We checked every company in our dataset of UK construction and building services firms against the open web: 10,235 registered companies, each one tested for a working website that verifiably belongs to that business. Only 52% had one.
Companies were taken from the free Companies House company data snapshot, filtered to construction and building services SIC codes (41100, 41201, 41202, 43210, 43220, 43290, 42220, 43999) and to small, medium and abridged filers — micro-entities and dormant companies were excluded. For each company we searched for a website and only counted it if the page itself named the company or carried its registered postcode. A domain that merely resembled the company name was not counted. Data collected July and August 2026.
5,337 of 10,235 companies had a confirmed website. A further 1,012 had a domain with mail servers but no working site — an email address and nothing to look at. The remaining 3,886 had no findable web presence at all.
This is the result we did not expect. Older companies are consistently more visible than newer ones.
| Incorporated | Companies | With a website |
|---|---|---|
| Before 1990 | 504 | 64% |
| 1990s | 592 | 60% |
| 2000s | 1,967 | 56% |
| 2010s | 3,867 | 51% |
| 2020s | 3,304 | 48% |
The obvious explanation is age of business rather than age of owner: a firm that has traded for thirty years has had time and reason to build a presence, while a firm founded in 2023 may still be winning all its work through the people its founder already knew. Which is exactly the position most subcontractors describe when you ask them where their next job comes from.
| Accounts filed | Companies | With a website |
|---|---|---|
| Unaudited abridged | 8,432 | 51% |
| Small | 1,336 | 56% |
| Medium | 370 | 68% |
Across 2,140 company email addresses where we could match the address to a named director, the pattern was overwhelmingly consistent:
| Pattern | Share |
|---|---|
| [email protected] | 89% |
| firstname.lastname@ | 6% |
| flastname@ | 3% |
| Everything else | 2% |
Corporate email conventions of the kind used in larger organisations are almost absent from this part of the industry. It is a sector of owner-run businesses, and the addresses show it.
Separately we collected 1,121 public construction contract awards published on UK Contracts Finder over 120 days. The median award was £199,000, and 78% were under £1m. The averages are much higher, but they are distorted by multi-year framework agreements rather than individual jobs.
The competitive bar is lower than it looks. If half your competitors cannot be found, and the ones founded most recently are the least visible, then being findable is not a marketing luxury — it is most of the contest. The same goes in reverse: if you are trying to reach these companies, half of them cannot be reached through their website, because there isn't one.
A company without a findable website may still have one we could not verify — a site that never names the company or its postcode would be counted as missing. Social-only presences (a Facebook page and nothing else) were not counted as websites. The dataset covers construction and building services SIC codes and does not describe UK businesses generally. And it is a snapshot: companies incorporate, fail and rebrand continuously.