Original research from the Companies House register, July 2026. Method at the bottom so you can check every number.
The numbers first
There are 24,283 active joinery installation companies on the UK register right now. Since January 2025, 4,826 new joinery firms have incorporated, and the trade is still adding roughly 321 new companies every month through 2026. That is a lot of vans, a lot of word of mouth, and a lot of blokes and businesses competing for the same local search.
Here is the harder number. Of the joinery companies that incorporated in January 2025, 19% were already dissolved within 18 months. Across everyone who started since January 2025, 174 firms are gone already. Most did not collapse owing money; they were struck off for never filing anything, which usually means the work never came.
So, do you need a website, or is Checkatrade enough?
Honest answer: directories do a real job. Checkatrade, Bark, MyBuilder and the rest put you in front of people who are actively looking, and the review systems carry weight. Plenty of joiners get their first year of work there.
But be clear about the deal you are making. Directory visibility is rented. You pay per lead or per year. Your profile sits on a page beside four competitors. The reviews you sweat for belong to the platform, the ranking rules can change any morning, and if you stop paying, you disappear. None of it builds an asset you own.
Your own website is the opposite deal: it costs once (or a fixed monthly amount), it holds your photos, your jobs, your reviews and your service area in one place you control, and every year it compounds instead of expiring. The joiners still trading in five years almost all have both: directories for the lead flow, their own site as the home base everything else points to.
The bit most joiners have not clocked yet
People have started asking ChatGPT and Google’s AI who to hire, the same way they used to ask Google for a list of links. When an AI answers “who is a good joiner near me”, it can only recommend businesses it can actually read: a real website, machine-readable, with clear facts about who you are and where you work.
A directory profile is not yours to make readable. Your own site is. In our testing this month, even among the UK’s top 50 digital agencies, some websites were effectively invisible to AI crawlers. Trade sites, built cheap on page builders, are usually worse. The joiners who fix this early are competing for recommendations almost nobody else is even trying to win yet.
What the survivors do differently
From the register data and the trade businesses we work with, the pattern is consistent: the firms that make it past the 18-month cliff have somewhere permanent to be found (their own site), collect proof in one place (photos of real jobs, named reviews), and answer the phone or the form the same day. None of that is clever marketing. It is being findable, credible and responsive while a fifth of your competition quietly disappears.
Method, so you can check it
Counts pulled live from the Companies House register (Advanced Search API) on 12 July 2026 for SIC code 43320, joinery installation: active companies, incorporations since 1 January 2025, and dissolution status by incorporation month. Companies House data is public; anyone can verify these numbers. Figures are a point-in-time snapshot. Corrections welcome: hello@modemarketing.co.uk.
Where Mode fits, stated plainly
Mode builds fixed-price websites for trades: a complete one-page site for £249, a five-page custom WordPress site for £495 live in five working days, or built, hosted and looked after for £99 a month. Every price is published, you own everything, and the site is built to be read by Google and by AI from day one. If you would rather check what AI currently says about your business first, that is a thing we measure. No calls needed, the prices are all on the site: Quick Site · Website Subscription · everything else.
