Business Matters has rebuilt its website from scratch, and the new site went live today. Publisher Capital Business Media said it was designed around the phone screen rather than the desktop, and around the more than 1.5m people who read the title online every month.
The company’s own technology team carried out the work over four weeks.
This is the fourth site in the CBM portfolio to be rebuilt after successfully going live with new sites for Travelling for Business, EV Powered and Property Portfolio Investor, and following the launch of new site, the recipe-led food website Nourish.
Built for phone readers
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found that UK adults spent 77 per cent of their time online on a smartphone in May 2025, against 12 per cent on tablets and 11 per cent on computers. Total time online averaged four and a half hours a day, 10 minutes more than a year earlier.
The rebuilt site carries 11 sections: News, Advice, Finance, Legal, Opinion, In Business, Technology, AI, Get Funded, Interviews and Profiles. Two of them are new. AI gathers the title’s coverage of the technology in one place, and Profiles has been rebuilt in a format the company said matches the way search engines now expect pages to be set out. All stay free to read, with no registration and no paywall. A free daily email goes out at 3pm. Print subscriptions are unchanged at 12 issues for £38, and the magazine distributes 50,000 copies a month.
Paul Jones, editor of Business Matters, said: “Our readers run businesses, and most of them read us on a phone between meetings, so the site had to be quick and it had to get out of the way of the journalism. We rebuilt it from the ground up rather than patching what was already there, which means every section now loads as fast as the homepage. It also gives us room to do more reporting, and more kinds of reporting, than the old site could carry.”
Built in-house
Adeel Hassan, chief technology officer at Capital Business Media, said: “Building it ourselves meant we could test it against the way people actually read us, rather than the way a template assumes they will. Most of our readers arrive on a phone with one hand free and a few minutes to spare, so that is where every decision started. We also rebuilt the profile pages so a search engine can tell straight away who a company is and who runs it, rather than having to piece it together, because that is how these pages get read in 2026.”
Business Matters was founded in 1986 and was appointed the official business magazine of the London 2012 Olympics. Capital Business Media publishes it alongside titles including Travelling For Business, EV Powered and the food title Nourish, and reaches more than 2.5m digital readers a month across the group. It invested £500,000 in 2021 to set up its events and awards company.
Richard Alvin, founder and group managing director of Capital Business Media, said: “This is an investment in the next decade of Business Matters, not a fresh coat of paint and we have done it with our own team.”
Capital Business Media said it will continue to rebuild its brand portfolio and also now offers the service to other businesses through Content Crafting Co, its editorial studio, which also handles website copy, search programmes and thought leadership for corporate clients.
Paul Jones
Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media's automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.
