I checked dozens of UK local business websites by hand. Here's what actually breaks, and the tool I built to do it for me

alex crisp — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:54:34 +0000

I'm Alex, 19, Ipswich. For the last month I've been doing something tedious: taking a UK town and a trade - "hairdressers, Wakefield", "accountants, Bristol" - opening every business's own website, and writing down what's wrong with it. Not "the design is dated". Things you can measure: does the bare domain resolve, does www, is the certificate valid, is there a published email address, does the contact form deliver a test message.

What breaks, in order of how often I see it:

The published web address no longer resolves. The directory listing still prints it. In three towns last week (Chesterfield, Huddersfield, Wakefield) I found three businesses each whose domain is NXDOMAIN on five public resolvers (Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, OpenDNS, AdGuard), bare and www, with a known-live and a known-dead control run in the same second. The owner usually doesn't know, because nobody who notices has a reason to tell them.
No published email at all. Bristol accountants: 0 of 25 had an address on their own site. UK marketing agencies: 8 of 8 did. This decides whether a niche is even reachable by email before anyone writes a line.
Contact forms that swallow the message. You only find this by sending one and waiting.
No HTTPS, so every visitor gets a browser warning.

Doing this by hand doesn't scale, so I built LeadDrive (https://leaddrive.uk). Trade + city in; it visits every site, returns phone, the email the business actually published (or "not found" - it never guesses, which is why it doesn't bounce), and each finding with the date it was checked so you can verify it yourself in ten seconds. It doesn't send anything - CSV/XLSX out, or a webhook to Zapier/Make/n8n on the higher plans.

Stack notes for the #webdev crowd: DNS checks go through multiple public resolvers with control domains in the same run, because a single resolver's answer isn't evidence on its own. Contact-form delivery is tested, not inferred from the presence of a form. Findings are stored with the check timestamp, never as a boolean.

What I got wrong early: trusting wildcard DNS as evidence (a whole booking-platform subdomain space resolves for any name you invent), and writing "the site is slow" in the first week before I had a way to measure it. Now if I can't measure it, it isn't in the output.

Free tier is 150 credits, no card. Paid starts at £49/month for 1,000 credits; FOUNDER50 halves that for the first year. Launched 1 September, one founder, zero revenue so far - I'd rather say that than imply otherwise. If you build local-business tooling, I'd like to hear which checks you'd add.

DEV Community: alex crisp

I checked dozens of UK local business websites by hand. Here's what actually breaks, and the tool I built to do it for me