help are in [how to transfer a .uk domain name](/insights/how-to-transfer-a-uk-domain/). The reason any of this bites is that most small businesses never checked what they owned in the first place. That is the bigger question, and it is in [do you actually own your website](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/). If you want the move handled for you, hosting, DNS, redirects and all, that is part of every site I build, from [£199](/websites/). Sources: - Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 11: first ownership of copyright: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/11 - Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 90: assignment of copyright: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/90 - Wix Help Centre: exporting or embedding your Wix site elsewhere: https://support.wix.com/en/article/exporting-or-embedding-your-wix-site-elsewhere - Wix Help Centre: exporting blog posts to other platforms: https://support.wix.com/en/article/wix-blog-request-exporting-blog-posts-to-other-platforms - Squarespace Help Centre: importing and exporting content: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814028-Importing-and-exporting-content - Nominet, The UK Domain: can I switch registrar?: https://theukdomain.uk/domain-support/can-i-switch-registrar/ ### Frequently asked **Q: What should I ask my web designer for when I leave?** Access before files: the domain registrar login with the domain in your own name, DNS control or a full record export, hosting or the site files and database, owner-level CMS access, your email accounts, primary ownership of your Google Business Profile, admin on Analytics and Search Console, logo source files with any font and image licences, third party accounts moved to your email, and a written assignment of copyright. **Q: Do I own the copyright in a website I paid for?** Not automatically. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes the author the first owner unless the work was made by an employee in the course of employment, and it says an assignment is only effective if it is in writing and signed. A freelancer or agency is not your employee, so ask for a signed line assigning the rights to you. You do own your own text and any photographs you supplied. **Q: How do I move my website without downtime?** Renew the domain, lower the DNS TTL a day or two ahead, build and test the new site on a temporary URL, sort email and copy the full DNS record set including SPF and DKIM TXT records, set 301 redirects for every changed URL, then switch DNS and test. Keep the old hosting running for about 30 days afterwards. **Q: Should I tell my web designer I am leaving before asking for access?** Ask first, tell second. A numbered list framed as tidying up your records is routine and usually gets answered within a week. The same list arriving after a notice email reads as a dispute. Once you have the domain, the DNS and your Google accounts, the timing of the conversation matters much less. --- ## Wix vs Squarespace for a UK small business Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/wix-vs-squarespace-uk/ Published: 2026-09-21 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Most Wix versus Squarespace articles are written by people who get paid when you sign up to one of them. This one is not, and I have no affiliate arrangement with either. Every figure below was opened on the company's own pricing or support page and checked on 21 September 2026. Prices change, so check them yourself before you commit; the links are at the bottom. ### Price, as each company publishes it Squarespace shows UK prices in pounds when you visit from the UK, and it charges less if you pay for a year up front. The page says "Free for 14 days. Pay annually to save up to 36%." | Squarespace plan | Paid annually, per month | Paid monthly | Online store transaction fee | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Basic | £12 | £16 | 2% | | Core | £17 | £24 | 0% | | Plus | £29 | £36 | 0% | | Advanced | £79 | £89 | 0% | Wix is harder to pin down from the UK, and that is worth knowing before you start. Its plans page shows dollars with this note attached: "Prices and currency vary by location. USD prices displayed for reference only. Displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase. Additional subscription periods are available. Prices do not include applicable taxes, which are determined according to your billing address. The final price can be seen on the purchase page, before payment is completed." In other words, the number you are shown is not the number you will pay, and you learn the real one at the checkout. | Wix plan | Listed price per month (USD, yearly) | Storage | Collaborators | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Free | $0 | Limited | 1 | | Light | $17 | 2 GB | 2 | | Core | $29 | 50 GB | 5 | | Business | $39 | 100 GB | 10 | | Business Elite | $159 | Unlimited | 100 | Take the sticker price as the floor rather than the bill. On top of it sit the things that only appear later: Squarespace's 2% online store transaction fee on Basic, its separate fee on digital content and memberships, card processing from 2% plus 25p, and on both platforms the domain. "Free domain for 1 year" means exactly one year. Wix spells this out: the voucher "is only valid with a purchase of a new domain from Wix and cannot be used to renew or extend a domain you already own". Year two, you pay for the domain like everyone else. **2%** the online store transaction fee Squarespace charges on its cheapest plan, on top of card processing. It drops to 0% from the Core plan up, so a shop on Basic is usually paying to save money. (source: Squarespace, UK pricing page, checked 21 September 2026) ### What you can take with you This is the question that actually separates them, and almost nobody asks it in month one. You will ask it eventually, because businesses outgrow platforms, and by then you may have four years of blog posts and a shop full of products in there. | | Wix | Squarespace | | --- | --- | --- | | The site itself | No. "Your site must run on Wix's servers" | Site content exports to an .xml file | | Page text | Copy and paste, page by page | Included in the .xml export | | Blog posts | "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms" | Included in the .xml export | | Products | Store product list exports to CSV | Products export to a .csv file | | Contacts | CMS collection content exports to CSV | Contacts export to .csv, in bulk or by list | | Images and video | No bulk export | No bulk export; one at a time from the Asset library | | The design | Does not transfer anywhere | Does not transfer anywhere | | The domain | Transferable away with an EPP code | Transferable away | Wix's position is a design decision, not an oversight. Its own words: "Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix's servers... the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix's proprietary technology and relies on Wix's services to operate." Squarespace is more open, but it is honest about the limits too: it warns that importing its own .xml into another Squarespace site "can cause broken image links and other issues", and that images cannot be exported in bulk. So on either platform, leaving means rebuilding. The difference is how much of the content you carry across by export and how much you retype. If you plan to blog seriously, that difference is the whole ball game. ### Where each one is genuinely better Wix gives you more room to move. The editor lets you place things where you want them, the app market is large, and the free tier means you can build something before spending anything. If you want to fiddle, or you need a specific booking or membership feature without paying a developer, Wix usually has it. Squarespace gives you a better looking result with less effort, because the templates hold you inside a grid and it is hard to make something ugly. It publishes plain UK prices, it exports your content, and it takes 0% in store transaction fees from the middle plan up. For a UK business that wants a smart brochure site and a small shop without thinking about it, that is the easier recommendation of the two. On search, neither one holds you back much. Both produce clean enough pages, both let you set titles and descriptions, and both connect to Google Search Console. Ranking is mostly about your content, your Google Business Profile and your reviews, not your platform, which is why [why don't I show up on Google](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/) has almost nothing to say about website builders. ### Where both of them cost you - The bill never ends. At Squarespace Core on annual billing, three years is a little over £600 before the domain, fees and any apps. That is not outrageous, but it is money spent on rent rather than on an asset. - The design does not leave. Whatever you spend on making it look right is spent on a platform, not on something you keep. - Code access is gated. On Squarespace, CSS and JavaScript customisation starts at Core, so the cheapest plan cannot be extended in the ways a developer would normally reach for. - Team access is gated too. Squarespace Basic allows two contributors; Wix Light allows two collaborators. Adding your bookkeeper or a marketer can mean moving up a plan. - Performance is out of your hands. Builders carry a lot of framework, and when a page is slow there is often nothing you can do about it beyond removing content. ### Which I would pick, and when I would pick neither If it has to be one of the two, I would take Squarespace for most UK small businesses: pounds on the page, an export route out, no store transaction fee above the entry plan, and a result that looks considered without much work. I would take Wix if you specifically need a feature from its app market, or you want to try something for nothing before you spend. I would pick neither when the site is a real part of how the business gets work. At that point you are paying a monthly fee for something you cannot move, cannot fully control and cannot take with you, and for a small brochure site that money adds up to more than having one built properly. That is the trade, and I have set it out plainly against each platform in [Wix vs a custom website](/insights/wix-vs-custom-website/) and [Squarespace vs a custom website](/insights/squarespace-vs-custom-website/). Whichever way you go, do one thing today: check the domain is registered in your name and not your designer's or an agency's. [Do you actually own your website](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/) explains how to check, and if the answer turns out to be no, [what to ask for when you leave your web designer](/insights/website-handover-checklist/) is the list to send. If you would rather own the thing outright, I build sites from [£199](/websites/). Sources: - Squarespace pricing (UK): https://www.squarespace.com/pricing - Squarespace Help Centre: importing and exporting content: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814028-Importing-and-exporting-content - Wix plans and pricing: https://www.wix.com/plans - Wix Help Centre: exporting or embedding your Wix site elsewhere: https://support.wix.com/en/article/exporting-or-embedding-your-wix-site-elsewhere - Wix Help Centre: exporting blog posts to other platforms: https://support.wix.com/en/article/wix-blog-request-exporting-blog-posts-to-other-platforms - Wix Help Centre: transferring your Wix domain away from Wix: https://support.wix.com/en/article/transferring-your-wix-domain-away-from-wix-2477749 ### Frequently asked **Q: Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper in the UK?** Squarespace is the one you can price before you buy. It publishes UK prices in pounds, from £12 a month on annual billing up to £79 for Advanced, checked on 21 September 2026. Wix does not publish a UK price list: its plans page shows USD figures marked as "for reference only" and says the final price is shown at the purchase page. Compare the totals including transaction fees and the domain from year two, not the headline rates. **Q: Can I move my website from Wix to Squarespace?** Not as a migration. Wix does not let you export your site or your blog posts, and says the site must run on Wix's servers, so a move means rebuilding the design and recreating the pages. You can export store products and CMS collections to CSV, download images individually, copy the page text by hand, and transfer the domain away using an EPP code from Wix. **Q: Is Wix or Squarespace better for SEO?** The difference is small enough that it should not decide your choice. Both let you set page titles, descriptions and URLs and both connect to Search Console. What decides whether a local business gets found is the Google Business Profile, reviews, and pages that answer what people actually search for. Platform is a long way down the list. **Q: Do you own your website on Wix or Squarespace?** You own your content and, if it is registered in your name, your domain. You do not own the site. On both platforms the design and the build live on their servers under a subscription, and stopping payment stops the site. Squarespace at least lets you export your text, products and contacts; Wix does not offer an export of the site or the blog. --- ## The state of small business websites in Croydon: 3,241 homepages checked Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/ Published: 2026-09-20 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Between 11 July and 16 August 2026 I ran the same automated check over the homepage of every small business I could find a website for in Croydon and the towns around it. It came to 3,241 sites. This page is the result: how many loaded at all, how many are readable on a phone, how many are secure, how fast they are, and how many say anything that a search engine or an AI assistant can actually use to work out that the business is local. Nothing here identifies a single business. Every figure below is a count or a percentage, and any group of fewer than 30 sites has been dropped rather than shown. The script that produces these numbers is kept so every figure can be recomputed. **51.9%** of live small business homepages in the London Borough of Croydon carry no structured data identifying them as a local business (source: Jones Digital, 1,934 live homepages audited 11 July to 16 August 2026) ### The sample, in plain terms Two sets of numbers appear on this page. The first is the London Borough of Croydon on its own: 2,054 businesses with a website, of which 120 (5.8%) had a homepage that did not load at all when it was checked, leaving 1,934 live homepages. That is the denominator for every borough percentage here, because if the page never loaded, none of the other checks could run. The second is the wider area this studio covers, the borough plus 20 neighbouring towns from Banstead round to Wimbledon: 3,241 businesses with a website, 210 (6.5%) down, 3,031 live. The town and trade tables further down use that wider set, because the borough on its own does not give enough businesses per trade to report honestly. ### About half of Croydon's homepages are invisible as local businesses Of the 1,934 live homepages inside the borough, 594 (30.7%) carried no structured data at all. A further 409 (21.1%) carried some structured data, but none of it described a local business: no name, address, opening hours or service area in a form a machine can read. Together that is 1,003 homepages, 51.9% of the borough. Structured data is a small block of machine readable detail in the page source. It is invisible to a human visitor and it is the single most direct way of telling Google, Bing and an AI assistant what the business is called, where it is, and when it is open. Without it, all of that has to be inferred from prose, and an assistant answering "who does this in Croydon" has nothing it can quote with confidence. It is not a ranking guarantee, but it is the difference between being described accurately and being guessed at. I have written separately about [how AI search picks which businesses to recommend](/insights/get-recommended-by-ai-search/). ### What else is missing Faults found on Croydon borough homepages: - No structured data at all: 30.7% - No social or Maps link: 25.3% - No meta description: 24% - Structured data, nothing local: 21.1% - Looks abandoned: 15.8% - No favicon: 15.7% - Drag and drop builder: 12% - Mixed content: 11.7% - Not on HTTPS: 6.8% - Not mobile friendly: 4.4% - AI crawlers blocked: 3.1% - Missing or generic title: 2.6% - Placeholder text left in: 1.7% Share of the 1,934 live homepages in the London Borough of Croydon. Every check is defined at the bottom of this page. The two that cost the most for the least effort are near the top. A missing meta description (465 homepages) means Google writes the snippet under your listing for you, from whatever text it finds first. No link to a social profile or a Google Maps listing (490 homepages) means the site is a dead end: nothing connects it to the Business Profile that actually appears in the local pack. Further down, 305 homepages (15.8%) have nothing newer than 2023 anywhere on the page. A customer reading one has no way of knowing the business is still trading. ### Speed is not the local weak point Page speed is the thing small business owners are told to worry about most, and in Croydon it is not where the damage is. Google PageSpeed Insights returned a mobile score for 735 of the 1,934 live borough homepages. The median was 66. Mobile PageSpeed scores, Croydon borough: - Under 40 (very slow): 3.9% - 40 to 59 (slow): 26.1% - 60 to 89: 59.5% - 90 or more (good): 10.5% Share of the 735 borough homepages that returned a mobile score. Scores are Google PageSpeed Insights, measured once per site during the audit window. So roughly a third are slow enough to lose visitors, and one in ten is genuinely fast. That is worth fixing, but it is a smaller and more expensive problem than the missing half sentence of structured data above it. ### What Croydon runs on Publishing platform, Croydon borough homepages: - WordPress: 42.6% - Not identified: 40.2% - Wix: 9.7% - Squarespace: 3.1% - GoDaddy: 2% - Shopify: 1% - Drupal: 0.8% - Joomla: 0.4% - Other builder: 0.3% Share of the 1,934 live borough homepages. "Not identified" means the page source carried no platform fingerprint: hand built sites, custom systems and heavily customised installs all land here. WordPress runs more of Croydon than everything else combined that could be identified. Of those, only 5 were on a WordPress version older than 5.0, so the old horror story of the abandoned WordPress 3 site is now rare. The more common problem is a current WordPress with nothing filled in. ### Croydon against the rest of the sample The same audit ran on 13,139 businesses outside this area, 11,836 of which had a live homepage. That makes a useful control: it shows which Croydon numbers are a local story and which are just what small business websites look like everywhere. | Check | Croydon borough | Rest of sample | | --- | --- | --- | | Live homepages measured | 1,934 | 11,836 | | No structured data at all | 30.7% | 31.7% | | Structured data, nothing