Which Indian Cities Have the Biggest Website Gap

The Indian cities with the biggest website gap are not the ones with the most businesses. Across the 98,509 Indian businesses in our index, the rate ranges from four in five in Morena to roughly one in four in Bengaluru — a spread wider than the one between entire countries.

Which makes the choice of city a bigger decision than the choice of vertical for most agencies, and it is one almost nobody makes deliberately.

Indian cities where we have checked at least four hundred businesses, ordered by the share with no website. This is read from the index each time the page is built rather than pasted in, so it moves as we scan:

Businesses with a verified website check. Cities below 400 checked are excluded — small samples move a great deal in this data.

Two things stand out immediately. The top of the table is entirely tier-2 and smaller cities, and the gap in several of them is high enough that a single market street is a week of work.

The other is how uneven the sampling looks: a city with 1,500 checked businesses and one with 6,700 are both on this list. That is a property of where we have scanned, not of the cities, and it is the main caveat on reading the ordering too precisely.

The bottom of the same list is exactly what you would expect, and it is worth stating so nobody plans a metro campaign on the assumption that this is untouched ground.

Bengaluru sits around 26%, Mumbai around 28%, Delhi around 29%. Those are still large absolute numbers — a quarter of five thousand checked businesses is a lot of prospects — but the businesses are bigger, better served and more likely to have been approached by somebody already.

The practical difference is what you are selling. In Morena or Kota you are mostly selling a first website. In Bengaluru you are mostly selling a redesign, competing with an incumbent and a known previous price. Same product, different sale.

Three things, and they compound.

Fewer agencies. A metro has hundreds of web shops working the same map. A tier-2 city has a handful, and the businesses there have often never been pitched by anyone.

Different customer expectations. A shop whose customers all live within two kilometres has never lost a visible sale to not being findable, so nothing forced the question. Nobody walked in and said they nearly went elsewhere because they could not find a website.

Directory habit. Where a JustDial or IndiaMART listing is the norm, the web-presence question feels answered — and it is answered, in a way that costs them monthly and that they do not own.

None of those is about affordability, which is the usual assumption. The businesses at the top of that table include hardware suppliers and clothing stores with substantial turnover.

It is our index, not a census. A city we have not scanned deeply appears low or not at all, and that says nothing about the city.

It also counts a business as having a website whenever there is anything in the listing's website field — including a Facebook page, a directory profile or a dead domain. Every rate here is therefore conservative, and the real first-website opportunity in each city is larger than the number shown.

Finally, a city-level rate hides enormous variation inside the city. Neighbourhood-level gaps within a single city range from the mid twenties to above fifty percent, which matters more for planning an actual week of work than the city figure does.