Survey: 28% of small businesses don’t have websites

Roughly one in four smaller businesses do not have a website, and fewer than half of them plan to create one this year, according to a new survey conducted by the online resource Top Design Firms.

While 71% of the small businesses polled for the survey have an online presence, 28% did not ”“ and of that percentage, only 44% plan to create one this year. Among the smaller businesses with websites, 46% relied on in-house employees to manage their websites while 34% are partnering with an agency to run their online site.

But having a website leads to additional concerns, as 21% of respondents said low website traffic was their greatest challenge in maintaining an online presence, followed by a lack of time and knowledge to maintain a website (14%) and keeping abreast of changes in search engine ranking (12%).

Among the solutions that these small businesses are planning for their websites in 2021 are new strategies to improve their website page speed and performance (43%), embedded videos on web pages (30%), virtual reality (19%), chatbots (18%) and a “dark mode” design (18%).

The survey polled 500 small business owners and managers during December. Among the respondents, 7% were one-employee businesses while 36% have two to 10 employees, 25% have 11 to 50 employees, 18% have 51 to 250 employees and 15% have 251 to 500 employees; 53% of respondents were female and 47% were male.