On this page
This list is remarkably boring, and its being boring is the point. The websites British people use most are the same ones they used last year and the year before, and the published rankings mostly disagree about the order rather than the membership.
Who is at the top
Grouped by what they are for, because that says more than a position number would.
| What it is for | The sites |
|---|---|
| Finding things | Google, and increasingly ChatGPT alongside it |
| Watching things | YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Netflix |
| Talking to people | Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Reddit, X |
| Buying things | Amazon, eBay, Argos, Tesco |
| Looking something up | Wikipedia, BBC News, the Met Office |
| Getting official things done | GOV.UK, the NHS website |
No visit numbers here on purpose. See the note below.
Two things about that table are worth a second look. GOV.UK and the NHS site are there because everybody in the country has to deal with them, which makes them the most-used sites nobody chooses. And ChatGPT arriving in the top group is the only real change in years, which is the single most important fact in this article for anybody with a business.
Why the same sites stay there
It is easy to answer money and stop. But plenty of very well funded websites have failed in Britain, and the survivors share four habits that cost nothing to copy.
1. They load quickly, on a bad connection
Open the BBC News front page on a phone with two bars of signal and it is readable almost immediately. This is not an accident and it is not expensive: it is small images, few scripts, and text that arrives before the decoration does. It is also the single most common thing wrong with small business websites we look at.
2. They work on a phone first
Most British web use is on a phone, and the big sites are designed for a thumb: big tap targets, short lines, nothing that needs pinching. A site designed on a large monitor and checked on a phone afterwards always shows.
3. They answer the question at the top
Wikipedia tells you what a thing is in the first sentence. The Met Office gives you the weather before it gives you anything else. Neither warms up. A small business site that opens with who we are and our journey is doing the opposite, and the visitor who wanted your prices has already gone back to the results page.
4. People arrive on purpose
The top sites get a large share of their visits from people typing the name directly, which is the strongest position a website can be in because it does not depend on anybody's ranking. For a local business the small version of this is real: being the place people in your area think of first is worth more than any single search term.
None of the four costs money. Three of them are decisions and one is restraint.
What has actually changed
For about fifteen years this list was stable enough to be dull. The one genuine shift is that a share of the questions people used to type into Google now go to an AI assistant instead, and the assistant answers in prose with a handful of sources named underneath.
That matters to a small business in a specific way. Being one of the sources an assistant names is a different job from ranking, and it rewards pages that answer a question plainly and completely rather than pages built to please a search engine. Which, conveniently, is the same advice as the third habit above.
So what do you do with this
- Open your own website on your phone, on mobile data, and count the seconds before you can read anything.
- Read your homepage's first sentence. Does it say what you do and who for, or does it warm up?
- Check that your prices, your area and your phone number are findable in one tap.
- Ask an AI assistant the question your best customer would ask, and see whether you are named.
That is four evenings of work and none of it needs a budget. If you would rather somebody else did it, that is what we are for, and there is more about how on the websites page.