Only one in five Nigerian businesses has a website

The short version

Most Nigerian businesses are contactable but not findable. They have a working phone number and no web presence they control. When someone searches for them, whatever a third party has written down is the entire public record.

More Nigerian businesses publish their opening hours than publish a web address. That single comparison tells you what the internet is for in this market: people use it to look you up. They do not keep a shop there.

The gap is geographic, and it is wide

Website adoption is not evenly spread. Among cities with more than 2,000 listings in our directory, the spread runs from about a third to about an eighth:

A business in Lagos is roughly two and a half times more likely to have a website than one in Jos. The gap reflects what the surrounding market rewards, and who is selling web services door to door.

The same divide shows up in reviews

Web presence and review presence move together. The share of businesses with no reviews at all runs the same direction:

Nearly half of listed businesses in Jos have never been reviewed by anyone. In Abuja it is under a fifth. A customer in Jos deciding between two plumbers has materially less to go on than a customer in Abuja making the same decision.

This is the part that compounds. Businesses that are invisible attract fewer reviews, and businesses with fewer reviews stay invisible. The cities that start behind fall further behind, and the gap is not about the quality of the work being done in them.

If you are trying to find a business

• A missing website is common here. In most of Nigeria it is the norm. Four in five legitimate businesses do not have one. Judge on other evidence.
• A working phone number is the stronger signal. Call it before you travel. A number that rings and is answered by someone who knows the business tells you more than a website that was last updated in 2021.
• Cross-check the address separately. Where there is no website, there is usually no canonical address either. Confirm it on the phone rather than relying on the first listing you find, including ours.

If this is your business

You probably do not need a website. You do need one page that you control and that says the true thing when someone searches your name. For most of the businesses in this data, the directory listing is that page, whether or not the owner has ever looked at it.

Claiming it costs ₦5,000 and takes a phone verification. It lets you fix the hours, correct the address, and add what you actually do. What it does not do is move you up the ranking, because that is not for sale.