The state of Indian small-business websites, 2026
We checked the websites of 1,141 independent clinics, shops, restaurants, hotels and offices in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. One in 4 no longer works, two in five give a customer on a phone no one-tap way to WhatsApp or call, and few say how you can pay.
- 24%
- of listed websites no longer work
- 41%
- have no WhatsApp or tap-to-call link
- 87%
- don't mention UPI or any payment option
- 92%
- fail automated accessibility checks
What we found
01
24%
One in 4 listed websites no longer works
Free tool: check if a website is down →Of 1,063 websites we could test, 16% point to a domain that no longer exists, and the rest are parked or for-sale pages, server errors or sites that never answer. Some businesses will have closed, but a dead link on Google Maps or a directory listing sends a ready customer to a competitor.
A domain usually lapses because the renewal reminder went to an old email address or an ex-employee.
02
41%
- WhatsApp chat link34%
- Tap-to-call link52%
- Neither41%
Two in five make a customer copy the number by hand
Free tool: WhatsApp link generator →Indian customers WhatsApp businesses before they visit, yet only 34% of homepages link to a WhatsApp chat and 52% have a tap-to-call number; 41% have neither. Clinics do best (77% have one or the other); offices and professional services do worst (38%).
03
13%
- Mention UPI or a payment gateway on the homepage13%
- Show a way to book online33%
- Show a GSTIN on the homepage2%
Few say how you can pay, or let you book
Free tool: UPI QR code generator →In the country of UPI, only 13% of homepages mention UPI, Razorpay, PhonePe, Paytm or any other way to pay, and 33% show a way to book online (clinics 67%, hotels 62%). Payment and booking pages can sit deeper in a site, so read this as what a first-time visitor sees.
04
3%
- English on the homepage98%
- Any Indian-language content (Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi…)3%
Only 3% have any Indian-language content
Free tool: website development in India →Almost every homepage is in English only; 3% carry meaningful text in any Indian language. For a clinic or a shop whose customers search in Hindi or Tamil, that leaves the local-language search results to someone else.
05
92%
- Text with too little contrast66%
- Links with no accessible name60%
- Images with no text alternative23%
- Buttons with no accessible name20%
- Zoom blocked on phones17%
Nine in ten fail automated accessibility checks
Free tool: website accessibility checker →axe-core, the open-source accessibility engine, found at least one WCAG 2.1 A/AA failure on 92% of homepages; the typical site failed 3 rules. Low-contrast text and icon links with no name lead, and both are usually a few lines of code to fix.
06
85%
- No business details for Google (LocalBusiness schema)85%
- No share image for WhatsApp previews49%
- No search description29%
Google and WhatsApp previews are left to guess
Free tool: schema markup generator →85% don't give search engines their business type, address and hours in structured form, which feeds Google Maps results and AI answers, and 49% have no share image, so a link sent on WhatsApp shows a blank card.
07
58/100
- Score under 50 on mobile26%
- Main content takes over 4 seconds87%
- Score 90 or more9%
On a phone, the typical site is slow
Free tool: website speed test →In a random sample of 102 sites run through Lighthouse's mobile test (the engine behind Google's PageSpeed Insights, simulating a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection), the median score was 58/100 and the main content took 9.4 seconds to appear; Google counts more than 4 seconds as poor. The median page weighed 3.5 MB.
08
16%
- Don't send http:// visitors to the secure site16%
- Dated footers saying 2023 or earlier22%
- No analytics installed34%
Signs a site has been left alone
Free tool: free website audit →16% still let visitors stay on the insecure http:// version, which browsers mark "Not secure"; of the footers that show a year, 22% say 2023 or earlier; and 34% have no analytics.
By type of business
Share of working websites in each group. Dentists are counted with clinics.
| n | WhatsApp link | Tap to call | Mentions UPI / payments | Online booking | Fail WCAG checks | Search description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coaching, gyms & studios | 38 | 26% | 47% | 3% | 16% | 91% | 71% |
| Restaurants & cafés | 124 | 19% | 44% | 13% | 19% | 91% | 67% |
| Clinics, dentists & health | 233 | 50% | 72% | 13% | 67% | 90% | 70% |
| Hotels & stays | 74 | 39% | 43% | 10% | 62% | 93% | 54% |
| Offices & professional services | 146 | 14% | 36% | 8% | 5% | 92% | 77% |
| Shops & retail | 189 | 38% | 48% | 21% | 14% | 93% | 76% |
| All | 804 | 34% | 52% | 13% | 33% | 92% | 71% |
By city
About 110 working sites per city, so differences of a few points between cities are within the margin of error.
| n | Not working | WhatsApp link | Tap to call | Fail WCAG checks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bengaluru | 125 | 21% | 29% | 49% | 91% |
| Chennai | 106 | 29% | 30% | 49% | 91% |
| Delhi NCR | 120 | 24% | 40% | 47% | 95% |
| Hyderabad | 104 | 30% | 37% | 53% | 91% |
| Kolkata | 118 | 21% | 35% | 53% | 94% |
| Mumbai | 118 | 23% | 26% | 48% | 88% |
| Pune | 113 | 22% | 39% | 63% | 91% |
What they're built on
Share of the 804 working sites by the platform we could detect. "Custom or other" includes hand-built sites and platforms we don't fingerprint.
- Custom or other44%
- WordPress33%
- Shopify9%
- Next.js6%
- Wix3%
- GoDaddy builder2%
- Webflow1%
- Drupal1%
- Squarespace1%
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 says how customers can pay (UPI, cards) and how to book.
- Pasting your link into WhatsApp shows a picture and a proper title.
- Google has your business type, address and hours in schema markup.
See where your site stands
The free audit runs these 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. Clinics, dentists, shops, restaurants, cafés, hotels, offices, coaching centres, gyms and studios with a website tag on OpenStreetMap in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune, exported in October 2026. We removed chains (anything carrying a brand tag, or a domain used by more than two locations), government, education and NGO sites (.gov.in, .nic.in, .ac.in, .edu.in, .org and similar), and listings that point to a social page or a directory such as Justdial or Zomato. From the 3,392 businesses left we drew a seeded random sample of up to 170 per city.
The visit. One visit per site from our research crawler (user agent "KodinavResearch"), which honours robots.txt: 34 sites opted out and 44 blocked automated visits; both are left out. Each homepage was fetched over https and http, then loaded in a mobile browser at 390 pixels wide and checked by axe-core against WCAG 2.0/2.1 A and AA rules. 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. Contact, payment, booking and language measures are read from the homepage only; Indian-language content means more than 30 characters in any Indic script. Speed comes from Lighthouse 12 with its standard mobile settings, run on a seeded random sample of 102 working sites.
The limits. OpenStreetMap lists the businesses volunteers have mapped, so this 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. Automated checks find only part of accessibility problems. We publish only totals and never name a business.
The data
Other editions
Cite this study
Kodinav (2026). The state of Indian small-business websites, 2026. https://kodinav.com/research/india-small-business-websites-2026