Kodinav research · October 2026
The state of Hong Kong small-business websites, 2026
We checked the websites of 836 independent Hong Kong shops, restaurants, clinics, hotels and offices. One in 5 no longer works. Most of the rest load fine, but leave out the things a customer on a phone needs first.
- 20%
- of listed websites no longer work
- 60%
- have no one-tap WhatsApp or call link
- 43%
- have an English-only homepage
- 10.7s
- median time for the main content to appear on a phone (simulated 4G)
What we found
01
20%
One in 5 listed websites no longer works
Free fix: check if a website is down →Of 789 websites we could test, 11% point to a domain that no longer exists, and the rest are parked pages, server errors or sites that never answer. Some of these businesses will have closed, but a dead link on a map listing or a Google profile sends a live customer somewhere else.
A domain usually lapses because the renewal reminder went to an old email address.
02
60%
Most give a phone visitor no one-tap way to get in touch
Free fix: WhatsApp link generator →Hong Kong customers message businesses on WhatsApp, yet only 22% of homepages link to a WhatsApp chat and 27% have a tap-to-call number. Many show the number as plain text, which a phone user has to copy, switch apps and paste.
We counted links on the homepage. A chat widget that opens WhatsApp by script may not be counted.
03
43%
- English only43%
- Chinese only25%
- Both on the homepage29%
- Tell Google about language versions (hreflang)31%
Four in ten homepages are English only
Free fix: bilingual websites, explained →In a city where many customers search in Chinese, 43% of homepages have no Chinese text and 25% have no English. Only 31% mark their language versions so Google shows the right one to the right searcher. Offices, restaurants and hotels lean furthest to English only.
04
87%
- No business details for Google (LocalBusiness schema)87%
- No share image for WhatsApp and Facebook previews47%
- No search description39%
Google and WhatsApp previews are left to guess
Free fix: schema markup generator →87% don't give search engines their business type, address and opening hours in a machine-readable form. 47% have no share image, so a link pasted into WhatsApp shows a blank card, and 39% leave Google to write their search snippet.
05
62/100
- Score under 50 on mobile21%
- Main content takes over 4 seconds85%
- Score 90 or more10%
On a phone, the typical site is slow
Free fix: website speed test →In a random sample of 98 sites run through Lighthouse's mobile test (the engine behind Google's PageSpeed Insights, which simulates a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection), the median performance score was 62 out of 100 and the main content took 10.7 seconds to appear; Google counts more than 4 seconds as poor. The median page weighed 3.4 MB, mostly images. Customers on fast Hong Kong 5G will often wait less, but a page this heavy is slow for anyone on a weak signal.
06
13%
Few mention the ways Hong Kong actually pays
Free fix: FPS QR code generator →Only 13% of homepages mention FPS, PayMe, Octopus, AlipayHK or WeChat Pay, and 24% show a way to book online, rising to 82% for hotels. Payment and booking pages can sit deeper in a site, so treat this as what a first-time visitor sees, not what the business accepts.
07
20%
- Don't send http:// visitors to the secure site20%
- Footer copyright 2023 or earlier23%
- No analytics installed41%
Signs a site has been left alone
Free fix: free website audit →20% still let visitors stay on the insecure http:// version, which browsers mark "Not secure". Of the footers that show a copyright year, 23% say 2023 or earlier, and 41% of sites have no analytics, so nobody knows how many customers they lose.
By type of business
Share of working websites in each group. * Fewer than 30 sites: read as indicative only.
| n | WhatsApp link | Tap to call | English only | Both languages | Search description | Online booking | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Classes, gyms & studios | 26* | 27% | 31% | 32% | 32% | 54% | 27% |
| Restaurants & cafés | 191 | 14% | 25% | 54% | 21% | 63% | 26% |
| Clinics & health | 22* | 27% | 50% | 37% | 16% | 41% | 23% |
| Hotels & guesthouses | 71 | 14% | 48% | 54% | 19% | 62% | 82% |
| Offices & services | 86 | 22% | 31% | 61% | 20% | 61% | 5% |
| Shops & retail | 238 | 31% | 18% | 26% | 43% | 63% | 11% |
| All | 634 | 22% | 27% | 43% | 29% | 62% | 24% |
What they're built on
Share of the 634 working sites by the platform we could detect. "Custom or other" includes hand-built sites and platforms we don't fingerprint.
- Custom or other43%
- WordPress20%
- Wix12%
- Shopify11%
- Squarespace4%
- Next.js4%
- Webflow1%
- Boutir1%
- Drupal1%
- Google Sites1%
- GoDaddy builder1%
Five checks for your own site
- The domain renews automatically, to an email address someone reads.
- A WhatsApp button and a tap-to-call number are on the homepage.
- The homepage speaks your customers' language, and Google knows which version is which.
- Pasting your link into WhatsApp shows a picture and a proper title.
- On a phone, the main content appears in under 2.5 seconds.
See where your site stands
The free audit runs the same checks on your website in about a minute, with each problem explained in plain language.
Run the free audit →How we did it
The list. Every Hong Kong shop, restaurant, café, bar, clinic, hotel, office, studio and gym on OpenStreetMap with a website tag, exported on October 2026. We removed chains (anything carrying a brand tag, or a domain used by more than two branches), schools, hospitals, government, education and .org.hk organisations. That left 916 businesses: 80 list only a Facebook or Instagram page and 836 have their own website.
The visit. One visit per site from our research crawler (user agent "KodinavResearch"), which honours robots.txt: 12 sites opted out and 35 blocked automated visits; both are left out. Each homepage was fetched over https and http, its certificate checked, and then rendered in a mobile browser at 390 pixels wide so pages built with JavaScript were measured as a visitor sees them. Sites with no answer were retried once.
The measures. "No longer works" means the domain does not resolve, the server does not answer, it returns an error, or it shows a parking page. Content measures (WhatsApp, call links, languages, payments, booking) are read from the homepage only. Language is judged from the visible text: more than 30 Chinese characters counts as Chinese. Speed comes from Lighthouse 12 with its standard mobile settings, run on a seeded random sample of 98 working sites.
The limits. OpenStreetMap only lists businesses that volunteers have mapped, so it is a sample, not a census, and leans toward businesses someone took the trouble to map. Some dead links belong to businesses that have closed. We publish only totals and never name a business.
The data
Cite this study
Kodinav (2026). The state of Hong Kong small-business websites, 2026. https://kodinav.com/research/hong-kong-small-business-websites-2026