identifying a local business | 21.1% | 20.6% | | No meta description | 24.0% | 26.6% | | No link to social media or Google Maps | 25.3% | 19.9% | | Looks abandoned | 15.8% | 12.5% | | On a drag and drop builder | 12.0% | 9.9% | | Scores under 60 on mobile | 30.1% | 38.5% | | Mixed content on a secure page | 11.7% | 13.8% | | Not on HTTPS | 6.8% | 7.0% | | Not mobile friendly | 4.4% | 4.3% | | AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt | 3.1% | 3.3% | | Homepage did not load at all | 5.8% | 9.9% | Croydon sites are not slower, not less secure and no less mobile ready than the rest of the sample. They are more likely to look abandoned, more likely to sit on a drag and drop builder, and noticeably more likely to link nowhere else at all. The picture is of sites that were built once, often on a builder, and then left. ### Town by town Across the wider 3,031 live homepages, 25 towns had at least 30 audited sites and are shown below. Seven more had fewer than 30 and have been left out entirely rather than reported on a handful of businesses. Sorted by sample size, largest first. | Town | Sites | No structured data | No meta description | On a builder | Looks abandoned | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Coulsdon | 420 | 27.1% | 22.9% | 14.0% | 18.8% | | South Croydon | 361 | 29.9% | 18.6% | 12.7% | 15.2% | | Purley | 229 | 34.1% | 26.6% | 17.9% | 18.8% | | Selsdon | 228 | 28.9% | 25.9% | 9.2% | 17.1% | | Croydon | 168 | 32.1% | 25.0% | 11.3% | 11.3% | | Worcester Park | 167 | 32.3% | 29.9% | 9.0% | 8.4% | | Kenley | 143 | 33.6% | 27.3% | 13.3% | 15.4% | | Streatham | 132 | 31.8% | 28.8% | 12.1% | 3.8% | | Sanderstead | 129 | 27.1% | 24.8% | 8.5% | 14.7% | | Crystal Palace | 113 | 29.2% | 25.7% | 7.1% | 9.7% | | Beckenham | 112 | 24.1% | 23.2% | 14.3% | 14.3% | | Norbury | 91 | 35.2% | 24.2% | 4.4% | 5.5% | | Bromley | 81 | 34.6% | 19.8% | 9.9% | 18.5% | | Penge | 58 | 27.6% | 12.1% | 5.2% | 8.6% | | Addiscombe | 57 | 36.8% | 31.6% | 3.5% | 5.3% | | Sutton | 53 | 18.9% | 20.8% | 9.4% | 15.1% | | Thornton Heath | 52 | 34.6% | 28.8% | 9.6% | 15.4% | | Orpington | 44 | 34.1% | 9.1% | 9.1% | 15.9% | | Wallington | 44 | 18.2% | 15.9% | 2.3% | 11.4% | | Wimbledon | 38 | 23.7% | 7.9% | 23.7% | 10.5% | | Epsom | 35 | 34.3% | 28.6% | 5.7% | 28.6% | | West Wickham | 34 | 32.4% | 17.6% | 14.7% | 8.8% | | Shirley | 32 | 43.8% | 34.4% | 9.4% | 15.6% | | Mitcham | 31 | 22.6% | 12.9% | 6.5% | 12.9% | | Morden | 30 | 33.3% | 23.3% | 0.0% | 10.0% | Shirley and Addiscombe come out worst on structured data, Wallington and Sutton best. Epsom stands out for abandonment, with more than a quarter of its homepages showing nothing newer than 2023. Wimbledon has by far the heaviest use of drag and drop builders. These are small samples once you get past the top few rows, so treat the bottom of the table as a hint rather than a fact. ### Trade by trade The same 3,031 live homepages, grouped by what the business does. 39 trades had at least 30 audited sites; 36 more were suppressed for being too small. No town and trade figures are combined anywhere on this page, because that would start to point at individual businesses. | Trade | Sites | No structured data | No meta description | On a builder | Looks abandoned | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Restaurants | 241 | 31.1% | 32.8% | 17.8% | 12.0% | | Pubs | 155 | 27.1% | 27.7% | 9.0% | 3.2% | | Landscapers | 108 | 26.9% | 15.7% | 16.7% | 15.7% | | Caterers | 98 | 25.5% | 18.4% | 11.2% | 16.3% | | Carpenters | 96 | 29.2% | 24.0% | 14.6% | 17.7% | | Roofers | 95 | 26.3% | 20.0% | 10.5% | 17.9% | | Window cleaners | 89 | 38.2% | 23.6% | 11.2% | 13.5% | | Scaffolders | 88 | 34.1% | 28.4% | 17.0% | 20.5% | | Cafes | 87 | 36.8% | 31.0% | 13.8% | 10.3% | | Kitchen fitters | 72 | 26.4% | 25.0% | 18.1% | 12.5% | | Glaziers | 71 | 35.2% | 14.1% | 4.2% | 15.5% | | CCTV installers | 71 | 31.0% | 14.1% | 8.5% | 23.9% | | Charities | 67 | 41.8% | 58.2% | 16.4% | 11.9% | | Skip hire firms | 66 | 21.2% | 21.2% | 3.0% | 18.2% | | Takeaways | 64 | 43.8% | 42.2% | 3.1% | 4.7% | | Bathroom fitters | 64 | 29.7% | 25.0% | 26.6% | 26.6% | | Handymen | 60 | 20.0% | 26.7% | 20.0% | 23.3% | | Dentists | 58 | 13.8% | 8.6% | 12.1% | 20.7% | | Nail salons | 58 | 32.8% | 22.4% | 12.1% | 15.5% | | Paving contractors | 54 | 22.2% | 22.2% | 9.3% | 11.1% | | Plumbers and heating engineers | 50 | 24.0% | 12.0% | 12.0% | 22.0% | | Barbers | 48 | 56.2% | 50.0% | 14.6% | 20.8% | | Guttering firms | 48 | 20.8% | 16.7% | 12.5% | 16.7% | | Funeral directors | 45 | 24.4% | 26.7% | 6.7% | 4.4% | | Florists | 44 | 34.1% | 20.5% | 6.8% | 2.3% | | Chiropodists | 43 | 32.6% | 20.9% | 11.6% | 18.6% | | Dry cleaners | 42 | 33.3% | 31.0% | 7.1% | 14.3% | | Fencing contractors | 42 | 35.7% | 28.6% | 4.8% | 23.8% | | Taxi firms | 38 | 36.8% | 13.2% | 0.0% | 28.9% | | Beauty salons | 37 | 43.2% | 29.7% | 16.2% | 18.9% | | Photographers | 33 | 33.3% | 15.2% | 12.1% | 6.1% | | Builders | 33 | 18.2% | 15.2% | 12.1% | 12.1% | | Gardeners | 32 | 9.4% | 9.4% | 0.0% | 3.1% | | Aerial installers | 32 | 25.0% | 3.1% | 6.2% | 28.1% | | Mobile mechanics | 32 | 25.0% | 18.8% | 3.1% | 9.4% | | Locksmiths | 31 | 41.9% | 16.1% | 3.2% | 12.9% | | Driving instructors | 31 | 29.0% | 6.5% | 6.5% | 9.7% | | Dog groomers | 30 | 23.3% | 16.7% | 16.7% | 10.0% | | Plumbers | 30 | 23.3% | 10.0% | 16.7% | 0.0% | Barbers are the outlier in both directions that matter: 56.2% have no structured data and half have no meta description, on sites selling a service people search for by neighbourhood. Takeaways are close behind at 43.8% and 42.2%. Charities have the worst meta description rate on the list at 58.2%, which is a lot of local fundraising pages that Google is writing the snippet for. At the other end, gardeners (9.4%) and dentists (13.8%) are in much better shape, dentists mostly because their sites tend to be built by specialists. One more figure worth reporting: 25.0% of florists were not mobile friendly, the highest of any trade, against an area average of 3.8%. ### What to do if this describes your website None of the most common faults on this page need a rebuild. In rough order of payback for the time spent: - Add a LocalBusiness block to your homepage with your name, address or service area, phone number and opening hours. This is the 51.9% problem, and on most platforms it is one plugin setting or one block of code. - Write a meta description for your homepage and your main service pages. Roughly 155 characters, written as an advert for the page, not a summary of your company. - Link your website to your Google Business Profile and your social accounts, and link them back. That connection is how a search engine confirms the site and the listing are the same business. [Verify your Business Profile first](/insights/verify-google-business-profile/) if you have not already. - Put a current year somewhere real on the page: a recent job, a dated post, this season's opening hours. A page whose most recent date is 2022 reads as a closed business. - Check the padlock. If your site loads over plain HTTP, or loads images over HTTP inside a secure page, Chrome will say so to every visitor. - Only then worry about speed. It matters, but it is the most expensive item on this list and, in Croydon, the least unusual fault. If you would rather see your own numbers than the borough average, the [free website audit](/free-website-audit/) runs most of these same checks on one site and sends you the list. If you want to know why the site is not showing up at all, start with [the eight usual reasons](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/). ### Method - Every business in the sample had a website recorded and had that homepage successfully requested between 11 July and 16 August 2026. Each site was fetched once. - The homepage only. No crawl of inner pages, so a site that carries structured data on a contact page but not the homepage is counted as missing it. That is deliberate: the homepage is what usually ranks and what an assistant usually reads first. - Sites whose homepage did not respond are reported as a separate figure and then excluded from every other percentage, because none of the other checks could run on them. - Page speed comes from Google PageSpeed Insights mobile scores. Not every site returned one, so the speed percentages use the 735 borough sites (and 1,121 across the wider area) that did, and say so. - Groups smaller than 30 sites are dropped, not merged and not shown. Town and trade are never crossed with each other. - Counts and percentages only. No business name, domain, phone number, email or screenshot appears here or in the working files behind it. ### What each check means - No structured data: the page contains no JSON-LD and no microdata of any kind. - Structured data, nothing identifying a local business: some structured data is present, but none of it describes a local business entity with the details a directory or assistant needs. - No meta description: there is no non-empty meta description tag, so search engines compose the snippet themselves. - No social or Maps link: the page links to no social profile and to no Google Maps listing. - Looks abandoned: the most recent year appearing anywhere in the page source is three or more years old. - On a builder: the page carries the fingerprint of Wix, GoDaddy or a similar drag and drop builder. - Not mobile friendly: no viewport meta tag, or a viewport pinned to a fixed desktop width instead of the device width. - Not on HTTPS: the homepage does not finally resolve over HTTPS. - Mixed content: a secure page loading images, scripts or stylesheets over plain HTTP. - AI crawlers blocked: robots.txt disallows the crawlers used by AI assistants. - Missing or generic title: the page title is absent or is a builder default such as "Home". - Placeholder text left in: lorem ipsum, "coming soon" or "under construction" is still on the live page. - No favicon: no icon is declared, so tabs and bookmarks show a blank square. ### Limitations, stated plainly - This is not a census. The sample comes from a prospecting database built to find businesses that might need a better website, so it is likely to skew towards weaker sites. Read every percentage as a description of this sample, not of Croydon as a whole. - It is a single snapshot taken over five weeks in summer 2026. Sites change; some of these will already be fixed. - Automated checks are literal. A site can pass every check and still be a bad website, and a site can fail three of them and still win the business. - Trade labels come from how each business is categorised in the source data, so a firm doing two things sits in one row. - Page speed was measured once per site, and a single PageSpeed run varies. The distribution is sound; an individual score is not. - Towns are taken from the business address, not from a boundary lookup, so the borough figures follow the postal town. The figures on this page may be reproduced with attribution to Jones Digital and a link to this page. If you are writing about this and want a breakdown that is not here, ask and I will run it, as long as it does not narrow down to individual businesses. Sources: - Jones Digital, homepage audit of 3,241 small business websites in Croydon and surrounding towns, 11 July to 16 August 2026 (this page): https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/state-of-croydon-small-business-websites/ - Google Search Central: local business structured data: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/local-business - Google Search Central: control your snippets in search results: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet - Schema.org: LocalBusiness: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness - Google PageSpeed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How many websites were checked, and where?** 3,241 small business homepages across the London Borough of Croydon and 20 surrounding towns, checked between 11 July and 16 August 2026. Of those, 2,054 were inside the borough itself. 210 homepages did not load at all and are excluded from the other percentages. **Q: What does "no structured data identifying a local business" actually mean?** Structured data is a block of machine readable detail in the page source that states the business name, address or service area, phone number and opening hours. 30.7% of Croydon homepages had none at all, and another 21.1% had some structured data that did not describe a local business. Together that is 51.9%, and it means search engines and AI assistants have to infer those details from ordinary page text instead of reading them. **Q: Are Croydon business websites worse than average?** Not across the board. On the same audit, Croydon sites were faster than the rest of the sample (30.1% scoring under 60 on mobile against 38.5%) and no less secure or mobile ready. Where Croydon is worse is upkeep: 15.8% look abandoned against 12.5%, and 25.3% link to no social profile or Google Maps listing against 19.9%. **Q: Which trades have the weakest websites?** Of the 39 trades with at least 30 sites in the sample, barbers came out weakest, with 56.2% carrying no structured data and 50.0% no meta description, followed by takeaways at 43.8% and 42.2%. Charities had the worst meta description rate of all at 58.2%. Gardeners at 9.4% and dentists at 13.8% had the least missing structured data. **Q: Can I quote these figures?** Yes. The figures are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so they can be reproduced with credit to Jones Digital and a link to this page. If you need a cut that is not shown, ask, as long as it does not narrow down to individual businesses. --- ## How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI search Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/get-recommended-by-ai-search/ Published: 2026-09-15 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in Croydon, or asks Google a question and reads the AI answer instead of the results. Two or three businesses get named. The rest are invisible, and they never find out it happened. The good news is that getting named is not mysterious and it is not expensive. It is mostly the same groundwork that has always won local search, plus four specific things that make a site legible to software. This guide is the practical list, in the order worth doing them. ### How an assistant actually picks a business An AI assistant is not ranking pages the way a search engine does. It gathers a handful of sources, reads them, and writes an answer that quotes or paraphrases the most useful passages. Being named is less like ranking first and more like being quoted in an article. That changes what matters. A page can rank respectably and still never be quoted, because it buries the answer under three paragraphs of preamble, or because nothing on it is specific enough to repeat. Conversely, a modest page that states a price plainly and cites where a number came from is very easy to quote. Assistants also weigh what other sources say about you. Your Google Business Profile, consistent listings and genuine reviews do a lot of work here, which is why none of this is separate from [ordinary local SEO](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/). ### Most of it is the groundwork you should be doing anyway Before anything AI-specific, the basics have to be in place, because an assistant cannot recommend a business it cannot read. A site that loads slowly on a phone, hides its services behind clever wording, or has no consistent name, address and phone number is a bad source, and it will be skipped in favour of a competitor who is easier to understand. | What both reward | What is specific to AI answers | | --- | --- | | A fast page, especially on mobile | Structured data linking the business, the person and the page as one entity | | Plain wording that names the service and the area | The direct answer placed first, before the detail | | A complete, verified Google Business Profile | Checkable specifics: real prices, named sources, honest dates | | Real reviews and consistent listings | Crawler access granted deliberately, plus a plain-text site summary | | Internal links that make sense | Content a machine can quote without rewriting it | ### The four things that are genuinely different These are the additions worth making, and between them they take hours rather than a retainer. - Describe the business in structured data, and link it together. Most sites emit a scatter of unconnected fragments: a business name here, an author there, a price somewhere else. Give them shared identifiers so an assistant reads one confident entity instead of guessing whether three mentions are the same company. [Google's structured data documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data) is the reference. - Put the answer first. Every page that answers a question should answer it in the opening lines, in plain language, with the detail underneath for humans who want it. If your page takes four paragraphs to get to the point, the assistant quotes whoever got there in one. - Publish things that can be checked. Real prices instead of 'contact us for a quote', statistics with a named publisher and a date, and comparison tables. Vague marketing copy gives an assistant nothing to repeat, so it repeats someone else. - Let the crawlers in on purpose. The assistants use their own crawlers, and a surprising number of sites block them by accident through a default setting or an over-eager security plugin. **up to 40%** was the improvement in visibility within generative engine answers that researchers measured from content changes alone, across a benchmark of diverse queries (source: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024) That study is worth knowing about because it tested this properly rather than guessing. Among the strategies it evaluated, adding citations to authoritative sources and adding relevant statistics were among the effective ones. Keyword stuffing, predictably, was not. ### Letting the crawlers in, deliberately Each assistant uses named crawlers, and your robots.txt decides whether they may read you. One trap catches people out: robots.txt rules are not cumulative. If you give a named crawler its own group, it ignores the general rules entirely, so anything you meant to keep private has to be repeated inside every group. The agents worth knowing by name, as of late 2026: - OpenAI: GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for search, ChatGPT-User for live browsing. [OpenAI publishes the list and the IP ranges](https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot). - Anthropic: ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. - Perplexity: PerplexityBot, with [its own documentation](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots). - Google: Google-Extended controls use in Gemini and AI answers separately from ordinary Googlebot crawling. - Also worth allowing: Applebot and Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, Meta-ExternalAgent, and CCBot, which feeds Common Crawl and therefore a great deal of downstream training data. The second thing worth doing is publishing a plain-text summary of your site for assistants to read, conventionally at /llms.txt. It is a short markdown file listing what you do, what you charge and where your main pages are, so a machine can get the facts without parsing your HTML. [The convention is documented at llmstxt.org](https://llmstxt.org/), it costs nothing to publish, and it removes any excuse for an assistant getting your prices wrong. This site publishes [one of its own](/llms.txt) if you want to see the shape of it. ### What you cannot control, and should be suspicious of - Nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name you. The engines do not publish how they select sources and they change without notice. - There is no equivalent of Search Console for AI answers yet, so measurement is indirect: you ask the assistants questions a customer would ask and see who gets named. - Anyone selling a 'guaranteed ChatGPT ranking' is selling something that does not exist. Be as sceptical as you would be about a guaranteed Google position. - Being cited does not always send a click. Some answers name you without linking, which is still worth having, because a recommendation by name is how people decide who to phone. ### How to tell whether it is working Pick the five questions a genuine customer would ask, phrased the way they would phrase them, and ask each of the major assistants once a month. Write down who gets named. It is crude, it is free, and it is currently a better signal than anything on a dashboard. Then watch the ordinary numbers underneath it. If the groundwork is right, organic enquiries and map views tend to move first, because the same work feeds both. If nothing at all is moving after a few months, the problem is usually upstream: the site is too slow, too thin, or does not plainly say what you do and where. That is the part worth fixing first, and a [free website audit](/free-website-audit/) will tell you which it is. Sources: - Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735 - Google, Introduction to structured data markup: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data - OpenAI, GPTBot and OpenAI crawlers: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot - Perplexity, PerplexityBot documentation: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots - The llms.txt convention: https://llmstxt.org/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?