Quick answers
These are the questions that most often bring Jersey business owners to our site from search. Each has a short answer here and a link to the guide with the full detail and the official sources.
Almost certainly. Under the Control of Housing and Work Law, most businesses need a licence, including most sole traders. A licence for a resident business is free: you apply on one.gov.je, and the Business Hub aims to decide within five working days. There are narrow exceptions, such as some sole traders working under eight hours a week.
A business name is registered with the JFSC alongside your licence: £77 to register and £62 to renew every three years (2026 fees). A limited company costs from £205 to incorporate (five business days) up to £856 (two hours), then £220 a year for the annual confirmation. You will also need to sort Social Security contributions, tell Revenue Jersey you have started trading, and register with the JOIC.
No. Jersey has its own Goods and Services Tax (GST) at 5% on most goods and services, and a business only has to register once its taxable sales reach £300,000 a year. If you sell goods to customers in the UK, UK VAT at 20% can be charged on those parcels at the border, so how it gets paid needs setting up before you start.
Not in 2026. The Better Business Grant’s productivity strand, the part that funds technology, is fully allocated and closed for 2026, and sole traders are not eligible even when it is open. No 2027 round had been announced when we last checked.
If you want to be found by people who do not already know you, yes. Before someone calls a tradesperson or books a table, they look the business up, and a social page or a Google profile alone often leaves questions unanswered. If you are fully booked from referrals, a well-kept Google Business Profile can carry you for a while.
It depends on who builds it and how big it is. With Jersey Web, builds start from £100 and are priced to the job: as a rough guide, from £100 to £300 for a one-page site and from £300 to £800 for a small multi-page site, plus hosting from £20 a month. That makes a one-page site from £340 to £540 in its first year, with your domain name and any extras on top.
Most importantly, registration with the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner (JOIC) if you hold any customer details: it costs £70 a year for organisations with fewer than ten staff, and failing to register is a criminal offence. You also need a privacy notice, cookie consent if you use analytics, your business details, and distance selling information if you sell online.
For investment, trust company, fund services and insurance mediation firms, the website counts as an advertisement under the Financial Services (Advertising) (Jersey) Order 2008. It must name the firm issuing it and give an address, name the Jersey Financial Services Commission as the regulator, and be clear, fair and not misleading, and copies must be kept for ten years.
Google switched off its free business.site websites in 2024, so the old address now shows an error. Your Google Business Profile still works. Remove the dead link from it, get a domain name in your own name, and point the profile at a proper website.
Start with the safe checks: try the site on mobile data, note the exact error, find out which company your domain is registered through, and check whether a renewal or hosting bill has gone unpaid. Do not change DNS settings by trial and error, and never pay a renewal notice from a company you do not recognise.
No, but it is worth having if you serve the island: islanders read .je as local. Anyone can register one, and it costs £49 a year direct from the Channel Isles registry. Whatever ending you choose, register the domain in your business’s own name, not your web designer’s.
Set up your Google Business Profile as a service-area business: you register your real address, hide it from public view, and list the parishes you cover instead. Never invent an address or borrow someone else’s, because a suspended listing is worse than none.
Yes. Our Jersey business directory lists over 400 local businesses by category and parish, each with a link to find them online, and listing is free. Businesses can add, update or remove their listing with the form on the page.
Jersey Web is a small UK web studio that builds websites for businesses and organisations in Jersey. We are not on the island: we work remotely, by WhatsApp, phone and email, and write each site for island customers. Our Jersey work includes the Jersey Sports Council website.
Builds start from £100 and are priced to the job. As a rough guide, a one-page website is from £100 to £300 and a website with several pages is from £300 to £800. Hosting is from £20 a month. Build and hosting together, a one-page site is from £340 to £540 in its first year. Online shops are priced after a short chat. We confirm the price in writing before you commit.
The server your site runs on, security and the SSL certificate, backups, ongoing maintenance and a real person to contact when you want a change. There is no setup fee and no long contract, and it starts from launch.
With Jersey Web, you do. You own your content, and your domain name is registered in your name and paid for separately, so it stays yours. There is no long contract. If an earlier designer holds your .je domain, the registry has rules and a route for getting it back.
Most small business sites we build are ready in two to three weeks once we have your details and content. Having your text, photos and decisions together first is what keeps it quick.
Yes. Jersey Web is a UK studio and works with Jersey businesses remotely, by WhatsApp, phone and email. Whoever you choose, check they know the Jersey details: GST at 5% and not UK VAT, registering with the JOIC, and a .je domain registered in your own name.
Ask who will own the domain, what the site costs over three years and not only to build, what the hosting includes, how changes are handled and what the contract ties you to. Ask for live examples and client references, who you will deal with day to day, and what they do about search and the legal basics.
Our Jersey photo library has 150 original photographs of the island, from La Corbière and Plémont to St Brelade’s Bay. More than 100 of them can be downloaded free through Pexels under the Pexels licence. Each photograph’s page says whether its download is available and links to it.
In our October 2026 study of 49 Jersey business websites, 49% showed a way to get in touch on the first phone screen, 20% had a tap-to-call button there and 14% showed a phone number that could not be tapped. Across the 43 sites we could measure, the main content took a median of 10.3 seconds to appear on mobile.
Ask us on WhatsApp (opens in a new tab) or by email, or look it up in the Jargon Buster and our guides. For a plan for your own site, try the free website planner.