14.7% of Australian trade businesses have no website at all

Short answer

7,525 of 51,127 Australian trade businesses — 14.7% — publish no website at all. Of the 32,633 whose site we actually fetched, 82.9% responded. A missing website is not a warning sign in this trade — it is normal for it, and being hard to find online is not the same as being bad at the job.

A website is the check people assume is always available, and for 14.7% of Australian trade businesses it simply is not there to run. That matters more than it sounds, because almost every other check depends on it: an ABN is confirmed from what a business publishes on its own site, and a phone number can only be matched against a site that exists.

BusinessesShare
Publish a website43,60285.3%
Publish none7,52514.7%
Site fetched and it responded27,04082.9% of 32,633 fetched

Why the second row is not a verdict

We fetched 32,633 sites, which is 63.8% of the directory — not all of it. Publishing "82.9% of Australian tradies have a working website" would divide a real number by the wrong denominator and turn a fact about our own coverage into a claim about tradespeople. Every rate on this site divides by the businesses the check actually ran for, and prints that base next to it.

What a missing website should change about what you do

  1. Ask for the ABN verbally and check it yourself on the national register. It takes about a minute and does not need the business to have published anything.
  2. Ask for the licence number for the state the work is happening in, and search it with that state's regulator. There is no national register.
  3. Ask for a written quote by email or text. A business with no website still has both, and a written scope is worth more than a website anyway.

Method

Every business in the directory that publishes a website has it fetched, and the result is recorded as reachable, unreachable, or not checked — never guessed. Businesses arriving from the second data source carry no website verdict at all, because the check has not been run for them, and an unrun check is published as unrun. Measured 2026-08-18 over 534,361 scanned records.

Common questions

Should I avoid a tradesperson with no website?
No. 14.7% of Australian trade businesses have none, which makes it the norm rather than a signal. Ask for the ABN and the licence number instead — both are checkable without a website.
How many Australian trade businesses have a working website?
Of the 32,633 we fetched, 82.9% responded. Across the whole directory, 85.3% publish a website address at all.

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