** By being an easy source to read and verify. In practice: a fast page that plainly names your service and your area, structured data describing the business, real prices rather than 'contact us', a complete Google Business Profile with genuine reviews, and robots.txt permitting OpenAI's crawlers. There is no submission form and no paid placement. You are making yourself the most quotable answer to the question, and the assistant does the rest. **Q: Is GEO different from SEO, or is it the same thing rebranded?** Mostly the same, with real additions. Around four fifths of the work is shared: speed, plain wording, structured data, consistent details, reviews. What is genuinely new is that assistants quote passages rather than rank pages, so answer-first structure and checkable specifics matter more than they used to, and crawler access has to be granted deliberately. If someone is selling GEO as an entirely separate product with its own retainer, be sceptical. **Q: Do I need an llms.txt file?** It is not required and no assistant guarantees it will read one, but it is cheap and low risk. It is a short plain-text file summarising what you do, what you charge and where your key pages are, which means a machine can get your facts without interpreting your page layout. For a small business with clear services and published prices it takes about twenty minutes to write and removes the chance of an assistant quoting a price that is three years out of date. **Q: Will AI search replace Google for local businesses?** Not yet, and probably not entirely. Ordinary search and the map still send the overwhelming majority of local enquiries, so anyone telling you to stop doing local SEO is giving you bad advice. What has changed is that a second surface now exists alongside it, and it is won with largely the same work. Treat it as additive. **Q: How long does it take to show up in AI answers?** Longer than a search ranking, and less predictably. Assistants draw on crawled content and on training data that can be months old, so a brand new page may be quotable within weeks by the live-browsing tools and take considerably longer to appear in the models' own knowledge. Treat it as a side effect of doing the groundwork well rather than a campaign with a launch date. --- ## How long does it take a new website to show up on Google? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-long-to-show-up-on-google/ Published: 2026-08-31 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital For most small business sites, expect one to three weeks before your site is findable by name, and expect competitive searches to take months. Google's own documentation puts crawling alone at anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, which is accurate but wide. What follows is what those timelines look like in practice on a real site I measured page by page across five weeks, and what moves you to the fast end of the range. ### The three stages, and how long each takes - Discovery: Google learns your page exists, from your sitemap, a link, or a submission. This can be same-day or can silently never happen if nothing points at the page. - Indexing: Google crawls the page and adds it to its index. Once discovered, small-business pages typically index within days. - Ranking: your page starts appearing for searches people actually make. Searches for your business name usually work within a week or two of indexing. Competitive terms are a different game measured in months. ### What I measured on a real site In August 2026 I tracked indexing on this site, page by page, through Google's own URL Inspection tool. Two brand-new location pages, linked from four other pages and listed in the sitemap, sat completely unknown to Google for six days, and a case-study page stayed unknown for over two weeks. The blocker turned out to be the sitemap: Google had quietly not re-fetched it for five weeks. The day I resubmitted it through Search Console, Google downloaded it within one second, and both new pages were crawled and indexed within 48 hours. **48 hours** from resubmitting the sitemap to brand-new pages being crawled and indexed, measured on this site in August 2026. The same pages had sat unknown to Google for six days beforehand. (source: Jones Digital, first-party Search Console data) **182 days** Bing crawled this site daily without indexing a single page, until the sitemap was submitted directly through Bing Webmaster Tools. (source: Jones Digital, first-party Bing Webmaster data) The lesson is not that Google is slow. It is that discovery, not indexing, is usually the bottleneck for small sites. Google indexed the pages almost immediately once it knew they existed. Everything that mattered was about making sure it knew. ### What actually speeds it up - Submit a sitemap in Google Search Console, and resubmit it when you add pages. Do not assume Google re-reads it on its own schedule; on the site above it had not looked for five weeks. - Use Request Indexing in Search Console for important new pages. It is the single fastest lever Google gives you, and it is free. - Link new pages from pages Google already crawls, ideally your homepage or your most-visited content. Orphan pages are the slowest to be found. - Give every page a lastmod date in the sitemap that reflects real changes. If every page claims to have changed every day, Google learns to ignore the signal. - For Bing, which also powers DuckDuckGo and AI assistants like Copilot, use IndexNow or Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing crawled the site above daily for six months without indexing a single page until the sitemap was submitted directly. ### The timelines to actually expect | Milestone | Typical time for a small business site | | --- | --- | | Site discovered and homepage indexed | A few days to two weeks with a submitted sitemap | | Findable by searching your business name | One to three weeks | | Inner pages indexed | Days to weeks each, discovery permitting | | Ranking for 'your service + your town' | Two to six months, competition and authority depending | | Ranking in the map results | Separate system entirely: verify your Google Business Profile and collect reviews | If your site has been live for more than a month and still does not appear when you search its name in quotes, something specific is wrong rather than slow: usually a noindex tag left on from development, no sitemap, or a site built so that every page is invisible without JavaScript. That diagnosis is a different article, and I have written it: [why don't I show up on Google?](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/) And if what you actually wanted to know is how long the building takes before any of this starts, that is [how long does a website take to build?](/insights/how-long-to-build-a-website/) Sources: - Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs (crawling takes a few days to a few weeks): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl - Google Search Central, sitemaps overview: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview - IndexNow protocol (Bing, Seznam, Naver): https://www.indexnow.org/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How long does it take a new website to show up on Google?** Google's official guidance is a few days to a few weeks for crawling. In practice, a small business site with a submitted sitemap is usually findable by name within one to three weeks, while ranking for competitive searches takes months. The single biggest accelerator is submitting your sitemap and requesting indexing in Google Search Console. **Q: Why is my new website not on Google after a month?** At that point it is usually a specific problem, not slowness: a leftover noindex tag from development, no sitemap submitted, no links pointing at the site, or pages that only render with JavaScript. Check the URL Inspection tool in Search Console; it tells you exactly what Google knows about any page. **Q: Does paying for ads make Google index you faster?** No. Google Ads and the organic index are separate systems, and running ads has no effect on crawling or indexing. The free levers, a sitemap, Request Indexing, and internal links, are the real ones. **Q: How long until a website shows up on Bing?** Left alone, sometimes never: I measured a site Bing crawled daily for six months while indexing none of it. Register the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap there, and use IndexNow, and pages start appearing within days to a couple of weeks. Bing also feeds DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and several AI assistants, so it is worth the ten minutes. --- ## How to verify your Google Business Profile Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/verify-google-business-profile/ Published: 2026-08-31 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Google now chooses your verification method for you, most service businesses are given video verification, and Google's guidance says the review takes up to five business days. Verification is the gate to the map results: nothing you do on your website puts you in that box, an unverified profile barely surfaces at all, and the process has grown stricter over the last couple of years. Here is how it works in 2026, including the video method most local businesses get, which I went through myself this summer. ### The methods Google uses now - Video recording: the default for most service businesses. You record your premises, equipment and proof of management live in the app. - Phone or text: a code to the business number, mostly for established categories with existing data. - Email: a code to a business email, less common. - Postcard: a code posted to your address, still used for some storefront businesses, and the slowest at up to two weeks. - Live video call: a scheduled call with a Google agent, sometimes offered when a recording fails. | Method | Typical wait | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | | Video recording | Up to 5 business days | Default for service businesses; live, unbroken take in the app | | Phone or text code | Minutes | Offered mainly to established categories | | Email code | Minutes to hours | Less common | | Postcard | 5 to 14 days | Some storefront businesses; slowest | | Live video call | 2 to 3 days to schedule | Usually offered after a failed recording | Which one you get depends on your category, whether you show an address or serve an area, and how much existing data Google has about the business. If you are a tradesperson, a mobile business or anyone without a public shopfront, expect video. ### Video verification: what Google actually wants to see Google's help page is specific: the video must be recorded live through the app in one continuous take, at least 30 seconds, and it must establish three things. Where you are: nearby street signs, neighbouring shops, or your service vehicle in a recognisable location. What the business is: equipment, stock, tools, branded materials, or the work itself. And that you manage it: unlocking the premises or vehicle, opening business software, or showing business documents. Blurry, edited or pre-recorded footage fails. - Plan the shot list before you press record: street sign, premises or van, tools or equipment, then something only the owner could show, like unlocking the door or logging into the till. - Keep it comfortably over the 30-second minimum. A one to two minute video that clearly covers all three requirements beats a rushed forty seconds. - Do it in daylight, and narrate as you go. You are making a case to a human reviewer, so make it easy for them. - If it is rejected, read the reason, fix that one thing, and go again. Rejections are usually about a missing element, not the production quality. ### How long it takes Google says video reviews take up to five business days. Phone, text and email codes are effectively instant once they arrive; postcards take five to fourteen days. Once verified, expect your profile to take a few weeks to settle into the map results as Google builds confidence in it. Verification opens the door, it does not jump the queue. ### After verification: the part most businesses skip **97%** of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, and 41% now always do. A verified profile with no reviews is a shop with the lights off. (source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026) **45%** of consumers used an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Perplexity to find local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% the year before. Those tools lean on the same profile, review and website data, so the work pays twice. (source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026) A verified but empty profile still loses to a worked one. Fill every field: categories, services, service areas, hours, photos of real work. Then collect reviews steadily, because review count and recency are the strongest signals you control in the map results, and reply to every one. I have written up the full playbook in [how to rank on Google Maps](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/) and [how to get more Google reviews](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/). And make sure the website your profile links to says the same things your profile does, the same name, the same number, the same areas; if you need that put right, that is exactly the sort of thing I do, from the [web design pages](/web-design/). Sources: - Google Business Profile Help, Verify your business with a video recording: https://support.google.com/business/answer/14271705 - Google Business Profile Help, How to improve your local ranking on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091 - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How long does Google Business Profile verification take in 2026?** Video verification, the most common route for service businesses, takes up to five business days for review according to Google's own guidance. Phone, text and email codes are near-instant; postcards take up to two weeks. Some video submissions clear in hours if automated checks pass. **Q: Can I choose how to verify my Google Business Profile?** No. Google decides the method based on your business category, whether you display an address, and the data it already holds. Most tradespeople and service-area businesses are given video verification whether they would prefer it or not. **Q: Why does my business not show in Google Maps at all?** The usual reason is an unverified profile, or no profile. Search your business name in Google Maps: if nothing appears, create the profile at google.com/business and complete verification. If a profile exists but someone else made it, use the claim process on the listing itself. **Q: My verification video keeps getting rejected. What now?** Rejections are nearly always a missing requirement rather than video quality: no proof of location, or nothing that shows you manage the business. Re-record covering all three elements explicitly, in one unbroken take, in daylight. If it fails repeatedly, the support flow can offer a live video call with an agent instead. --- ## How much does a web designer cost in Croydon? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/web-designer-cost-croydon/ Published: 2026-08-31 (updated 2026-09-14) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Ask five Croydon businesses what they paid for their website and you will hear five very different numbers, sometimes for very similar sites. