In a sample of 303 trading UK tanning salons, 94 have a website of their own, 33 let customers book online from it, and just 14 pass all six website basics we tested.
Customers rate these salons highly. The mean Google rating is 4.8, and 276 salons sit at 4.5 or higher. Yet 245 of them have no online booking on a site of their own.
- About 3 in 10 have their own website.
- About 1 in 9 lets customers book online from its own site.
- Fewer than 1 in 5 show prices on a website.
How the 303 salons did on six website basics
A salon with no website of its own fails all five of the other tests, so every rate below is a share of all 303.
Own website
94 of 303 (31.0%), 95% range 26% to 36%
A live domain that mentions tanning. Social pages and booking-platform pages don't count.
HTTPS
89 of 303 (29.4%), 95% range 25% to 35%
Served over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
Mobile-friendly
78 of 303 (25.7%), 95% range 21% to 31%
Set up for phone screens, with no sideways scrolling at 390px.
Opening hours visible
64 of 303 (21.1%), 95% range 17% to 26%
Days and times in the page text.
Prices visible
51 of 303 (16.8%), 95% range 13% to 21%
A £ price in the page text.
Online booking
33 of 303 (10.9%), 95% range 8% to 15%
A link or embed to a booking system, or a book-online button that leads to a booking page.
All six tests passed
14 of 303 (4.6%), 95% range 3% to 8%
The 14 that pass everything
That's 14 of 303, or about 1 in 20. Each has a working site of its own, secure and readable on a phone, with online booking, prices and opening hours all there to find.
Among the salons with a site, booking lags
Look only at the 94 salons with their own site and the picture changes. Of those 94:
- 95% use HTTPS
- 83% are mobile-friendly
- 68% show opening hours
- 54% show prices
- 35% offer online booking
The other 209 break down like this: 189 with no site found, 12 on dead domains, 7 we couldn't reach and 1 on a booking platform only.
The gap: 245 well-rated salons with no online booking of their own
Of the 303, 299 have a Google rating, and the median salon has 36 reviews. That's a lot of goodwill, and a lot of it stops at the listing.
245 salons rate 4.5 or higher and have no online booking on a site of their own. 57 have 50 or more reviews and no own site found.
Reviews with a site and without
Salons with their own site have a median of 45 reviews, against 32 for those without. Mean ratings are nearly identical at 4.83 and 4.79. This is an association only. It doesn't show that a website brings more reviews.
How we did it
- The list. We started with 901 UK salons, de-duplicated from a list we built for sales research. It isn't a census of every UK salon, so these figures describe the sample.
- The sample. We put the list in a fixed random order and worked through 360 salons. 303 were confirmed trading and form the denominator. 14 had closed permanently, 2 temporarily, and 41 couldn't be confirmed.
- Confirmed trading. 261 salons had a matched Google listing with reviews that wasn't marked closed, and 42 had their own site carrying a 2025 or 2026 date. Neither proves trading in the last 12 months.
- The checks. Fieldwork was on 30 October 2026. We loaded each site's home page and up to three contact, price or booking pages in an automated browser at phone width.
The limits
- Read the rates as floors. Prices and hours shown only in images, PDFs or apps weren't detected. Booking needed a detectable link, embed or known system, so 12 sites with "book" wording and no detectable system fail. Some of the 189 salons with no site found may have one we missed, and 7 sites we couldn't reach count as fails.
- One pull the other way. The 42 site-dated salons qualify only because they have a site, and salons with neither a listing nor a site fall out of the sample. That nudges the own-site rate upwards.
- What the ranges cover. They're 95% Wilson intervals and assume a random sample of this list. They don't cover the other limits here.
- No regional comparisons. The sample is too small to compare towns or regions, so we haven't.
- Other points. Free builders such as Wix and Weebly count as own sites. Branches of a chain that share a site each count separately. The detectors were spot-checked by sample, not fully audited, and listings can be out of date.
We publish aggregates only. No salon is named or identifiable.
Our interest. Tanning Salon Websites sells websites to salons, so we have a commercial interest in these findings. David Johnson of Tanning Salon Websites also runs three tanning salons.
How to cite this
Tanning Salon Websites (2026), The state of UK tanning salon websites 2026, fieldwork 30 October 2026, https://tanningsalonwebsites.co.uk/research/uk-tanning-salon-websites-2026/
Please keep the wording "in a sample of 303 trading UK tanning salons" and mention that we sell salon websites.