Most of your visitors decide
on a phone, in the street.

Stratford-upon-Avon has around thirty thousand residents and receives visitors in numbers that dwarf that entirely. The Shakespeare properties, the Royal Shakespeare Company's two theatres, the river and the town itself sustain a hospitality, retail and attractions economy far larger than the resident population could support. That single fact shapes nearly every commercial website in the town, whether or not the business thinks of itself as being in tourism.

The practical consequence is that a large share of the searches that matter are made on a phone, by someone who is already here, within an hour of them spending money. They are not researching a purchase over a fortnight. They want to know whether you are open, where exactly you are, what it costs, whether there is a table at seven, and whether the photographs look like somewhere they want to be. A site that takes six seconds to load, or that hides its opening hours in a PDF, loses that person to whoever is next in the list.

The second pressure is the aggregators. For accommodation, restaurants and attractions, the booking platforms and review sites outrank almost every independent business for the generic searches, and take a commission on top. You will not beat them at "hotels in Stratford". What is winnable is the search for you by name, the specific thing you do that they cannot categorise, and the direct booking that saves you fifteen or twenty per cent — which means the site's real job is conversion, not acquisition.

Beyond the visitor economy there is a quieter Stratford: the professional practices, the businesses on the industrial and business park land to the east and south, and a genuine rural and agricultural base in the surrounding villages, with its own seasonality and its own paperwork. Very little software is written for that last group, which usually means more manual work than there needs to be.