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because "web designer" covers everything from a teenager with a Wix login to a ten-person agency with an office to pay for. This guide explains what you will actually be quoted locally, why the numbers vary so much, and how to compare quotes that look nothing alike. ### The three prices you will actually be quoted | Route | Typical cost | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | | DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) | £10 to £40 a month, forever | You do the work yourself in their editor. Quick to start, but the monthly fee never ends and the site cannot leave the platform. | | Freelancer / one-person studio | £200 to £1,500 one-off | One person designs and builds it. Prices vary with experience and how custom the build is. This is where I sit. | | Agency | £2,000 to £10,000+, often with a retainer | A team, a process, account management. Right for complex projects; overkill for most local businesses. | None of these is automatically wrong. A market stall does not need an agency, and a national e-commerce operation should not be built on a £199 one-pager. The waste happens when a small local business pays agency prices for a five-page brochure site, or locks itself into a builder subscription that costs more over three years than a hand-built site it would own outright. ### What actually moves the price - How many pages and how custom. A one-page site with your services, photos and contact details is a different job from a twenty-page site with online booking. - Who writes the words and supplies the photos. If the designer has to write your content from scratch, expect that in the price. - Features. Booking systems, payments, customer accounts and anything bespoke move a project from hundreds into thousands, whoever builds it. - Ongoing care. Hosting, backups, updates and changes are either bundled into a monthly fee, quoted hourly, or quietly missing from the quote. Ask. - The overhead you are funding. An agency quote includes the project manager, the office and the sales pipeline. A freelancer quote mostly includes the work. ### What I charge, so you have a real local number I run an independent studio in Croydon and my prices are fixed and public: £199 for a one-page starter site, £499 for a standard small-business site, £999 for the pro tier, and custom builds from £1,999. Care plans run from £29 a month for hosting, backups and monitoring, and if you would rather not pay upfront, Pay Monthly rolls a standard build and care into £59 a month with nothing upfront. The price is agreed before I start and does not move, and the site and domain are yours outright. Full details are on the [websites page](/websites/) and the [care plans page](/care-plans/). I publish these not because mine are the only fair prices, but because a real number makes every other quote easier to judge. If someone quotes you £4,000 for a five-page site, they should be able to explain, specifically, what the extra £3,500 buys. ### Questions that save you money - Do I own the site and the domain outright? If the answer involves a monthly fee to keep your own website, walk away. - Is the price fixed before you start? Hourly quotes on a vague brief are how £800 becomes £2,400. - Who actually builds it? Some agencies outsource the build. You are paying local prices for offshore work with a markup. - What happens after launch? Hosting, backups, and small changes: get the monthly number in writing. - Can I see three sites you built that are still live? Live and fast today beats a beautiful portfolio PDF. ### Croydon and nearby Being local matters less for the build, and more for accountability: you can meet the person, and they cannot vanish behind a support ticket. I work across the borough and the towns around it, with dedicated pages for [website design in Addiscombe](/web-design/addiscombe/), [Selsdon](/web-design/selsdon/), [Morden](/web-design/morden/), [Purley](/web-design/purley/) and [Coulsdon](/web-design/coulsdon/), plus the wider [web design by area](/web-design/) hub. The prices are identical everywhere; the pages exist because the neighbourhoods and the businesses in them are genuinely different. ### Frequently asked **Q: How much does a web designer cost in Croydon?** As a working range: DIY builders run £10 to £40 a month indefinitely, freelancers typically £200 to £1,500 one-off depending on scope, and agencies from £2,000 upwards. My own fixed prices start at £199 for a one-page site and £499 for a standard small-business site, with care plans from £29 a month. **Q: Is a cheap £200 website worth having?** If it is built properly, yes, for the right business. A fast one-page site that names your service and area, shows real photos and makes your number tappable will beat a bloated £2,000 template site that takes six seconds to load. What makes cheap sites bad is rushed cookie-cutter work, not the price. **Q: Why do agencies cost so much more than freelancers?** You are paying for a team and its overhead: project management, meetings, an office, a sales function. For complex projects that coordination earns its keep. For a local business site, most of that money is not going into your website. **Q: Do web designers charge monthly or one-off?** Both models exist. One-off for the build plus an optional monthly care plan is the cleanest: you own the site and can leave anytime. Be careful with all-in monthly deals where you never own anything; if you stop paying, the site vanishes. My Pay Monthly is £59 a month and you still end up owning the site. --- ## What does website maintenance cost in the UK? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/website-maintenance-cost-uk/ Published: 2026-08-31 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital A professionally maintained small business website in the UK costs £25 to £150 a month in 2026, with bare hosting below that and agency retainers well above it. The spread exists because wildly different things are sold under the same name: one £50 plan includes an hour of a human's time every month; another £50 plan is automated hosting with a support inbox. This guide gives you the real ranges, what should be inside them, and how to tell which kind you are being sold. ### The UK market in 2026, in one table | What you are buying | Typical monthly cost | What is included | | --- | --- | --- | | Bare hosting, no humans | £3 to £20 | A server, an SSL certificate, maybe automated backups. Nobody is watching your site. | | Maintenance plan, small business site | £25 to £150 | Hosting plus updates, backups, monitoring, and some amount of human help each month. This is where most local businesses should be. | | Agency retainer | £300 to £500+ | A team on call, project management, and usually a wider marketing scope than one website. | Independent UK price guides published in 2026 land in the same place: most quote £25 to £100 a month as the normal band for a small business site, with £75 to £150 for busier WordPress sites carrying forms, plugins and regular content changes. If a quote sits far outside those bands in either direction, ask what makes it different. ### What the money should actually buy **91%** of the 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities logged in 2025 were in plugins, a 42% rise on the year before. Unapplied plugin updates are the front door for most small-site hacks, and applying them is exactly the unglamorous work a maintenance plan exists to do. (source: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026) - Hosting and an SSL certificate that renews itself, because an expired certificate takes your site offline with a security warning. - Backups made daily and stored somewhere other than the same server, and, crucially, tested. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup. - Software and security updates, applied and checked. Unpatched plugins remain the most common way small business sites get hacked. - Uptime monitoring, so the person maintaining the site finds out it is down before you or your customers do. - Human time for changes: new prices, new photos, a new page. This is the part that varies most between plans, so pin down how much is included and what happens when you exceed it. ### My own prices, for comparison I publish mine so you have a real benchmark rather than a range: Hosted at £29 a month (hosting, SSL, daily backups, monitoring, domain and email management), Care at £49 (everything in Hosted plus content changes live within 48 hours, about an hour a month), and Growth at £129 (everything in Care plus a new page every month, Google Business Profile posts and a monthly report). All monthly rolling, no exit fees, and you keep the site and domain if you leave. Full detail is on the [care plans page](/care-plans/). ### Two questions that expose a bad plan First: what happens if I stop paying? The right answer is that you keep your site, your domain and your content, and only the ongoing service stops. If cancelling means losing the website itself, that is not maintenance, it is rental, and it prices your exit at the cost of a whole new site. Second: what exactly was done last month? A good provider can answer in specifics: updates applied, backups verified, changes made, uptime. If the honest answer is nothing, you have found out what you are paying for. I have written up how to check what you would actually walk away with in [do you own your website?](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/) Sources: - EdTheDev, Website maintenance cost UK 2026 (£25 to £100 a month for small business sites): https://edthedev.co.uk/blog/website-maintenance-cost-uk/ - UK Web Works, Website maintenance cost UK 2026 budgeting guide: https://ukwebworks.co.uk/website-maintenance-cost-uk-2026-a-no-nonsense-budgeting-guide/ - Jones Digital care plans, published pricing: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/care-plans/ - Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026 (91% of new vulnerabilities in plugins): https://patchstack.com/whitepaper/state-of-wordpress-security-in-2026/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How much does website maintenance cost per month in the UK?** For a small business site in 2026, typically £25 to £150 a month depending on how much human time is included. Bare hosting runs £3 to £20 but includes no people; agency retainers start around £300. My own plans run £29, £49 and £129 so you can benchmark against a real published price list. **Q: Can I just maintain my website myself?** Yes, if you have the time and remember to keep doing it. The tasks are not hard individually: updates, backups, renewals, monitoring. The risk is that they are invisible until they fail, and most owners stop doing them within a few months. If you go DIY, at minimum set up automated offsite backups and uptime monitoring. **Q: Is website maintenance worth it for a small static site?** A static site removes the biggest risk, hackable plugins, so it needs less. It still needs hosting, a renewing certificate, backups and someone noticing if it goes down, which is why bare-bones plans around £29 exist. What a static site does not need is a £150 a month WordPress-style plan. **Q: What is usually not included in a maintenance plan?** Redesigns, new features, large amounts of new content, and SEO campaigns. Those are project work and should be quoted separately. A fair plan states its monthly included time and tells you when a request goes beyond it, before doing the work. --- ## Why isn't my website getting any enquiries? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/why-no-enquiries-from-website/ Published: 2026-07-20 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: if your website is not bringing in enquiries, it is almost always one of six things, and every one of them is fixable. Either people are not finding the site, it loads too slowly and they leave, it makes getting in touch harder than it should be, it does not look like a business you can trust, it offers no proof that you are any good, or it falls apart on a phone. The trick is to check them in order, from the top of the funnel down, because fixing the contact form is pointless if nobody ever reaches it. ### 1. Is anyone actually seeing it? This is the one to rule out first, because you cannot get an enquiry from a visitor you never had. Plenty of sites that owners think are underperforming are simply invisible: they do not rank for the things people search, and they are not in the Google map results. If your site only shows up when someone types your exact business name, that is not an enquiries problem, it is a visibility problem. Start with [why your business does not show up on Google](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/) and [how to rank on Google Maps](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/). ### 2. Is it too slow? **53%** of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load (source: Google / SOASTA research, Think with Google) Speed is a silent killer because you never see the people it costs you. They land, the page is still chewing on a giant image or a pile of plugins, and they are gone before it finishes, straight back to the next result. A slow site does not announce itself; it just quietly leaks half your visitors. Most template and page-builder sites are slow by default. A hand-built site should load in well under a second, and you can check yours in the [free audit](/free-website-audit/). ### 3. Is it obvious how to get in touch? A visitor who wants to contact you should never have to hunt. Your phone number belongs at the top of every page, tappable on a phone. There should be one obvious next step, a call, a message, or a booking, and it should be visible without scrolling. It sounds basic, but a huge number of small business sites bury the contact details on a separate page and lose the person who was ready to act. If someone has to work to give you money, most will not bother. ### 4. Does it look like it can be trusted? **75%** of people judge a business's credibility on its website design alone (source: Stanford Web Credibility Research) People decide whether to trust you in the first second, before they have read a word, and they decide largely on how the site looks. A dated design, stock photos of people who do not work for you, a broken layout, or a Not secure warning in the browser bar all quietly say do not risk it. This is not about being flashy. It is about looking like a real, current, credible business, because that is what earns the enquiry. ### 5. Where is your proof? The vast majority of people read reviews before they choose a local business, and a site with no evidence that anyone has ever hired you asks a stranger to go first. Real reviews, real photos of real jobs, names, logos of places you have worked, any accreditation: this is the difference between a brochure and a decision. If you have happy customers but nothing on the site to show for it, you are leaving enquiries on the table. Here is [how to get more Google reviews](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/) to put them to work. ### 6. Does it work on a phone? More than half of all web visits now happen on a phone, and for a local business searching on the move it is usually more. If your site was built for a desktop and merely tolerates mobile, with tiny text, buttons too fiddly to tap and a menu that fights back, most of your visitors are getting your worst version. A site should be built for the small screen first, then scaled up, not the other way round. ### How to find out which one it is You do not have to guess. Run your address through the [free website audit](/free-website-audit/) and it scores your site out of 100 across speed, mobile, SEO, security and how well it wins customers, which maps almost exactly onto the six reasons above. That tells you where the leak is. If the honest answer is that the site is too far gone to patch, [here is what a proper rebuild costs](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/), and [what we build](/websites/). Either way, an enquiries problem is a solvable problem once you know which of the six it is. Sources: - Think with Google, Mobile page speed and abandonment benchmarks: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/ - Stanford Web Credibility Research, Persuasive Technology Lab: https://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/ ### Frequently asked **Q: My website gets visitors but no enquiries. Why?** If traffic is coming but nobody contacts you, the problem is further down: usually the site is slow, hides the contact details, does not look trustworthy, has no reviews, or is awkward on a phone. Fix those in order. If you get almost no visitors in the first place, it is a visibility problem instead, and that is where to start. **Q: How do I know if my website is too slow?** Run it through a free audit and look at the speed score, or just load it on a phone on mobile data and count. If it takes more than about three seconds to become usable, you are losing around half your mobile visitors before they see anything. Most of that is fixable by cutting page weight, and a hand-built site avoids it in the first place. **Q: Do I need a new website, or just changes to this one?** Often a few targeted fixes are enough: speed, a clear phone number, some real reviews and a mobile tidy-up. Sometimes the underlying site is dated or built on a slow platform and patching it costs more effort than it is worth. The free audit will show you which, and I will give you a straight answer rather than talk you into a rebuild you do not need. --- ## Will ChatGPT and AI search bring my business customers? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/will-ai-search-bring-customers/ Published: 2026-07-20 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: yes, but not by magic, and not as much as the headlines suggest yet. AI tools like ChatGPT and the AI answers now sitting on top of Google are starting to send local businesses real work. But the way you earn a recommendation from them is not some new dark art. It is the same solid groundwork that gets you found on Google in the first place. So the honest position is this: AI search is a real, growing channel worth being ready for, and the good news is that getting ready for it is the same job as getting your website right. **800M+** weekly users were reported for ChatGPT by late 2025, one sign of how many journeys now start with a question to an assistant (source: OpenAI, reported October 2025) ### What is actually changing More people now open an assistant and simply ask, rather than typing keywords into a search box. Someone might ask ChatGPT who can build them a website in Croydon, or ask for the best rated plumber near them, and get a short list back in a sentence instead of ten blue links. At the same time, Google itself now puts an AI generated answer above the normal results for many searches. So some journeys that used to start with a search now start with a question, and the business that gets named in the answer gets the head start. ### The honest bit: it is not replacing Google yet **25%** was Gartner's 2024 prediction for how much traditional search volume would fall by 2026 as people switch to AI (source: Gartner, February 2024) That prediction made a lot of noise, and it is worth knowing that it has not really played out. Search has not collapsed by a quarter; it is evolving, not disappearing. Running an AI answer is far more expensive than a plain search, and for now the majority of local customers still find you the ordinary way, through Google search and the map pack. So do not panic, and do not abandon what works to chase a shiny new thing. Treat AI as a growing extra channel that rewards the same fundamentals, not as a reason to throw out your plan. ### How an AI actually decides who to recommend Here is the part that makes it simple. An assistant cannot recommend a business it cannot find or cannot read. It builds its answers from the open web, from Google, from reviews and from directories. So it leans towards businesses whose information is clear, consistent and easy to digest. In practice, the things that make you visible to AI are almost exactly the things that make you visible to Google: - A fast, well-structured website an engine can read easily, not a slow, script-heavy one it struggles with. - The same business name, phone number and address everywhere it appears: your site, your [Google Business Profile](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/), and any directories. - Real reviews in decent numbers, because assistants lean on them just as people do. Here is [how to get more](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/). - Plain content that answers the real questions customers ask, in clear language, so it is easy to quote back. - Being mentioned and linked from other trusted sites, which is what tells any engine you are real. There is no separate AI trick hiding underneath that list. It is the same credibility, clarity and consistency that has always won on Google, just now read by a machine that answers in a sentence. ### What this actually means for you You do not need an AI strategy. You need the groundwork done properly: a fast, clear website you own, a claimed and consistent Google Business Profile, a steady trickle of real reviews, and honest content that answers what your customers actually ask. Do that and you become the answer whether the question is typed into Google or spoken to an assistant. If you are not sure how your site measures up on the basics that both rely on, the [free website audit](/free-website-audit/) scores exactly those, and [why your business does not show up on Google](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/) covers the visibility side. The businesses that win the next few years will not be the ones chasing every new tool the week it launches. They will be the ones whose basics are so solid that every engine, old or new, keeps pointing to them. Get the foundation right and you are ready for whatever the search box turns into next. Sources: - Gartner, Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026 Due to AI Chatbots: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents - TechCrunch, Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-has-hit-800m-weekly-active-users/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Should I be worried that AI will kill Google and my website with it?