A third of UK contractor websites won't let you tap the phone number.

The method comes first, because it changed the numbers.

What cleaning the data did to the numbers

Three passes. Every one of them moved the figures down, for the same reason each time: a page that will not open looks identical, to a script, to a site that has nothing on it.

Why 100 became 75

The last nine only surfaced on the third pass. A Chrome error page weighs about 130 KB, so it sails through any filter based on page size and lands in the statistics as a site that has nothing on it. Someone has to read the titles.

On the 14 dead domains, the honest phrasing is "14 of the 100 domains in this list no longer respond", not "14% of contractors have lost their website". The list was built in July 2026 and firms move or close.

All 75 measured sites.

HTTPS, page titles and mobile viewport tags are effectively solved. Every site that opened had all three. The gap is no longer in whether a site exists, it is in whether it does anything for the person holding a phone.

Nearly half of them passed everything.

Thirty-six of the 75 cleared all eight checks. Not one site failed more than four. This is not an industry with broken websites, it is an industry where half the sites are fine and the rest miss one or two cheap things.

Four in five run WordPress or Wix.

We read the platform off the page source. The median column is the weight of the homepage HTML, which is the one place the platforms genuinely differ.

A Wix homepage arrives about four times heavier than a WordPress one and seven times heavier than a hand-built page. The heaviest in the sample was 2,075 KB.

What the platform does not predict is whether the checks pass. WordPress sites missed a tappable phone link 26% of the time and Wix sites 36%, which at these numbers is p = 0.40. Nothing to see.

All 75 sites, named.

Alphabetical, not ranked. Every one of these is a public homepage and every check can be repeated in a browser in about ten seconds. Thirty-six of them have nothing missing at all.

What this does not say

• It is not a random sample of UK contractors. It is 100 firms from one prospect list, weighted towards ventilation. Read it as a snapshot of that list.
• Eight technical checks are not a judgement of a business. Plenty of firms with a poor score are booked solid on word of mouth.
• A tappable phone link is not proof of anything on its own. It is the cheapest thing on this list to fix, which is why it is worth naming.
• We did not test speed, accessibility or content. Those need a different method and we would rather publish four checks we trust than eight we do not.

Lumith is a London studio building websites, software and AI for UK businesses, with a deep specialism in construction and trades. We ran this because it is our own prospect list. About the studio.