(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — UK-based budget web hosting provider Streamline.net (www.streamline.net) issued the results of a study on Wednesday, indicating that small businesses in the UK tend to handle their own web development in house, but that many of them don’t treat their business websites as a top priority.
Streamline’s “Small Business Bytes Survey,” which included a study of 2400 small UK firms, suggests that only 10 percent of small businesses update their websites on a daily basis, and that more than half updates its website “infrequently.”
A separate survey of 400 small businesses showed that more than half of UK small business build and maintain their websites themselves, though many small business owners say they use their evenings to work on their websites.
“Important elements like Search Engine submission and website measurement can transform the return from a website,” says Streamline marketing manager Clare Lewis, quoted in the press release. “ There are now easy-to-use and affordable tools for achieving these to suit all budgets, so every company should check they have these bases covered.”
While two thirds of companies have had a business website for two years or longer, only 10 percent update their site daily. One quarter update their site monthly, while 54 percent make updates “infrequently.”
Small business investment in websites remains modest, says Streamline, saying that one third of companies have only a single domain name, with three quarters owning fewer than six.
Streamline says the surveys were conducted through web forms, though it doesn’t mention how the respondents were located. If respondents were all customers of Streamline, the hosting provider’s focus on low-cost budget type shared hosting could skew the results toward the more simplistic web efforts because it presumably would not include those small businesses whose website needs couldn’t be satisfied by the company’s roughly $15-per-month top-of-the-line shared plan.
Small and medium-sized businesses, in the estimation of vendors such as Parallells and Microsoft – those with a vested interest in the success of their hosting partners – are an extremely significant market for web hosting services, and one they expect to grow in the coming years.
Streamline’s study, however, does offer some interesting insight into how businesses on the “small” end of the SMB scale might tend to neglect their web presences.
