We read more than a hundred golf club websites. Here is what we found.
In 2026 we went through the websites of over a hundred golf clubs across England, the way a visitor would: every page, every price, every link. Then we checked what we found in a real browser before writing a word. This is the honest picture.
Of a hundred clubs, ranked worst to best
These are counts from our own reading of a hundred club websites in August 2026, with the worst re-checked in September. They are conservative: we only count what we saw with our own eyes.
Fourteen things we found, club by club
Every one of these was on a live website when we checked. Names are left off; the clubs have not asked to be examples. Most of these are not neglect. They are what happens when a website is nobody's job.
- Yorkshire, pay and playThe website's sitemap listed 3,002 articles. Fourteen were golf posts from 2018. The other 2,988 were gambling articles in Polish, Italian, Czech and Russian, each carrying the club's name in its title, and invisible from the club's own browser.Still live when we checked on 4 September 2026.
- Lancashire, members' clubThe course guide loaded twenty photographs totalling seventy megabytes. On a phone at the first tee it barely opened. The same twenty pictures, properly saved, come to six.Also: the booking page displayed one phone number and dialled another.
- Warwickshire, 1894All eighteen hole pages read "Hole description here". The maps and the flyovers were there; the words never arrived. The course had four different lengths depending on which page you read.6,012 on the homepage, 5,957 on the card, 6,018 across the hole pages, a fourth set on the maps.
- Yorkshire, pay and playA page on the site gave the club's address as Uplands Golf, 17 Mile Drive, Pebble Beach, California. Not in the menu, but in the sitemap Google reads. The About Us page was placeholder Latin advertising a vacancy for a caddy; the club's own FAQ says caddies are not allowed.Theme demo pages left live since the site was built.
- Herefordshire, family-ownedThe Course Overview page read, in full, "CONTENT GOES HERE". The club's name was spelt "Golf Glub" on the homepage and again on the venue-hire page. A Play Safe Stay Safe page in the menu was the Covid framework of 19 July 2021.The club's real domain was a different one from the address most listings gave.
- Dorset, 1891The Summer Green Fees page contained no green fees: a link to the booking system and a promise of the best price. "How to Find Us" was blank apart from "Last updated: 23 Apr 2021". Open Results read "Okay, you found a secret page, but we can't show you what we have on here yet."The hole-by-hole text and the printed card disagreed on stroke index for four holes.
- Wiltshire, 1880The homepage said the course was 6,501 yards. The course page and the card said 6,351. The society guidance notes still quoted the 2021 green fee and named a General Manager who had left.A well-kept site on an agency. Errors happen to good clubs too.
- Herefordshire, members' clubThe history page was Lorem ipsum, with the placeholder date "19th June 1956" printed three times. Hole 13's page carried hole 11's numbers. No email address appeared on any web page; it existed only inside the membership application PDF.
- Hampshire, 27 holesThe homepage still carried a "website maintenance" notice. A 122-yard par 3 was labelled "Hole 24 - Par 5". Both course pages shared the same search-engine description, which promised "the final push".
- Hampshire, estate courseThe theme's map configuration pointed at Brooklyn, New York. "info@yourdomain.com" sat in every page. Two demo pages were live with "John Doe / Developer" and a phone number of 1.555.555.555. The footer said Copyright 2015.The clubhouse page and the history of the estate were both live and neither was in the menu.
- Staffordshire, members' clubTen photographs used eighteen times under different filenames, and at least six were free stock: the buggies, the wedge and ball, the burger, and two course panoramas with Spanish moss on the trees. The contact page listed a fax number identical to the phone number.
- Gloucestershire, Forest of DeanThe membership enquiry form had 256 spam comments published underneath it. A test page was live. The homepage "What's on" photograph was Unsplash stock with the filename still saying so.
- Lancashire, members' clubTwo email links sent mail somewhere other than the address printed beside them. Two memberships had two prices each, depending on the page. The green fee was not published anywhere on the site.
- Somerset, pay and playThe one club address in every email we drafted turned out not to exist. It appeared nowhere on their site. We had read it off a directory, and we were wrong. So we check everything twice now, in a real browser, before it goes anywhere.Ours, not theirs. Included because it is true.
What this is, and what it isn't
It is not a list of bad clubs. Several of the sites above belong to clubs that are plainly well run: opens results posted the day after the competition, safeguarding pages refreshed last month, a course that drains so well it rarely closes. The website is the one thing nobody at the club is paid to mind, so it drifts.
It is also not a scoring exercise. We do not rank clubs by how many faults we can find. We look for the three things that are actually costing bookings, and we send those. Usually one of them is a price that cannot be found and one is a page that says something untrue about the club.
How we check
Every page, fetched the way a browser fetches it. Every link followed to where it really goes, not where it says it goes. Every image opened. Every PDF read. Then the findings re-checked on the day the email goes, because clubs fix things, and a finding that was true last month is an insult this month.
We got this wrong ourselves early on, more than once, by trusting what a crawler told us over what a browser shows. So now we do not.
Want to know what yours says?
The findings audit is free and takes us a week. Most clubs are surprised. A few are alarmed. All of them are better off knowing.