Kodinav research · October 2026
The state of Taiwan small-business websites, 2026
We checked the websites of 1,000 randomly sampled independent Taiwanese shops, restaurants, guesthouses, clinics and offices. One in 4 no longer works, most give a phone visitor no one-tap way to get in touch, and nearly four in ten listed businesses have no website at all, only a social page.
- 38%
- of listed businesses only have a social page
- 26%
- of listed websites no longer work
- 48%
- have no LINE or tap-to-call link
- 47%
- of dated footers say 2023 or earlier
What we found
02
26%
One in 4 listed websites no longer works
Free tool: check if a website is down →Of 954 websites we could test, 15% point to a domain that no longer exists, and the rest are parked pages, server errors or sites that never answer, more than in Hong Kong (20%) or the US (15%). Some businesses will have closed, but a dead link on a map listing sends a customer to a competitor.
03
48%
- LINE add-friend or chat link37%
- Tap-to-call link32%
- Facebook Messenger link4%
- None of these48%
Half give phone visitors no one-tap way to get in touch
Free tool: LINE QR code & link generator →Taiwanese customers message businesses on LINE, yet only 37% of homepages link to LINE and 32% have a tap-to-call number; 48% have neither.
04
67%
- Chinese only67%
- Chinese and English28%
- Tell Google about language versions (hreflang)17%
Two in three homepages are Chinese only
Free tool: bilingual English and Chinese websites →67% of homepages have no English and only 17% mark their language versions for Google. For businesses that serve tourists, expats or overseas buyers, English searchers may never find them.
05
94%
- Links with no accessible name71%
- Text with too little contrast65%
- Images with no text alternative49%
- No page language25%
- Buttons with no accessible name22%
Nine in ten fail automated accessibility checks
Free tool: website accessibility checker →axe-core found at least one WCAG 2.1 A/AA failure on 94% of homepages (the typical site failed 4 rules), against 78% in our US study. Icon links with no name, low contrast and images without alt text lead.
06
47%
- Dated footers saying 2023 or earlier47%
- Don't send http:// visitors to the secure site26%
- No analytics installed33%
Half the dated footers are years old
Free tool: free website audit →Of the footers that show a year, 47% say 2023 or earlier; 26% of sites still let visitors stay on insecure http://, and 33% have no analytics.
07
90%
- No business details for Google (LocalBusiness schema)90%
- No share image for LINE and Facebook previews47%
- No search description30%
Google and LINE previews are left to guess
Free tool: schema markup generator →90% don't give search engines their business details in structured form, and 47% have no share image, so a link pasted into LINE shows a blank card.
08
54/100
- Score under 50 on mobile40%
- Main content takes over 4 seconds89%
- Score 90 or more2%
On a phone, the typical site is slow
Free tool: website speed test →In a random sample of 98 sites run through Lighthouse's mobile test (simulated mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection), the median score was 54/100 and the main content took 13.7 seconds to appear; Google counts more than 4 seconds as poor.
By type of business
Share of working websites in each group. * Fewer than 30 sites: read as indicative only.
| n | LINE link | Tap to call | Online booking | Chinese + English | Fail WCAG checks | Footer ≤ 2023 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Classes, gyms & studios | 19* | 37% | 42% | 0% | 18% | 94% | 43% |
| Restaurants & cafés | 170 | 28% | 28% | 21% | 23% | 95% | 59% |
| Clinics & health | 41 | 27% | 32% | 15% | 11% | 98% | 48% |
| Hotels & guesthouses | 184 | 40% | 47% | 61% | 35% | 89% | 51% |
| Offices & services | 60 | 32% | 35% | 5% | 26% | 93% | 29% |
| Shops & retail | 230 | 46% | 22% | 10% | 31% | 97% | 43% |
| All | 704 | 37% | 32% | 26% | 28% | 94% | 47% |
Three largest cities
The three cities with the most sites in the sample (90–190 each); differences of a few points are within the margin of error.
| n | LINE link | Tap to call | Chinese + English | Fail WCAG checks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taipei | 194 | 28% | 25% | 35% | 95% |
| New Taipei | 89 | 53% | 35% | 23% | 94% |
| Taichung | 136 | 46% | 36% | 22% | 97% |
What they're built on
Share of the 704 working sites by the platform we could detect, including Taiwanese platforms CYBERBIZ, 91APP, WACA and Meepshop.
- Custom or other63%
- WordPress15%
- CYBERBIZ5%
- Shopify4%
- Wix2%
- 91APP2%
- Next.js2%
- Squarespace1%
- Google Sites1%
- Weebly1%
- Joomla1%
- EasyStore1%
Five checks for your own site
- The domain renews automatically, to an email address someone reads.
- A LINE add-friend button and a tap-to-call number are on the homepage.
- Pasting your link into LINE shows a picture and a proper title.
- The footer and content are current, and http:// redirects to https://.
- If you serve foreign customers, there's an English version with hreflang.
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 Taiwanese shop, restaurant, café, hotel, guesthouse, clinic, office, studio and gym on OpenStreetMap with a website tag, exported in October 2026. We removed chains, government, NGOs and .gov.tw/.edu.tw/.org.tw sites, leaving 5,050 independent businesses; 1,903 list only a social page. From the 3,147 with their own website we drew a seeded random sample of 1,000.
The visit. One visit per site from our research crawler (user agent "KodinavResearch"), which honours robots.txt: 6 sites opted out and 40 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, booking, payment and language measures are read from the homepage only. Speed comes from Lighthouse 12 with its standard mobile settings, on a seeded random sample of 98 working sites.
The limits. OpenStreetMap lists the businesses volunteers have mapped, so this is a sample, not a census. 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
Cite this study
Kodinav (2026). The state of Taiwan small-business websites, 2026. https://kodinav.com/research/taiwan-small-business-websites-2026