Nearly half of all UK businesses are embarrassed by their website

An angry office worker preparing to smash his laptop with a hammer.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Nearly half (47%) of UK businesses aren’t confident in their website’s ability to impress clients, while 92% of UK business leaders think theirs costs them up to £100,000 in sales annually.

That’s according to a new study from content management system (CMS) provider Storyblok, which surveyed 500 business leaders at “mid-sized” ecommerce companies across the US and Europe on their website’s costs and revenue performance.

With businesses preferring, on average, to spend £336,500 on marketing over half a decade, with a quarter of businesses spending £500,000 or more.  it’s clear that many businesses still don’t believe the internet is a worthwhile, profitable space.

Embarrassing website design

Another recent StoryBlok survey of 6,000 customers across the US and Europe revealed that 60% of them abandon around 5 online purchases a year due to poor user experience (UX) on websites.

As a result, it seems a culture is emerging across businesses in the UK and globally that an “embarrassing” website is either a fact of life or just about good enough.

That’s a problem, says Storyblok co-founder and CEO Dominik Angerer, given how far web design tools have come.

“At first, these results look completely contradictory. On the one hand, businesses believe their websites are costly embarrassments, on the other hand, they are seemingly satisfied with their performance. The answer is that expectations are too low.”

“Many businesses believe that marketing technology is inherently very expensive and is difficult and time-consuming to get right. This is no longer the case.”

“A modern wave of API-first, best-of-breed technology is currently disrupting the industry, making the martech stack not only more cost-effective, but also more user-friendly for the teams working with it.”

From ecommerce website builders, to CMS providers like WordPress and its best alternatives, and even options as basic as link in bio tools, businesses of all sizes have a vast array of intuitive options at their fingertips to get an impressive web presence up and running.

Luke Hughes
Staff Writer

 Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.

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