← All articles

A month after registration, 18% of new Manchester companies have a website, up from 15% in their first week - how long a “no website” lead stays a lead

Every lead list of “businesses without a website” raises the same question: for how long is that true? A company registered last week has not had time to build anything. A company registered a year ago and still without a site has probably decided it does not need one. Somewhere between the two is the moment a lead is worth a call.

On 11 October 2026 I ran the No-Website Leads Actor twice on the same place, Manchester, with output: "all" so that every new company is returned with its website status, not only the leads. Two samples of 150 companies each, taken from the UK register (Companies House):

• Week A: companies registered between 1 and 7 October 2026, so 4 to 10 days old on the day of the run.
• Week B: companies registered between 1 and 7 September 2026, so 34 to 40 days old.

Same city, same register, same method, one month apart. Here is what moved.

What moved in a month

Four companies out of 150 gained a website in a month. The share without any domain fell from 53% to 49%. Everything else is noise at this sample size.

Two readings of the same table:

• For a web agency, a company that is a month old and still has no site is a better lead than one registered this week: the founders have had time to think about it, and 82% of them still have nothing. The lead does not expire in a month.
• For a market observer, the pace is slow. If it continued linearly, half of these companies would still be without a site after a year. In practice many of them will never need one: a holding company, a property vehicle or a one-person consultancy does not. The Actor already removes holdings and property companies by default; the samples above are what remains.

The domain signal

The field I watch most is domainRecent: the domain at the company’s name was created within a few weeks of the registration, and nothing is on it yet. Someone paid for the name and has not built the site. In week A that was 24 companies out of 150; in week B, 20. So about one company in seven buys its domain in the first days, and most of them have still not built anything a month later.

What sits on those registered domains, by week:

Who they are

In both weeks the most common activity by far is retail sale via mail order houses or via Internet (SIC 47910): 27 companies in week A, 24 in week B. These are online shops in the making, registered before the shop exists. Then come software development and IT consultancy (62012, 62020), take-away food shops (56103), management consultancy (70229) and, in week B, cleaning services (81210) and advertising agencies (73110). No names here: the dataset carries them, with the registered office, the SIC codes and the Companies House link.

What this does not say

• One city, two weeks, 150 companies each. The 15% to 18% move is four companies. Run it on several cities and several weeks before quoting a rate.
• “Website found” means found at the company’s name. The Actor builds the domains a company would normally use (tapwagon.co.uk, tap-wagon.com…) and checks them. A company trading under an unrelated brand name is counted as having no website. The not attributable row holds real pages on older domains that could not be tied to the company by its number, name or postcode.
• The first run on a month-old week crashed. With output: "all" and 150 companies the Actor read full home pages into memory and exceeded its 512 MB. Fixed the same day (build 0.1.19): pages are now read in a stream and cut at 400 KB, and the default memory is 1 GB. The numbers above come from the run after the fix.
• No contact details on the leads. A company without a website has left none anywhere; you get the name, the activity and the registered office. Companies that do have a site come with the e-mails and phones found on it: 14 of the 150 in week B.

How to do it

{
  "countries": ["UK"],
  "ukLocations": ["Manchester"],
  "registeredFrom": "2026-09-01",
  "registeredTo": "2026-09-07",
  "output": "all",
  "maxItems": 150
}

One run per week studied, about 90 seconds and under half a cent of platform usage each on the author’s account. Leads cost $0.005 each; with output: "all" the companies that do have a website cost $0.002. For a lead list rather than a study, leave output on its default (noWebsite), or set it to newDomain to get only the companies whose domain was just bought: the hottest ones.

Disclosure: the Actor is built by the author of this article.

Part of the EuroScrape actor collection — all articles.