** No. AI answers are changing how some people search, but they are additive rather than a replacement, and predictions of a sudden collapse in search have not come true. If anything your website matters more, because a clear, credible site is exactly what both Google and the AI tools read to decide who to recommend. **Q: How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT or AI answers?** By being findable and readable. Have a fast, well-structured website, keep your business name, phone and address identical everywhere, collect real reviews, and answer common customer questions in plain content. Assistants build their answers from that kind of clear, consistent information, so the businesses that do the fundamentals well are the ones that get named. **Q: Do I need to do anything special or technical for AI search?** Not really, and be wary of anyone selling a magic AI package. The groundwork is the same as good ordinary SEO: speed, clarity, consistency, reviews and honest content. Get those right, which a proper website does by default, and you are already in good shape for AI answers without any special effort. --- ## Do you actually own your Wix or Squarespace website? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/do-you-own-your-website/ Published: 2026-07-19 (updated 2026-09-21) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: probably not. If your site is on Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or a similar builder, you are renting the platform, not owning the website. The words look the same, but the difference decides what happens the day you want to change host, hire a new designer, or simply stop paying. Here is what ownership really means, in plain terms. ### Renting versus owning, in plain English A builder site is a subscription. Your pages live inside the company's system as a database plus their own rendering engine, and you pay every month to keep them switched on. An owned site is a set of files, written in standard code, that sit on hosting you control, tied to a domain in your name. One you operate for as long as you pay; the other is an asset you hold. ### The test: can you take it with you? The simplest way to tell what you own is to ask what you could walk away with. On a builder, the honest answer is very little. | Platform | What you can take with you | | --- | --- | | Wix | No full export. Text and images by hand only; the design, layout and code stay behind | | Squarespace | A basic feed of blog posts and page text; the design does not come, and moving out is unsupported | | Owned custom site | Everything: the files, the code, the structure and the domain | Wix is the strictest: there is no full export at all, so the work you put in over years cannot be extracted to anywhere else. Squarespace lets you take a basic content feed but not the design, and does not support migrating a site out. Reviewers who grade the small print put Wix's terms of service at 38 out of 100 for fairness, largely because of this lock-in. **38 / 100** fairness score given to Wix's terms of service by independent reviewers, driven largely by data and design lock-in (source: ToS Watchdog, Wix terms of service review 2026) ### Why ownership actually matters Three practical reasons. First, leverage: if you own the files you can move host or hire a different developer whenever you like, so no one has you over a barrel. Second, cost: an owned site is a one-off, not a fee that runs forever. Third, resilience: if the builder raises prices, changes its rules, or you simply forget to pay, an owned site does not vanish overnight. Renting is fine, right up until the day it is not. ### If the answer turns out to be no Ownership is really four separate questions: who holds the domain, who controls the DNS, who can log in, and who owns the copyright. Most people find at least one of them is not them. Each has its own fix, so here is where to go next depending on what you found. - You are still with your designer and want to leave cleanly: [what to ask for when you leave your web designer](/insights/website-handover-checklist/) is the eleven item list to send, in one email, before you announce anything. - You cannot reach whoever built it: [my web designer has disappeared](/insights/web-designer-disappeared/) covers getting the domain and the site back when nobody is answering. - The domain is in the wrong name, or with the wrong provider: [how to transfer a .uk domain name](/insights/how-to-transfer-a-uk-domain/) walks through both processes and what Nominet charges. - You are choosing between the two big builders rather than leaving one: [Wix vs Squarespace for a UK small business](/insights/wix-vs-squarespace-uk/) compares the real prices and what each one lets you export. ### What owning a site looks like with Jones Digital When I build a site, it is yours: the code, the content and the domain, in your name, handed over at the end. Hosting is inexpensive and you control it, upkeep is optional from £29 a month rather than mandatory, and if you ever want to take the whole thing elsewhere, you can, with my blessing and a copy of the files. That is the difference between an asset and a subscription. A site you own from £199, [built for your trade](/for/). If you are still weighing the platforms, here is [Wix vs a custom website](/insights/wix-vs-custom-website/) and [Squarespace vs a custom website](/insights/squarespace-vs-custom-website/). Sources: - ToS Watchdog, Wix terms of service review: https://terms.law/ToS-Watchdog/website-builders/wix/ - Squarespace Help Center, importing and exporting content: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814028-Importing-and-exporting-content ### Frequently asked **Q: Do you own your website on Wix?** No. On Wix you rent the platform monthly, and there is no full export, so the design, layout and code cannot be moved elsewhere. If you stop paying, the site goes offline. You can save your text and images by hand, but not the site itself. **Q: Can you export a Squarespace website?** Only partly. Squarespace lets you export a basic feed of blog posts and some page text, but the design and layout do not come with you, and migrating a full site out is not officially supported. In practice, leaving Squarespace means rebuilding the site somewhere new. **Q: What does it mean to own your website?** It means the actual files and code that make up your site, plus the domain name, are yours and sit on hosting you control. You can move them to a new host or developer at any time. That is different from a builder, where you rent access to a site that only exists inside the company's system. --- ## Is a Facebook page enough, or do you need a website? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/facebook-page-or-website/ Published: 2026-07-19 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: a Facebook page is a great place to be discovered, but on its own it quietly costs you customers. Most people who hear about you will look you up before they get in touch, and if all they find is a page they cannot fully trust, some will not call. The strongest setup is both: Facebook to reach people, and a website you own to turn them into customers. Here is why. ### Facebook reach is not what it was The first problem is arithmetic. Facebook's feed is pay-to-play now, and organic reach has collapsed: studies put the share of your own followers who see a typical unpaid post at just 1 to 6 percent. You built the audience, but you have to pay to reach it, and every post competes with everyone else's. A website flips that: people arrive because they searched for what you do, and you do not rent the connection to them. **1 to 6%** the share of a Facebook page's own followers who see a typical unpaid post, as organic reach has declined (source: OnDeck, Facebook page vs website 2026) ### People check before they buy The second problem is trust. Before someone books a tradesperson, a salon or a clinic, they look them up, and a real website is the credibility signal they are looking for. Around 81% of people research a business online before making a purchase, and a business with a website is rated markedly more trustworthy than one without. A local business with no website is estimated to lose a fifth to a third of referred customers at that verification step, the moment between hearing about you and deciding to contact you. **81%** of consumers research a business online before they buy, and a business with a website is seen as around 41% more trustworthy than one without (source: DreamHost, 2026 local business trust index) ### What you own, and what you only rent A Facebook page sits on someone else's platform. They own the audience, they set the rules, and they can change the algorithm, restrict your page, or add fees whenever they like, with no input from you. A website is yours: the content, the design, the domain and the customer contact all belong to you. If Facebook changed overnight, a business that also has a website still has its front door. | | Facebook page | Your own website | | --- | --- | --- | | Who owns the audience | Facebook does | You do | | Reach of a normal post | 1 to 6% of followers | Anyone searching for you | | Found on Google | Barely | Yes, if built for it | | Trust with new customers | Limited | A real credibility signal | | The rules can change | Any time, without you | You are in control | ### The right answer is both None of this means delete your Facebook page. It is genuinely useful for discovery, updates and social proof, and it drives people toward you. The point is where they land next. Use Facebook to be found, and send that traffic to a website you own, where the phone number, the prices and the booking live, and where Google can find you too. That is the setup that turns attention into work. ### You do not need much to start A website does not have to be a big project. A fast one-page site with your services, your area, your reviews and a clear way to get in touch is enough to capture the customers a Facebook page alone lets slip. It starts at £199, it is [built for your trade](/for/), and it is live in about five days. Wondering if it is worth it at all? Here is [whether you actually need a website in 2026](/insights/do-i-need-a-website/). Sources: - OnDeck, Facebook page vs website: which to use: https://www.ondeck.com/resources/facebook-page-vs-website-which-use - DreamHost, 2026 local business trust index: https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/dreamhost-2026-local-business-trust-index/ - AIOSEO, Facebook vs website for small business: https://aioseo.com/facebook-vs-website-which-is-best-for-small-business/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?** For most local businesses, yes. A Facebook page is good for being discovered, but organic reach is now only a few percent of your followers, and many customers will not fully trust a business they cannot find on a proper website. The best setup is both: Facebook to reach people and a website you own to convert them. **Q: Is a Facebook page free and a website not?** A Facebook page is free to set up but costs you in reach, since you increasingly have to pay to be seen, and you do not own the audience. A website is a one-off from £199 that you own outright, works on Google, and does not charge you to reach the followers you already have. **Q: Can a website really bring in more customers than Facebook?** They do different jobs. Facebook helps people discover you; a website helps them decide. Because around 81% of people check a business online before buying, a website often captures customers a Facebook page alone would lose at the point of decision. Used together, they work better than either alone. --- ## GoDaddy website builder vs a custom site: is it good enough to rank? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/godaddy-website-builder-vs-custom/ Published: 2026-07-19 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: GoDaddy's website builder is the quickest way to get a business online, and if you need a simple digital business card live this afternoon it does the job. But it hides the controls that decide whether you ever rank on Google, and its low starting price rises once the introductory term ends. For a business that wants to be found and to grow, a custom build gives you the control GoDaddy holds back. Here is the honest comparison. ### What GoDaddy's builder is good at Credit where it is due. GoDaddy's builder uses an AI design tool that assembles a working, tidy site in minutes from a few answers, and it is about as fast and beginner-friendly as this gets. Load speed on the finished sites is generally decent. If your goal is simply to exist online this week, with an address, opening hours and a phone number, it is a reasonable starting point. ### The introductory-price trap GoDaddy leans on low introductory pricing, then renews at a noticeably higher rate. The builder starts at a small monthly fee for the first term, roughly £8 to £17 a month depending on tier, but the renewal is where the real cost shows up, with the store plan sitting at the top of that range before it climbs. As with every builder, it is a fee you keep paying for as long as the site exists, and you built it yourself. Always check the renewal price, not the first-year headline. ### The SEO controls it hides from you This is the real problem for anyone who wants to be found. GoDaddy's builder gives you no control over your sitemap.xml or robots.txt, the two files that tell Google what to crawl and index, and it offers no schema markup and no access to the underlying HTML or CSS. Its SEO Wizard is fine for a beginner but lacks the depth to compete for a ranking. On a custom site those controls are yours, which is a large part of why a hand-built page tends to rank better for the same effort. **No access** GoDaddy's builder gives you no control of your sitemap.xml or robots.txt and no schema markup, the technical levers that decide how Google crawls and ranks you (source: Cybernews, GoDaddy Website Builder review 2026) | | GoDaddy builder | Custom (Jones Digital) | | --- | --- | --- | | Cost | Low intro rate, higher on renewal, forever | £199 to £999, once | | Who builds it | You do, AI-assisted | I do | | Do you own it? | No, you rent the platform | Yes, site and domain | | SEO control | No sitemap, robots or schema access | Full control of all three | | Design | Rigid grid, no CSS or HTML | Designed around your business | | Best for | A quick digital business card | A site built to be found and grow | ### When GoDaddy is genuinely enough If you need a single-page presence live today, you are not trying to rank against competitors, and you are happy paying monthly and doing it yourself, GoDaddy's builder is a fair, fast option. It is a digital business card, and sometimes that is all a business needs to start. ### When a custom build wins If you want to be found on Google, look distinct from every other GoDaddy template, and own the site rather than rent it, a custom build is the better call. You get the sitemap, the structured data, the speed and the design control that decide whether customers ever see you, plus a site that is yours to keep. A one-page build from £199, [made for your trade](/for/), live in about five days. If GoDaddy is where your domain already lives, here is [why you might not be showing up on Google](/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/) yet. Sources: - Cybernews, GoDaddy Website Builder review 2026: https://cybernews.com/best-website-builders/godaddy-website-builder-review/ - TechRadar, GoDaddy Website Builder review 2026: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/godaddy-website-builder - Website Builder Expert, GoDaddy review 2026: https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/website-builders/godaddy-review/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Is GoDaddy good for SEO?** Only at a basic level. GoDaddy's builder has an SEO Wizard that helps beginners with titles and descriptions, but it gives you no control over your sitemap.xml or robots.txt, no schema markup, and no access to the HTML, which are the levers that decide competitive rankings. It is fine to simply exist online; it is limited if you want to be found ahead of rivals. **Q: Why does GoDaddy get more expensive?** GoDaddy advertises a low introductory price for the first term, then renews at a higher rate. It is a common builder tactic, so always check the renewal price, not just the first-year figure. Either way it is a monthly cost that continues for as long as the site is live. **Q: Is GoDaddy or a custom website better for a small business?