Newcastle’s small business scene is growing quickly, with many comparisons being made to Manchester. In light of Andy Burnham’s devolution and north-facing politics, things are looking up.
The North East now has around 55,000 VAT private enterprises. Around three-quarters are micro-businesses (fewer than five people). That’s a lot of struggling people trying to run a site, serve customers, file taxes…
A growing business list doesn’t always mean a growing list of good websites, of course, and most tend to trip up on the same three things.
Building a website is the easy part now
Building a website used to mean hiring someone for many hundreds of pounds, or learning it the hard way. But not anymore. Drag-and-drop builders, ready-made templates, a few clicks and you’re live. Even if you do go with a custom site, AI has improved productivity to get more out of your time (or money).
But easy to build isn’t the same as built well. When most North East enterprises are micro-businesses, one person is very often the founder, the marketer and the web developer, all at once. That’s how sites end up slow, awkward on a phone, or missing something as basic as a working contact form.
An average site may now be easier to build than ever, but a great site is almost the same difficulty as before.
Hosting is the boring bit nobody budgets for
Hosting often gets neglected. That is, until the the site goes down on the day a customer tries to check opening hours. Uptime, load speed, security certificates – all the technical SEO stuff remains important. A slow page loses visitors, but it also ranks you lower in Google. So a site that vanishes for even a few hours can cost a small business its one shot at a first impression.
Reviews are where reputations are actually won or lost
A good site with terrible reviews doesn’t convince anybody. Reviews carry a lot of legal weight now too (not just your reputation). New rules under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act made it so that fake or misleading reviews are formally illegal from April 2025.
The Competition and Markets Authority can fine offenders up to 10% of global turnover. Genuine engagement matters more than ever, especially with Google finding new ways to reward authority due to the mass influx of AI content.
This is where something like IONOS’s AI Reputation Manager can help. It pulls Google, Trustpilot and Facebook reviews into one place and drafts replies for a human to approve, rather than ignore. It’s not that software should write reviews for you (that’s exactly what the new rules target) but that decent feedback shouldn’t sit unanswered for weeks because nobody had a spare hour for it.
Getting the basics right, in order
Website, hosting, reviews. These should be viewed as one job. Sole traders make up over half of all UK private businesses… It’s usually one person wearing every hat going, relying on LLMs to get them through.
That’s why these things get tackled in whatever order feels most urgent that week, rather than the order that actually works. When North East businesses get it right, it becomes obvious. Everything works as intended, and there’s little friction for the end user.
