Web design in Croydon, built by the person doing the work.

Croydon has the largest concentration of office space outside central London, and a high street and shopping centres that pull people in from all over the south. But most of the businesses I build for are smaller: the trades, clinics, salons and clubs that a neighbourhood actually runs on. Those are the ones a good local website helps most.

What is actually happening in CR0.

Croydon town centre has a Business Improvement District with a levy, a boundary and a ballot, and plenty of the businesses I build for sit outside all three.

The BID levy stops at £40,000 of rateable value

Croydon BID charges a levy of 1% of the relevant rateable value of each hereditament in its area valued at £40,000 or more, and exempts every premises below that figure. It puts its levy-paying membership at 470 businesses, inside a boundary running from West Croydon station in the north, taking in Cherry Orchard Road and Number 1 Croydon in the east, Park Lane and Coombe Road in the south, and Charles Street and Church Street to the west.

So if your rateable value is under £40,000, or your address is in Addiscombe, Shirley, Selsdon or Thornton Heath rather than the centre, none of that collective town-centre marketing is working on your behalf. Your own site is. The current term runs from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2027, and the renewal ballot for a 2027 to 2032 term runs from 21 September to 21 October 2026, which is worth knowing if you do pay the levy.

What 168 Croydon homepages looked like when I checked them

Between 11 July and 16 August 2026 I audited small business websites across 32 towns in and around the borough. 168 of those businesses gave a Croydon address and still had a homepage that loaded. Of those 168: 32.1% carried no structured data at all, 25.0% had no meta description, 11.3% were built on a cheap page builder, 11.3% had a footer year three or more years old, and 7.7% were still not served over HTTPS. The method and the borough-wide figures are in the study.

Croydon is not the worst town in that sample on any of those measures. It is simply average, which is the point: being average in a town of this size means a few hundred competitors have the same gaps you do, and closing them is unusually cheap.

What I would fix first on a Croydon site

• LocalBusiness structured data naming the trading address, the opening hours and the phone number, so a search engine has something to read rather than something to guess.
• A meta description written for the search you want, instead of a blank tag that leaves Google to cut a sentence out of your homepage.
• HTTPS on every page, because the browser warns your visitor before they read a word of your copy.
• A phone number that dials on one tap and stays on screen as the page scrolls.

Your next customer is a few streets away, deciding between the businesses that showed up when they searched.