** GoDaddy is better if you need something live today and only want a simple presence. A custom site is better if you want to rank on Google, look distinct, and own the site outright. Many businesses start on GoDaddy and move to a built site once they are ready to be found properly. --- ## Squarespace vs a custom-built website: an honest 2026 comparison Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/squarespace-vs-custom-website/ Published: 2026-07-19 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: Squarespace is the best-looking of the big builders, and if you are happy to build the site yourself and pay a monthly fee for as long as it exists, it is a reasonable choice. If you want it done for you, loading fast, ranking well, and actually owned, a custom build is the better long-term call. Here is the honest comparison, including the transaction fees and the lock-in that most Squarespace guides leave out. ### What Squarespace actually is Squarespace is a subscription website builder known for polished, design-led templates. You rent the platform monthly and assemble the site yourself inside its editor. A custom-built site is designed and coded for you, then handed over: the files, the domain, all of it. One is a monthly service you operate; the other is an asset someone builds once and gives to you. ### The real cost, plan by plan Squarespace has no free plan. In the UK its 2026 tiers are Basic at £12 a month, Core at £17, Plus at £29, and Advanced at £79, and those are the discounted annual prices; pay month to month and they are higher again. That is £144 to £948 a year, every year, and you are still the one building and maintaining it. | | Squarespace | Custom (Jones Digital) | | --- | --- | --- | | Cost | £12 to £79 a month, forever | £199 to £999, once | | Who builds it | You do | I do | | Do you own it? | No, you rent the platform | Yes, site and domain | | Sales fees | 2% on the Basic plan, plus card fees | None, you keep every penny | | Speed | Heavier templates, slower on mobile | Built to load in under a second | | If you leave | The design does not come with you | You keep everything | ### The transaction fees nobody mentions Squarespace's cheapest Basic plan charges a 2% Squarespace fee on every sale, on top of the usual card-processor fee. Selling digital content or memberships instead? Basic takes 7% and Core takes 5%. To drop the 2% sales fee you have to move up to Core at £17 a month. It is a quiet tax on exactly the small businesses least able to absorb it, and a custom site with your own checkout charges you nothing beyond the card fee. **2% + 7%** Squarespace's Basic plan adds a 2% fee on product sales and up to 7% on digital content and memberships, on top of card fees (source: Squarespace Help Center, transaction fees 2026) ### Speed and SEO: the part that costs you customers Squarespace templates are attractive, but they carry a lot of styling and script to make the drag-and-drop editor work, and that weight lands hardest on a phone, where most local searches happen. Speed is both a ranking signal and a conversion one: a one-second delay in load time is linked to roughly 7% fewer conversions, and 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds. A lean hand-built site loads in under a second, so Google and your customer have no reason to leave. **53%** of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load (source: Digital Applied, page speed statistics 2026) ### The part that matters most: can you take it with you? This is the one to understand before you start. Squarespace lets you export a basic feed of blog posts and page text, but the design, layout and structure do not come with you, and migrating a site out of Squarespace is not officially supported. In practice, if you ever outgrow it, you are paying to rebuild from scratch. A custom site is the opposite: the code and the domain are yours from day one, so moving host or designer later costs you nothing but a copy. If you want the fuller picture on this, here is [whether you really own your Wix or Squarespace site](/insights/do-you-own-your-website/). ### When Squarespace is the right call Honestly: if you enjoy building it yourself, you want to tweak it often, your budget is a few pounds a month rather than a one-off, and you value a good-looking template over speed and ownership, Squarespace is a sensible start. Plenty of businesses launch on it and move to a built site once the work is coming in. There is no shame in that path. If you are weighing the builders against each other, here is [Wix vs a custom website](/insights/wix-vs-custom-website/) too. ### When a custom build wins If you would rather not spend your evenings on it, if you want it to load instantly and rank well, and if you would rather own an asset than rent a subscription, a custom build is better value the moment you keep the site more than a year or two. For a local business that wants it done properly and left to work, that is the whole point. A one-page site from £199, [built for your trade](/for/), live in about five days, and yours to keep. Not sure what a fair price is? Here is [what a website should actually cost](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/). Sources: - Squarespace Help Center, transaction fees and payment processing rates: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/27853679334157-Transaction-fees-and-payment-processing-rates - Website Builder Expert, Squarespace pricing 2026: https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/website-builders/squarespace-pricing/ - Digital Applied, page speed statistics 2026: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/page-speed-statistics-2026-revenue-impact ### Frequently asked **Q: Is Squarespace good for SEO?** It is fine for the basics. Squarespace produces clean titles and metadata and handles small sites well, but its templates are heavier than a hand-built site, so they load slower on mobile, which Google counts against you. You also work within the platform's limits on markup and structured data. A custom site gives full control of speed and code, so it tends to rank better for the same effort. **Q: Can I move my site off Squarespace later?** Only partly. You can export a basic feed of blog posts and some page text, but the design, layout and structure stay behind, and Squarespace does not officially support migrating a site out. In practice you rebuild from scratch. That is the main reason to think about ownership before you start, not after. **Q: Is Squarespace cheaper than a custom website?** Cheaper by the month, not over time. At £12 to £79 a month it costs £144 to £948 a year, every year, and the cheapest plan also adds a 2% fee on sales. A one-off Starter build is £199 and you own it, with upkeep optional from £29 a month. Keep the site more than a year and owning it usually wins. --- ## How to choose a web designer, without getting burned Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-to-choose-a-web-designer/ Published: 2026-07-14 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital There is no licence for building websites. Anyone with a laptop can call themselves a web designer, and plenty do, which is why choosing one feels like a gamble. It does not have to be. A web designer's past work, terms and answers to a few direct questions tell you almost everything. This is the checklist I would use if I were hiring one myself. ### Start with the work, not the pitch Every designer will tell you they build beautiful, fast, Google-friendly websites. Ignore the words and check the evidence. Ask for three live sites they built, then open each one on your phone, on mobile data, not office wifi. Does it load in a couple of seconds? Can you find the phone number without hunting? Does anything jump around or break? Then look at when those sites were built and whether the businesses still use them. A portfolio of sites that are still live, still fast and still maintained years later says more than any award. If you want a benchmark for what fast feels like, [this page measures itself in your browser](/lab/speed/) against Google's own thresholds. ### The ownership question, ask it first The most expensive websites are the ones you do not own. Some providers register the domain in their own name, keep the site on a proprietary builder you can never leave, or rent the whole thing back to you for a monthly fee that never ends. Leave, and you lose the site, sometimes even the domain, and start again from nothing. So ask directly: when this is done, who owns the domain, who owns the site files, and can I move it to another host or developer if I choose? The only acceptable answer to all three is you, in your name, yes. Anyone who dodges that question is telling you the answer. ### Questions that reveal how someone actually works - What is the total price, in writing, before you start? A professional gives a fixed figure or a clearly capped range, not a shrug and a day rate. - How long will it take, and what do you need from me? A real process has a timeline and a short list of things they will ask you for. - What happens after launch? Listen for hosting, backups, security updates and how content changes get made, and what each costs. - Who actually does the work? Some agencies sell you a senior and deliver an outsourced junior. With a freelancer or one-person studio, the person you talk to is the person building it. - What happens if I want to leave? The graceful answer covers handing over files, domain and access without a fight or a fee. - How will customers find the site? You want to hear about page titles, local search and Google Business Profile, not a vague promise of 'SEO included'. ### Red flags that predict a bad ending - No live examples you can visit, or examples that are slow and broken on a phone. - The domain gets registered in their name 'to make things easier'. - Guarantees of a number one Google ranking. Nobody can promise that honestly. - No written quote, or a price that keeps growing as the project goes. - Pressure to sign a long contract before you have seen anything. - They cannot explain, in plain English, what you get for the money. ### Cheap, expensive, and what actually matters Price alone tells you little. A £3,000 agency site can be a template with a markup, and a £300 site can be exactly what a small business needs, built well by someone with low overheads. What predicts a good outcome is not the number, it is the clarity around it: a fixed price, a defined scope, ownership in your name, and a plain plan for aftercare. For a fuller picture of what different price points really buy, see [what a website should cost](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/). ### The checklist, in one place | Check | The answer you want | | --- | --- | | Live examples on your phone | Fast, working, still in use by the business | | Domain, files, hosting ownership | Yours, in your name, portable | | Price | Fixed and written down before work starts | | Timeline | A clear date and a short list of what they need from you | | After launch | Named plan for hosting, backups, updates, changes | | Who does the work | The person you are talking to, or a named team | | If you leave | Full handover, no ransom | ### Where I fit, since you will ask This guide is how I think a web designer should be judged, so it is only fair to be judged by it. My prices are fixed and [published](/websites/), every site and domain is owned by the client outright, the person you talk to is the person who builds it, and the work is live for you to check: [see it here](/work/). If that sounds like the right shape, [tell me what you need](/contact/). If you choose someone else using this checklist, it has still done its job. ### Frequently asked **Q: Should I choose a freelancer or an agency?** Neither is automatically better. An agency suits large projects that need a team; a freelancer or one-person studio usually means lower overheads, one point of contact and the senior person doing the actual work. Judge either by the same checklist: live work, ownership, fixed price, aftercare. **Q: How much should a website cost for a small business?** In the UK, simple small-business sites commonly run from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand depending on size and who builds it. The number matters less than what it buys: ownership, speed, and a clear plan for what happens after launch. **Q: What questions should I ask a web designer before hiring?** The big five: what is the fixed price, who owns the domain and files, what live sites can I check, what happens after launch, and what happens if I want to leave. Clear answers to those five filter out most bad experiences. **Q: Is it a red flag if a web designer registers the domain for me?** Registering it for you is fine and normal. Registering it in their own name is the red flag. The domain should be in your name from day one so you can leave with it whenever you like. **Q: Can a web designer guarantee first place on Google?** No. Nobody controls Google's results, and an honest designer will say so. What they can promise is the groundwork: a fast site, proper page structure, local search setup and content written around what your customers search for. --- ## Why doesn't my business show up on Google? Eight reasons, and the fixes Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/why-dont-i-show-up-on-google/ Published: 2026-07-14 (updated 2026-08-31) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital "We are not on Google" is the single most common thing a local business owner says to me, and it almost never has a mysterious cause. In nearly every case it comes down to one of eight problems, and every one of them is fixable. This guide walks through them in the order you should check, with the fix for each. ### First, diagnose it in thirty seconds Before fixing anything, find out which problem you have. Open Google and search for site:yourwebsite.co.uk (with your own domain). If Google shows your pages, your site is indexed and your problem is ranking, not visibility. If it shows nothing, your problem is indexing, which is reason one below. Then search for your business name plus your town. If your Google Business Profile does not appear on the right-hand side or in Maps, that is reason two, and it is the one to fix first. ### 1. Google has not indexed your website Google cannot rank pages it has never seen. New sites, sites that moved domain, and sites built with a stray "noindex" setting left on are all invisible, no matter how good they look. The fix is [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console), Google's own free tool. Verify your site, submit your sitemap, and use the URL inspection tool on your homepage. It will tell you plainly whether the page is indexed and, if not, why. Every site I build ships with a clean sitemap, sensible page titles and Search Console set up on day one, because none of the rest of this guide matters if Google has not read the site. ### 2. You have no Google Business Profile, or it is unverified **44%** of clicks in local searches go to the Maps local pack, ahead of organic results (29%) and ads (21%) (source: SeoProfy local SEO statistics, 2026) For a local trade or shop, the map listings at the top of the results page are where the customers actually are. If you have never claimed your free Google Business Profile, or you started and never finished verification, you are not in that box and a competitor is. Claiming, verifying and properly filling in the profile is the highest-value hour a local business can spend on marketing. The full walkthrough is in my guide to [getting on Google Maps and ranking higher](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/). ### 3. Your website never says what you do or where This one is everywhere. The homepage says "Quality you can trust" and "Family run for 20 years", and not once does it say "electrician" or "Sutton". Google ranks pages for the words on them. If the trade and the town are not written on the page, in the page title, in headings and in normal sentences, you will not appear when someone searches for them. The fix is plain writing. Say what you do, where you do it, and what someone should do next, on every page. It is not stuffing keywords, it is making sure the obvious words are actually present. My guide to [what pages a website needs](/insights/what-pages-does-a-website-need/) covers how to structure this without padding. ### 4. Your business details do not match across the web If your website says JD Plumbing Ltd, your Business Profile says J.D. Plumbing and an old directory says JD Plumbing & Heating with a previous phone number, Google is less confident all three are the same business, and confidence is what rankings are built on. Pick one exact name, address and phone number, then make every listing match: website footer, Business Profile, Facebook, and the directories you may have forgotten you are on. ### 5. You have no reviews, or the profile looks abandoned Reviews are a ranking factor and, more importantly, the reason a human picks you over the listing next to you. A profile with no reviews and a photo from 2019 reads as closed. A steady trickle of genuine reviews, each with a short reply, reads as busy and trusted. There is a practical system for this in my guide to [getting more Google reviews](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/), and none of it involves buying anything. ### 6. The site is too slow, or broken on phones Most local searches happen on a phone, and Google ranks with mobile performance in mind. A site that takes six seconds to appear, jumps around while loading, or needs pinching to read is fighting its own rankings. You can see exactly how Google measures this on my [live speed demo](/lab/speed/), which scores a page against Google's own thresholds in your browser. ### 7. You are trying to rank for the wrong words "Plumber" on its own is a national fight you do not need to win. "Emergency plumber Purley" is a local one you can. Look at your pages: are they aimed at the searches your customers actually type, which nearly always include a place or a specific job? One honest page per service, per area you genuinely cover, beats a single vague homepage every time. If you want to see what aiming at the right words looks like in practice, the [website design in Purley](/web-design/purley/) and [Coulsdon](/web-design/coulsdon/) pages are built exactly that way, street names and all. ### 8. Everything is right, it is just new A brand-new website and a fresh Business Profile do not rank on day three. Indexing takes days, settling takes weeks, and competitive local terms can take a few months of steady signals: reviews arriving, the profile posted to, pages being added. New is only a problem when it becomes a reason to stop. Keep the basics ticking and the graph moves in one direction. I have measured what the waiting actually looks like, page by page, in [how long does it take a new website to show up on Google?](/insights/how-long-to-show-up-on-google/) ### Symptom to cause, at a glance | What you see | Most likely cause | The fix | | --- | --- | --- | | site: search shows nothing | Site not indexed | Search Console, submit sitemap, check for noindex | | No map listing for your own name | No or unverified Business Profile | Claim and verify the free profile, fill it in fully | | Indexed but nowhere for "trade + town" | Pages never say the trade or town | Rewrite titles, headings and copy in plain words | | Rankings feel stuck below competitors | Few reviews, thin pages, slow site | Review system, one page per service and area, fix speed | | Different details on old directories | Inconsistent name, address, phone | Pick one exact version, correct every listing | | Site is three weeks old | It is new | Keep adding signals, give it weeks, not days | ### The honest summary None of this is magic, and almost none of it costs money. It is a checklist: indexed site, verified profile, plain words, consistent details, steady reviews, fast pages, sensible targets, and patience. If you would rather hand the whole list to someone who does it every week, [that is exactly what I do](/contact/), including as part of every build. Sources: - SeoProfy, 75 local SEO statistics for 2026: https://seoprofy.com/blog/local-seo-statistics/ - Google, How to improve your local ranking on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091 - Google Search Console (free indexing and search tool): https://search.google.com/search-console ### Frequently asked **Q: How do I check if my website is on Google?** Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk, replacing yourdomain with your actual address. If your pages are listed, you are indexed. If nothing appears, set up Google Search Console, submit your sitemap and inspect your homepage URL to see what is blocking it. **Q: How long does it take for a new website to show up on Google?** Indexing usually happens within days once a sitemap is submitted. Ranking is slower: expect weeks to settle, and a few months to compete for busier local terms. A verified Google Business Profile usually appears for your own business name much faster. **Q: Why does my competitor show up and I don't?** Usually some combination of a more complete Google Business Profile, more and fresher reviews, pages that name the service and the town plainly, and a faster site. All four are checkable, and all four are fixable. **Q: Do I have to pay Google to show up?** No. The Business Profile is free and the organic results are free. Ads are optional and separate. For most local trades, the free work in this guide moves the needle more than a small ad budget does. **Q: Will a new website fix my Google visibility on its own?** Only if the website was the problem. A fast site with plain wording fixes reasons three and six. It does not claim your Business Profile, gather reviews or tidy old directory listings, which is why every build I do includes local search setup, not just design. --- ## How to get more Google reviews for your business Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/ Published: 2026-07-13 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Getting more Google reviews is not complicated: ask every happy customer, at the moment they are happiest, with a direct link that takes one tap. Do that consistently and reply to what comes in, and your reviews, your rating and your ranking all climb together. Here is how to make it a habit. ### Why reviews matter more than ever Reviews have quietly become the thing customers check before they call you, and the bar keeps rising. **97%** of consumers read online reviews, and 41% now always read them before choosing a business, up from 29% a year ago (source: BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026) **68%** will not use a business rated under 4 stars; 31% only use businesses rated 4.5 or higher (source: BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026) People read around ten reviews before they trust a business, and they expect them to be recent. Reviews also feed your Google Maps ranking, so getting them helps you [rank higher on Google Maps](/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/) at the same time. | A customer looking at your rating | What the data says | | --- | --- | | Reads reviews at all | 97% | | Always reads them first | 41% | | Needs at least 4.0 stars | 68% | | Only uses 4.5 stars and above | 31% | ### How to actually get them Most businesses simply never ask, or ask once and give up. The trick is to make asking a routine, and to remove every ounce of friction. - Get your Google review link (in your Business Profile, tap 'Ask for reviews' and copy it). It opens the review box in one tap. - Ask at the peak-happiness moment: the day you finish the job, or right after a customer says something kind. - Ask in person first, then follow up with the link by text or email. A spoken ask plus an easy link converts best. - Make it a habit after every job, not a one-off campaign. A steady trickle beats a sudden burst. - Send one gentle reminder a week later if they forget. Most people mean to and simply get busy. ### Reply to every review Replying is half the value, and most businesses skip it. Businesses that respond to 80% or more of their reviews see a measurable ranking boost, and it shows the next reader that you care. Thank the good ones. Answer the critical ones calmly and factually, in public, then take the detail to a private channel. A handled complaint often reassures readers more than a wall of five stars. ### What not to do (the Google rules) - Do not buy reviews or use review-farm services. Google detects and removes them, and it can get your profile suspended. - Do not offer discounts, freebies or prize draws in exchange for a review. Incentivised reviews break Google's policy. - Do not review-gate: sending happy customers to Google while diverting unhappy ones elsewhere is against the rules. - Do not post fake reviews or review your own business. It is obvious, and it destroys trust when spotted. ### Make it effortless The businesses that win at reviews build the asking into their process so it never gets forgotten. A short review link in your job-done message, your email signature and your invoices does most of the work. On a Growth [care plan](/care-plans/) we set up the prompts and keep them running, so the reviews come in without you having to remember. Reviews are the cheapest marketing you will ever do; you just have to ask. Sources: - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/ - WiserReview, Google review statistics 2026: https://wiserreview.com/blog/google-review-statistics/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How do I ask customers for a Google review?** Ask in person when the job is done and they are happy, then follow up with your Google review link by text or email. The link (from your Business Profile's 'Ask for reviews' button) opens the review box in one tap, which removes the friction that stops most people. Keep it short and personal. **Q: Can I pay for Google reviews or offer a discount for one?** No. Buying reviews and offering any incentive, including discounts, freebies or prize draws, both break Google's policies and can get your profile suspended. You can and should ask freely; you just cannot pay or reward people for leaving one. **Q: How many Google reviews do I need?** There is no magic number, but consistency and rating matter more than a huge total. Since 68% of people want at least 4 stars and consumers read about ten reviews before trusting a business, aim for a steady stream of recent, genuine reviews that keeps your average at 4.5 or above. --- ## How to get your business on Google Maps, and rank higher Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-to-rank-on-google-maps/ Published: 2026-07-13 (updated 2026-08-31) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital To show up on Google Maps you need three things: a complete, verified Google Business Profile, consistent business details across the web, and a steady flow of reviews. Google then ranks you on how relevant you are, how close you are, and how well-known you are. Here is how to get all three working, without the jargon. The verification process itself, including the video method most trades now get, is covered step by step in [how to verify your Google Business Profile](/insights/verify-google-business-profile/). ### Why Google Maps is worth the effort When someone searches for a local business, the map and its three highlighted listings, the local pack, sit right at the top. That is where the clicks go, and it is not close. **44%** of clicks in local searches go to the Maps local pack, ahead of organic results (29%) and ads (21%) (source: SeoProfy local SEO statistics, 2026) **126%** more traffic goes to businesses in the local pack than to those ranked 4 to 10 (source: Resourcera local SEO statistics, 2026) It is also where trust lives. When people research a local business, they trust Google most (66%), then Google Maps (45%), then the company's own website (36%). Nearly half of all Google searches now carry local intent, and most happen on a phone. ### The three things Google ranks you on - Relevance: how well your profile matches what the person searched. This is mostly your category and services. - Distance: how close you are to the searcher. You cannot change your location, but you can make sure Google knows exactly where you are and where you work. - Prominence: how established and trusted you look, driven mainly by reviews, mentions of your business around the web, and your website. ### Fill out your Google Business Profile properly This is the biggest lever you control, and most businesses half-do it. Claim and verify your profile, then complete every field. **~32%** of local pack ranking comes from your Google Business Profile, the single largest factor (source: AdviceLocal local search ranking factors, 2026) - Primary category: the single most important choice. Pick the one that describes your core service exactly. - Name, address and phone: correct and consistent with your website. - Opening hours, including special dates, so you never look closed when you are open. - Photos: real ones, of your work, your team and your premises. Profiles with photos get more clicks. - Services and a plain description of what you do and where. - Service areas: the towns and neighbourhoods you cover. ### Reviews are the fuel After your profile, reviews are the biggest driver of Maps ranking, worth roughly 16 to 20% of the decision. It is not just the total: consistency (a steady trickle of new reviews) and your response rate both matter. Businesses that reply to 80% or more of their reviews see a measurable ranking boost. Here is [how to get more Google reviews](/insights/how-to-get-more-google-reviews/). | What Google weighs (local pack) | Roughly | | --- | --- | | Google Business Profile (category, completeness) | ~32% | | Reviews (quantity, velocity, responses) | 16 to 20% | | On-page signals from your website | ~19% | | Proximity, links and mentions | the rest | ### Keep your details identical everywhere Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number across the web. If your details differ between your website, Google, Yell and Facebook, it gets confused and trusts you less. Pick one exact format and use it everywhere. This is also why a directory listing spree with sloppy details can hurt rather than help. ### It works best with a website behind it Google Maps and a fast website you own are a pair, not an either-or. Your profile wins the local search; your website is where people decide to call, and it feeds Google the on-page signals that back your profile up. A [website built for your trade](/for/), loading in under a second, is what turns a Maps listing into an enquiry. If you are weighing it all up, start with [do you actually need a website](/insights/do-i-need-a-website/). Sources: - SeoProfy, 75 local SEO statistics for 2026: https://seoprofy.com/blog/local-seo-statistics/ - AdviceLocal, 2026 local search ranking factors: https://www.advicelocal.com/blog/2026-local-search-ranking-factors-maps-organic-ai/ - Resourcera, local SEO statistics 2026: https://resourcera.com/data/seo/local-seo-statistics/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How do I get my business on Google Maps?** Create and verify a Google Business Profile at google.com/business. Add your correct name, address, phone, category, hours and photos. Once Google verifies you (usually by postcard, phone or video), your business appears on Maps. Completing every field is what decides how high you rank. **Q: Why isn't my business showing on Google Maps?** Usually one of three things: the profile is not verified yet, the details are incomplete or inconsistent with your website, or you are being outranked by closer, better-reviewed competitors. Verify the profile, complete every field, and start gathering reviews consistently. **Q: How long does it take to rank on Google Maps?** A verified, complete profile can appear within days. Climbing into the top three for competitive searches takes longer, typically weeks to months, and depends on reviews, consistency and how strong your competitors are. It is a steady build, not an overnight switch. --- ## What pages does a small business website need? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/what-pages-does-a-website-need/ Published: 2026-07-13 · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital A small business website needs surprisingly few pages. For most local businesses it is a strong Home, a Services page (or one page per service), an About and a Contact. Everything else is optional. What matters is not the number of pages but that each one has a clear purpose and a clear next step. A tight five-page site that loads fast beats a sprawling fifteen-page one every time. ### The core pages every site needs | Page | Its one job | | --- | --- | | Home | Say who you are, what you do and where, show proof, and point to the next step | | Services | Explain what you offer and, ideally, what it costs | | About | Build trust: the person or team behind the business | | Contact | Make getting in touch effortless: phone, form, and where you are | | Service or area pages | Rank for specific searches like 'plumber in Croydon' | ### Home: the page that works hardest Your home page carries the most weight. In a few seconds it has to answer three questions: what do you do, do you cover my area, and can I trust you. Then it needs to make the next step obvious, a phone number to tap or a short form. Most local searches happen on a phone, so a tappable call button near the top is not optional. **98%** of people use the internet to find a local business, so the right handful of pages does real work (source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey) ### Service pages: where you actually get found This is the part people skip and then wonder why they do not rank. A single 'Services' page that lists everything is fine for humans, but a separate page for each key service, and for each town you cover, is what wins specific searches. Someone typing 'boiler repair in Purley' is far more likely to find a page about boiler repair in Purley than a general services list. This is exactly how we build [pages for each trade](/for/). ### About and Contact: trust and the next step About is where a nervous customer decides you are real. A photo, a sentence on who you are and why you do this, and any accreditations do more than a page of marketing speak. Contact should be the easiest page on the site: your number, a short form, your hours, and a map if you have premises. Nothing clever, nothing in the way. ### Pages you probably do not need yet - A blog, unless you will genuinely keep it updated. A stale blog looks worse than none. - Separate team pages for a one or two-person business. - Huge galleries. A handful of strong, real photos beats fifty stock ones. - A long history or mission-statement page nobody reads. Fold the good bits into About. ### Start small, grow deliberately The best small-business sites start lean and add pages with a reason. A one-page site that does its job is a genuinely good start, and it is [live in about five days from £199](/websites/). As you grow, adding a page for a new service or a nearby town is how you keep climbing on Google, which is one of the things a [care plan](/care-plans/) handles for you each month. Build the pages that earn their place, and leave the rest. Sources: - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/ - Think with Google, local search behaviour: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/ ### Frequently asked **Q: How many pages should a small business website have?** For most local businesses, around five: Home, Services, About, Contact, and a page for each key service or area you want to be found for. The exact number matters less than each page having a clear purpose. A focused one-page site is also a perfectly good start. **Q: Do I need a blog on my website?** Only if you will keep it updated. A regularly-written blog helps you rank and shows expertise, but a blog with two posts from three years ago looks worse than no blog at all. If you cannot commit to it, skip it and put that energy into strong service pages. **Q: Can I start with just a one-page website?** Yes, and for many businesses it is the smart first move. A well-built one-page site that loads instantly, shows what you do and takes the call can be live in about five days from £199. You can add more pages later as you grow, without rebuilding. --- ## Wix vs a custom-built website: which is right for you? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/wix-vs-custom-website/ Published: 2026-07-12 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: if you are happy building it yourself, paying a monthly fee for as long as the site exists, and you only need something simple, a builder like Wix or Squarespace is a reasonable choice. If you want it done for you, loading fast, ranking well, and actually owned, a custom build is the better long-term call. Here is the honest comparison, without pretending builders are useless. ### What each one actually is Wix and Squarespace are drag-and-drop website builders. You rent the platform monthly and build the site yourself from templates. A custom-built site is designed and coded for you on a modern stack, then it is yours: the files, the domain, all of it. One is a subscription you operate; the other is an asset someone builds and hands over. ### The real cost, over time Builder pricing looks cheap by the month and adds up by the year. Wix's entry business plan is around £17 a month, but a genuinely functional business site with the apps most people end up needing commonly runs £30 to £80 a month. That is £360 to £960 every year, forever, and you built it yourself. | | Wix / Squarespace | Custom (Jones Digital) | | --- | --- | --- | | Cost | £17 to £80 a month, forever | £199 to £999, once | | Who builds it | You do | I do | | Do you own it? | No, you rent the platform | Yes, site and domain | | Speed | Often slow on mobile | Built to load in under a second | | If you stop paying | The site goes offline | You keep everything | | Upkeep | Your job | Optional, from £29/month | ### Speed and SEO: the part that costs you customers This is where hand-built pulls ahead. Builders carry a lot of extra code to make the drag-and-drop work, and it shows on a phone, where most local searches happen. Independent testing in 2026 put Wix's median mobile speed score at around 62 out of 100; a lean hand-built site sits comfortably in the 90s. Google uses page speed as a ranking signal, so a slow site is a quiet tax on how often you get found. **62 / 100** Wix's median mobile speed score in 2026 testing, versus 90+ for a lean hand-built site (source: tech-insider.org, 2026 builder testing) To be fair, Wix's SEO tools have genuinely improved and are fine for the basics. But you are still working inside the platform's limits, and you are still the one doing the work. A hand-built site gives full control of the markup, the structured data, and the speed, which is why it tends to rank better for the same effort. If you want the wider picture, here is [what a website should actually cost](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/). ### When a builder is the right call Genuinely: if you enjoy the DIY, you want to tinker with it yourself daily, your budget is a few pounds a month rather than a one-off, or you need something live this afternoon, a builder is a sensible start. Plenty of businesses begin on Wix and move to a built site once it is paying for itself. There is no shame in that path. ### When a custom build wins If you would rather not spend your evenings building a website, if you want it to load instantly and rank well, and if you would rather own an asset than rent a subscription, a custom build is the better value the moment you keep it more than a year or two. For most local businesses that want it done properly and left to work, that is the whole point. A one-page site from £199, [built for your trade](/for/), live in about five days, and yours to keep. Sources: - tech-insider.org, Wix vs Squarespace 2026 (Lighthouse testing): https://tech-insider.org/wix-vs-squarespace-2026/ - Website Builder Expert, Wix vs Squarespace 2026: https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/website-builders/comparisons/wix-vs-squarespace/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Is Wix bad for SEO?