Research
We read 2,154 UK golf club websites. Here’s what they show.
Every golf club website we could read on the four national club lists, in October 2026: how clubs take bookings, recruit members, measure their marketing, and what it means for yours.
What we read
Club managers often ask us the same questions. What booking system do most clubs use? Is it normal not to have an online membership form? Does anyone actually use a CRM? We couldn't find anyone who had counted, so we did.
In October 2026 we took every club on the England Golf, Scottish Golf, Wales Golf and Golf Ireland club lists, kept the 2,741 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and read the public website of each one we could: 2,154 club websites, 1,530 in England, 444 in Scotland, 127 in Wales and 53 in Northern Ireland. We read the homepage and the membership, visitor, society and events pages, and looked at what the pages show and what their code loads.
Nobody was contacted, no form was submitted and no account was created. We don't name any club here. Our own client clubs are in the figures, and we don't name them either.
Seven in ten clubs take tee times online, and three systems run most of them
1,514 of the 2,154 club websites (70%) let a visitor book a tee time online. Of those 1,514, 578 (38%) use BRS, 423 (28%) intelligentgolf and 239 (16%) Club Systems, so three systems run 1,240 of them (82%). Golfmanager, Lightspeed, GolfNow, Golf Genius and TeeItUp appear on 58 more between them. The other 216 use another system, their national union's booking page, or one we couldn't identify.
1,602 (74%) link a member login, most often to intelligentgolf (431), Club Systems (320) or BRS (219). Only 50 (2%) link a club app in the App Store or Google Play.
That concentration matters when a club wants its systems to work together. Our free report, The Annual Golf Club Software Report 2026, sets out what each supplier publishes about connecting to other software, and the questions to ask before you sign.
Only one membership page in five lets someone apply online
1,892 club websites (88%) have a membership page. Of those, 398 (21%) offer an online application form and 367 (19%) a form to download and print. 414 (22%) have an enquiry form only. 346 (18%) send the reader to the general contact page, and 350 (18%) give only an email address or phone number.
Prices are usually there: 1,319 membership pages (70%) show them on the page or in a linked PDF. 625 (33%) mention a joining fee, 300 (16%) a waiting list, and 114 (6%) a trial or taster membership. Junior membership is offered on 80% of membership pages, intermediate or under-30 on 42%, five-day or weekday on 42%, and flexible or points-based membership on 28%.
Few enquiry forms ask permission to stay in touch
Of 1,233 clubs with an enquiry form, 322 (26%) show a marketing consent tickbox. Of 1,190 forms we could inspect, 170 (14%) link to a privacy notice. Only 150 club websites (7%) show a newsletter sign-up form.
A tickbox looks like a small thing. Without one, a club can answer the enquiry, but it has no permission to send that person news, offers or an open day invitation later.
Half of club websites show no analytics at all
1,060 club websites (49%) show no Google Analytics or Tag Manager code at all. 850 (39%) load Google Analytics 4 or Tag Manager, and 263 (12%) the Meta pixel used to measure Facebook and Instagram advertising. 63 (3%) load a CRM's tracking code, 51 (2%) of them HubSpot, and 86 (4%) an email marketing tool such as Mailchimp. These are floors: code added later through Tag Manager can't be seen from the page.
724 (34%) show a cookie consent tool. 578 (27%) load tracking code with no consent tool we could see. That's 578 of the 943 sites that load tracking (61%). The ICO's guidance on cookies and similar technologies explains when consent is needed. It's worth checking your own site against it.
Chat is rare. 40 club websites (2%) have a chat widget, and 7 of those are AI-led. 5 of the 7 are Capture Concierge, which Albatross makes, so read that figure with our interest in mind.
What the websites run on
Counting WordPress underneath every group, 935 club websites (43%) run on it. 1,198 (56%) credit a web designer or agency in the footer. 2,100 (97%) are served securely over HTTPS.
Search and AI answers
932 club websites (43%) carry structured data, the code that tells search engines and AI assistants what a page is about. Only 99 (5%) use the GolfCourse type made for golf courses. 1,536 of the 2,153 we could check (71%) publish a sitemap, and 1,074 (50%) carry the tags that control how a page looks when it's shared.
294 (14%) block at least one of the AI crawlers we checked (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot) in their robots.txt file. That's a legitimate choice. It's worth making sure it's one the club made on purpose, and not a setting someone else switched on.
Prices and the season ahead
Where a club publishes a clear number, the lowest adult weekday green fee for 18 holes has a median of £35 (from 266 clubs), and the lowest society day price a median of £40 a head (from 181 clubs). 410 club websites (19%) link a gift voucher or online shop. By 24 and 25 October, 380 (18%) already had a Christmas or festive page live.
Six checks for your own club website
- Can someone apply for membership from the membership page? If the page only gives an email address, add a short form, or a clear next step with a named person.
- Does every enquiry form carry an unticked marketing tickbox and a privacy link? Without the tickbox you can reply, but you can't follow up later.
- Can you see where your visitors and enquiries come from? If your site loads no analytics, you can't tell which page, campaign or channel brought a new member in.
- Does your site ask for consent before it loads tracking? Check what your pages load against the ICO's guidance.
- Do search engines and AI assistants know what your pages are? Ask your web designer about structured data, including the GolfCourse type, and decide your AI crawler policy on purpose.
- Do your systems talk to each other? Ask your booking and membership supplier, in writing, what connects to what.
How we did it
We took the public club lists of England Golf, Scottish Golf, Wales Golf and Golf Ireland (Northern Ireland only): 2,741 clubs. 587 are not in the figures: 174 that don't own a course, 159 with no website listed, 212 we couldn't read, 22 whose web address now shows unrelated content, and 20 whose robots.txt asks not to be read. We read each website once, on 24 or 25 October 2026, honouring robots.txt, one page at a time.
Rules classified each page from its text, forms and code, and we checked 40 clubs again from scratch: 1.5% of the values tested were wrong, and every rule behind them was fixed before these figures. A website can show things a rule misses, and code added through Tag Manager can't be seen, so technology figures are floors. Prices count only where a number sits in clear wording.
Our interest. Albatross designs club websites and makes Capture, including Capture CRM and Capture Concierge, so we have an interest in what clubs use. The figures are counts of what the websites show, and our own client clubs are counted the same way as everyone else.
The full data
The free report goes deeper.
The Annual Golf Club Software Report 2026 covers booking, membership and club systems, and what each supplier publishes about connecting.