A Purley web designer, built by hand nearby.

Purley runs on independents and professional services: family firms, private clinics, consultancies and skilled trades, the sort of businesses that live or die on reputation and word of mouth. Online, that reputation needs a fast, credible website that turns a local Google search into a phone call. That is exactly what I build, and being just down the hill I can do it in person.

What is actually happening in Purley.

Purley funds its own town-centre work through a levy that its businesses vote on every five years. What that levy does not buy is a website that turns a search into a phone call.

A 2% levy, and a ballot every five years

Purley BID is funded by a levy of 2%, which it puts at around £161,000 a year, ring-fenced for the exclusive use of the Purley BID area. Every five years Purley businesses are asked to vote in a ballot on whether to keep it, and the renewal campaign for the next term is running now.

That money pays for things you can see from the pavement. It does not pay for the half of your marketing that happens before anyone reaches the pavement, on a phone, three miles away, comparing you against two other names.

229 Purley homepages, and the one in five that had stopped

In an audit of small business websites across 32 towns, run between 11 July and 16 August 2026, 229 businesses with a Purley address still had a homepage that loaded. 34.1% of them carried no structured data, against 30.3% across the whole sample. 26.6% had no meta description. 17.9% were on a cheap page builder, against 11.0% area-wide. And 18.8% showed a footer whose newest year was three or more years old, against 14.2% area-wide.

That last one is the check I trust most, because it is the one a customer runs without knowing it. A copyright line reading 2022 answers the question they were really asking, which is whether you are still trading and whether anyone will pick up. The numbers and the method are in the study.

The Purley pattern

A high cheap-builder share and a high stale-footer share usually travel together, and they describe the same story: a site built once, in a hurry, on a platform nobody can log into any more. That is the job I get called for most often on the Brighton Road, and it is usually a rebuild rather than a repair, because the original login is gone and the content is worth keeping but the platform is not.

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