Sooner or later a UK business owner gets an email — or a LinkedIn message, or a cold call — warning that their website is breaking the law and that a compliance package will fix it by Friday. A lot of it is manufactured pressure. But underneath the scaremongering sits a real and rather boring truth: a UK business website does have to show certain things, and most small business sites we look at get at least one of them wrong. The reassuring part is that the list is short, the fixes are quick, and much of what gets sold as compliance you do not actually need. This is a plain-English summary rather than legal advice, so if your business sits close to any of the lines below, take proper advice — but it will tell you what to check and where the real requirements come from.
The company details every limited company must show
If your business is a limited company or an LLP, the law is specific about identifying yourself. The rules live in the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 — worth naming, because a surprising number of online guides still cite the 2008 regulations these replaced. The requirement is routinely forgotten, most often on sites built before the company was incorporated, or after it moved office and nobody updated the address.
It does not have to appear on every page. A single, easily found location — almost always the footer — is enough, and that is where practically every compliant site puts it. The same details belong on your business letters, order forms and invoices, and your registered name should sit in your email footer too. On your website and in your emails, four things must appear:
- —Your full registered company name, exactly as it appears at Companies House — not just your trading name or your logo
- —The company registration number
- —The part of the UK where the company is registered — for most businesses that is expressed as "Registered in England and Wales"
- —The address of the registered office
Sole traders and partnerships: much less, but not nothing
If you trade as a sole trader or an ordinary partnership you are not caught by the company disclosure rules — there is no registration number to publish. But if you trade under a name that is not simply your own — "Riverside Plumbing" rather than "John Smith" — the business names provisions of that same 2015 set of regulations still apply. You have to show the name of the owner or owners, and an address in the UK where documents can be served, on your website and on your stationery. If you trade under your own name, you generally have nothing to add here at all. This is one of those places where the honest answer is that you probably already comply and can move on.
The e-commerce rules that apply to almost every website
Separate from company law, the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 apply to anyone providing an "information society service" — which, in plain terms, is almost any commercial website, shop or not. They require a set of details to be, in the wording of the regulations, easily, directly and permanently accessible, which again is what a footer and a contact page are for. Between them you need the name of the business, a geographic address where you can be contacted — a real address, not only a PO box or a contact form — and an email address that actually reaches you. If you are VAT registered, your VAT number has to be shown. If you belong to a regulated profession or a trade register, you state the body and your registration number. And any prices you quote have to be clear about whether they include tax and delivery. The same regulations expect marketing emails to be identifiable as marketing, and, if you take orders online, the ordering steps to be explained before someone commits.
A privacy policy is not the optional extra people treat it as
The moment your site collects any personal data, you have to tell people what you do with it — and almost every site collects some. A contact form takes a name and an email address; analytics records an approximation of who visited. Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you must provide clear privacy information, which in practice means a privacy policy or notice covering what you collect, why, how long you keep it and who you share it with. The Information Commissioner's Office is the authority here, and it publishes free templates and guidance aimed squarely at small organisations. A short, honest privacy notice that matches what your site genuinely does is worth far more than a long one copied from a business that collects entirely different things.
If you sell to consumers, there is a little more
Selling to the public online brings in the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Before someone buys, you have to give them certain information — a clear description, the total price including delivery, who you are and how to reach you — and for most distance sales the consumer gets 14 days after delivery to change their mind and return the item. In practice that means a shop needs plain terms and conditions, a returns and cancellation policy that reflects the 14-day right, and delivery costs shown before checkout rather than sprung at the end. We cover the practical side in our e-commerce guide; the point here is simply that a shop carries obligations a brochure site does not.
Cookies and accessibility: the two you have probably been warned about
Two further areas get more airtime than the rest, usually from someone selling a fix. Cookies are governed by PECR alongside UK GDPR: if you set any non-essential cookies — most commonly analytics or advertising tags — you generally need proper consent first, and the detail of those rules changed in February 2026. Accessibility is a duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage — a genuine obligation, but not the one the overlay-widget emails describe. Both have their own detail and their own myths, and we have written separately about each rather than repeat it here.
What the penalties actually are, honestly
The trading disclosure rules are backed by criminal sanction — failing to show the required company details is an offence that can bring a fine for the company and its officers. That sounds alarming, and the honest picture is that prosecutions of small businesses over a missing company number are vanishingly rare. Falling short on the e-commerce or consumer rules is more likely to bite through an unenforceable contract, or a complaint, than a fine. For a five-page site the realistic risk is not a penalty at all; it is the quieter cost — a due-diligence or tender form asking how you handle data, a customer who notices the details do not add up, a supplier who reads it as a sign you cut corners elsewhere. Fix these things because they are cheap to fix and quietly cost you credibility when they are wrong, not because an inspector is on the way.
A ten-minute check
You can confirm most of this yourself in the time it takes to make a coffee. For anything you are then unsure about, GOV.UK and Companies House are the authoritative, free sources, and the ICO covers the data side. Run through this:
- —Does your footer show your registered company name, number, place of registration and registered office? This applies to limited companies and LLPs
- —Is there a real geographic address and a working email somewhere obvious, usually the contact page?
- —If you are VAT registered, is your VAT number shown?
- —Is there a privacy policy, and does it describe what your site actually collects rather than a generic list of everything?
- —If you sell online: plain terms, a returns and cancellation policy reflecting the 14-day right, and delivery costs shown before checkout?
- —Sole trader under a trading name: are the owner's name and a UK service address shown?
How we handle this on the sites we build
Every site we build ships with these basics already in place: the required company details in the footer, a privacy policy and cookie consent that match what the site really does, accessibility built to WCAG 2.2 AA, and, for shops, the consumer information a sale needs. It costs very little to do at build time and is tedious to bolt on afterwards, which is the whole argument for getting it right at the start. If you have inherited a site and are not sure what it does or does not show, we are happy to take a look and tell you plainly what — if anything — needs changing. Often it is a five-minute footer edit rather than a project, and when it is, we would rather say so.