** Not bad, but limited. Wix's SEO tools cover the basics well in 2026, but you work within the platform's constraints and builder sites often load slower on mobile, which Google counts against you. A hand-built site gives full control of speed and markup, so it tends to rank better for the same effort. **Q: Can I move from Wix to a custom site later?** Yes, and many businesses do exactly that. They start on a builder, and once the site is bringing in work they move to a faster, owned build. Your domain, text and images come with you, though a builder will not export the design itself, so that part is a rebuild; the platform subscription is what you leave behind. **Q: Isn't a builder cheaper?** Cheaper by the month, not over time. At £30 to £80 a month a builder costs £360 to £960 a year, every year. A one-off Starter build is £199 and you own it, with upkeep optional from £29 a month. Keep the site more than a year and owning it usually wins. --- ## Do you actually need a website in 2026? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/do-i-need-a-website/ Published: 2026-07-11 (updated 2026-08-09) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital The honest answer for almost every local business is yes, and it matters more now than it did five years ago, not less. Here is why, without the sales pitch. ### Your customers are already looking for you online Word of mouth still works, but it travels through Google now. Someone gets your name from a neighbour, searches it, and decides in a few seconds whether you look like the real thing. If nothing comes up, or what comes up is a half-finished Facebook page, that hesitation costs you the job. **98%** of people use the internet to find a local business (source: BrightLocal, 2024) **76%** who search nearby visit a business within 24 hours (source: Google) That second number is the one that matters most for a local trade or shop. A local search is not idle browsing; it is someone ready to call or visit today. You want to be one of the names they find. ### Why social media is not enough on its own Instagram and Facebook are good for showing your work, but they are not a substitute for a website. You do not own them, they are not built to be found on Google, and an Instagram grid is not a booking system, a service list, or a place to show your accreditations. They are the shop window; the website is the shop. ### When you might genuinely be fine without one There are a few. If you are fully booked on referrals alone and turning work away, a website is a lower priority. If your entire trade is a single directory or marketplace you are happy renting from, you may not feel the gap yet, though it is worth reading why [your own website beats renting leads](/insights/website-vs-checkatrade/). For anyone who wants to control their own enquiries, look credible, and be found by people nearby, the case is clear. ### It does not have to be a big project The reason a lot of small businesses put it off is they imagine months of work and thousands of pounds. It does not have to be that, and it helps to know [what a website should actually cost](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/). A good one-page site that loads instantly, shows what you do, and takes the call can be live in five days [from £199](/websites/), with a [page written for your trade](/for/). The bar is lower than you think, and the return, a single extra job, usually clears the cost many times over. Sources: - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2024: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2024/ - Think with Google, local search behaviour: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Can I just use a Facebook or Instagram page?** As your only presence, no. Social media is good for showing work, but you do not own it, it barely shows up on Google, and it cannot do the jobs a website does: service pages, areas covered, accreditations, and a clear way to get in touch. Use both, with the website as the anchor. **Q: I only get work by word of mouth. Do I still need one?** Word of mouth now runs through Google. People get your name from a friend, then look you up before they call. A website is where that search either reassures them or loses them, so even a referral business benefits from having one. **Q: How cheaply can I get a proper website?** A one-page Starter site, live in five days, is £199, and you own it and the domain outright. You can spread it over monthly payments from £59 if you would rather not pay upfront. --- ## How long does it take to build a website? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/how-long-to-build-a-website/ Published: 2026-07-11 (updated 2026-09-14) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: for a small business, most websites take between two and eight weeks from the first conversation to going live. A simple one-page site can be done in a week or two, a standard five-to-ten-page site usually takes four to eight, and a larger agency project runs six to twelve. The thing that decides where you land is rarely the coding. It is how quickly the words and photos get finished. ### The honest timeline by project type | Type of site | Typical time to launch | | --- | --- | | One-page or landing site | 1 to 2 weeks | | Standard small-business site (5 to 10 pages) | 4 to 8 weeks | | Full agency project | 6 to 12 weeks | | E-commerce or booking system | 10 to 16+ weeks | | Jones Digital Starter, content ready | About 5 days | Those ranges are the current UK market, not just our own quote. Most agencies and freelancers put a straightforward small-business site at four to twelve weeks, and anything with a shop or a booking engine sensibly longer. If someone promises a ten-page, fully bespoke site by Friday, be a little wary. ### Where the time actually goes A website project is really six small stages, and the actual building is only one of them. Understanding the split is the easiest way to see why timelines stretch. - Discovery and planning: what the site needs to do and which pages it needs. A few days. - Design: the look, the layout, the feel. A few days to a couple of weeks. - Content: the words, the photos, the logos and reviews. This is the one that runs long. - Build: turning the design into a fast, working site. Days for a small site. - Review: you check it on a private link and say what to change. A day or two, if feedback is quick. - Launch: it goes live and gets pointed at your domain. Same day. Notice that the build, the part people imagine takes the longest, is one of the shorter stages for a small site. The calendar is set by the human steps around it. ### The real bottleneck is your content Ask anyone who builds sites for a living what causes delays, and the answer is the same: waiting on the client. Not because owners are difficult, but because writing the words and finding the photos is real work that gets pushed behind the day job. **50%+** of website projects slip past their deadline because of slow approvals or late content (source: Industry web design timeline surveys, 2026) This is genuinely good news, because it is the one part you control. A build does not stall on the technical side; it stalls waiting for a homepage paragraph or a folder of job photos. Get those ready before anything starts and the whole thing moves at the speed of the work, not the speed of the back-and-forth. ### How we keep it to days, not months Two reasons a Jones Digital build is measured in days. First, the engineer who quoted it does the work, so nothing sits in a queue behind account managers or subcontractors. Second, the page is already built for your trade, so we start from a proven structure rather than a blank screen, and I draft the words for you to approve rather than asking you to write them cold. You can see what that looks like [for your trade](/for/), and [what it costs](/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/) before anything begins. ### How to make your build faster - Pick out ten to twenty of your best real job photos before you start. - Have your logo, your reviews and your accreditations in one place. - Give one person the final say, so feedback does not go around a committee. - Reply to the review link quickly; a day saved on feedback is a day off the launch. - Know what you want the site to do first: get calls, take bookings, or show your work. None of this is technical, and all of it is in your hands. Do it up front and even a careful build lands in days. If you are still deciding whether it is worth it at all, here is [the honest case for a website](/insights/do-i-need-a-website/). Sources: - Elementor, How long does it take to build a website (2026): https://elementor.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-website/ - Huemor, Website design process and timeline: https://huemor.rocks/blog/website-design-process-and-timeline/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Can a website really be built in a week?** Yes, for a focused one-page or small site where the content is ready. A Starter build from us goes live in about five days because the structure is already proven for your trade and we draft the words for you. Larger, fully bespoke sites reasonably take longer. **Q: Why do agencies quote six to twelve weeks then?** Bigger scope and more people. A ten-page bespoke site with custom design, several rounds of committee feedback and an account manager in the middle simply has more moving parts. That timeline is fair for that kind of project; it is just not what most small businesses actually need. **Q: What slows a website build down the most?** Content and approvals, not code. More than half of projects miss their deadline waiting on the business to supply text, photos or sign-off. Prepare your photos and copy before the build starts and you remove the single biggest cause of delay. --- ## Your own website vs Checkatrade and the directories Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/website-vs-checkatrade/ Published: 2026-07-11 (updated 2026-07-13) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Directories like Checkatrade, Bark and MyBuilder can send you work, and for a brand-new trade with no reputation, that is genuinely useful. But it helps to be clear-eyed about what you are buying, because it is not the same as owning a website. ### What Checkatrade actually costs in 2026 - Membership starts around £60 a month, but it is common to pay £100 to £150 a month before a single lead comes in. - Higher tiers run £199 to £399 a month, depending on your trade and area. That is £2,400 to £4,800 a year for visibility. - Leads cost extra on top: £5 to £15 for a small job, £20 to £40 for a bigger one like a boiler or a bathroom. - It is typically a 12-month contract you cannot leave mid-term. ### The part that stings: shared leads The lead you pay for is usually sent to three or four tradespeople at once. So you might pay £30 for an enquiry that also went to your competitors, and only one of you wins the job. The other two or three paid for nothing. You are not buying a customer, you are buying a chance to compete for one, and paying whether you win or not. ### Side by side | | Your own website | Checkatrade | | --- | --- | --- | | Cost | £199 to £999, once | £60 to £399 a month, plus per-lead fees | | Who gets the enquiry | You alone | Shared with 3 to 4 rivals | | Do you own it? | Yes, site and domain | No, you rent the listing | | Contract | None | 12 months, no mid-term exit | | What happens if you stop? | You keep everything | The listing disappears | ### What your own website is instead A website is an asset you own. You pay once to build it, then it works for you every day. When someone finds you through it and gets in touch, that enquiry is yours alone. Nobody else paid for it, and nobody else received it. Over a year, the maths is not close. **98%** of people use the internet to find a local business (source: BrightLocal, 2024) Consider the numbers. A full [Starter website](/websites/) from us is £199, less than two months of a mid-tier Checkatrade membership, and it does not expire. A Standard site at £499 is roughly a quarter of what many trades spend on directories in a single year. And the enquiries it brings in are exclusively yours, forever. ### It does not have to be either/or Plenty of trades keep a directory listing while their own site finds its feet, then quietly let it lapse once the website is bringing in the calls. That is a sensible path. The point is simply this: the directory rents you leads; the website is the thing you own. Build the asset first, and let the rented leads become optional. If you want a starting point, here is what we build for [plumbers and heating engineers](/for/plumbers/). Sources: - Checkatrade, Does Checkatrade cost money?: https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/trade/start-business/does-checkatrade-cost-money/ - SwiftLead, Checkatrade cost for tradesmen breakdown: https://www.swiftlead.co.uk/blog/checkatrade-cost-for-tradesmen - BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2024: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2024/ ### Frequently asked **Q: Is Checkatrade a scam?** No, it is a legitimate service and it does send work. The issue is value: you pay a monthly fee plus per-lead costs, the leads are often shared with rivals, and you never own the relationship. It can be worth it early on, but it is renting, not owning. **Q: How does a website compare on cost?** A one-off Starter build is £199 and a Standard site £499, versus £1,200 to £4,800 a year for a directory before per-lead fees. The website does not expire, and every enquiry through it is yours alone rather than shared with two or three competitors. **Q: Should I cancel my directory membership?** Not necessarily on day one. A common approach is to keep it running while your website builds momentum and your Google presence grows, then let it lapse at the end of the contract once the site is doing the heavy lifting. --- ## What should a small business website actually cost? Canonical: https://jonesdigital.co.uk/insights/what-should-a-website-cost/ Published: 2026-07-11 (updated 2026-09-14) · Author: Connor Jones, Jones Digital Short answer: for a small business in the UK, a professionally-built website costs somewhere between £800 and £10,000, and most fall between £1,500 and £6,000 with a freelancer or £3,000 and £10,000 with an agency. That is a huge range, so the real question is not the number, it is what you are getting for it. ### The honest range in 2026 | Who builds it | Typical UK cost | | --- | --- | | DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £12 to £80 a month | | Freelancer | £1,500 to £6,000, one-off | | Regional agency | £3,000 to £10,000 | | London or large agency | £4,000 to £10,000+ | | Jones Digital | £199 to £1,999, fixed | Those figures are the current UK market, not just ours. They are worth knowing before anyone quotes you. ### The costs people forget to mention Two things quietly inflate a quote. First, VAT: a VAT-registered designer adds 20% on top, so a £3,000 quote becomes a £3,600 invoice. Always ask whether a price includes VAT. Second, upkeep: hosting, updates and small changes are ongoing, and can run anywhere from £20 to a few hundred pounds a month. A cheap build with expensive, vague upkeep is not cheap. ### What you are actually paying for Price should track three things: how many pages and features you need, who is doing the work, and how it is looked after afterwards. A one-page site that loads instantly and takes calls is a genuinely different job from a ten-page site with booking and location pages. Both are valid; paying agency rates for the first one is not. It also matters who builds it. With an agency you are paying for account managers, overheads and often subcontractors. With an independent studio you are paying for the person doing the work, and nothing else. ### Where we sit Jones Digital is deliberately at the sensible end: [fixed prices](/websites/) of £199, £499, £999, or from £1,999 for custom work, agreed before anything starts, with no hourly surprises and no separate VAT shock. You own the site and the domain outright, and upkeep is optional and plainly priced from £29 a month on a [care plan](/care-plans/). A single job from a good website usually covers the whole thing several times over. The point is not that cheaper is always better. It is that the price should be clear, the work should match it, and you should never be guessing what the final invoice will say. Sources: - GoDaddy, How much does a UK website cost?: https://www.godaddy.com/resources/uk/smallbusiness/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-website-uk - Duport, Average cost of website design for small business UK: https://www.duport.co.uk/blog/small-business-website-cost-uk/ - GOV.UK, VAT registration and rates: https://www.gov.uk/vat-registration ### Frequently asked **Q: Why is the price range so wide?** Because "a website" covers everything from a one-page holding site to a ten-page site with booking and payments, and because who builds it (a solo engineer vs a London agency) changes the rate dramatically. Match the build to what you actually need and the price falls into place. **Q: Should I just use Wix or Squarespace?** You can, and for a very simple site it is fine. But you are renting the platform, doing the work yourself, and the result rarely loads as fast or ranks as well as a hand-built site. Weigh the monthly cost and your time against a one-off build you own. **Q: Is VAT included in your prices?** Our prices are fixed and agreed before we start, with no separate VAT surprise added at the end. Always ask any designer this question, because a 20% addition on a £3,000 quote is £600 you did not plan for.