Hello! Remember me? 👋
I feel as though I should probably start this post with a rather large apology, because it has been a ridiculously long time since I last updated Online Competition.
My last post was way back in March 2025 which, frankly, is a little embarrassing. I certainly didn’t intend to disappear for quite so long! Work got busy, family life got busy, and somewhere along the way my poor little comping website ended up being one of those things I kept meaning to come back to “next week”.
You know how that goes.
But I am VERY pleased to say that I’m back – and I haven’t returned empty-handed.
In fact, I’ve been giving Online Competition a bit of an overhaul behind the scenes, and there’s now a shiny new UK competitions directory on the site.
And I’m rather excited about this one. 🎉
Table of Contents
A proper home for free UK competitions
One thing I’ve always wanted Online Competition to be genuinely useful for is actually finding competitions to enter.
Writing about comping is all well and good (and believe me, I can happily disappear down a rabbit hole discussing odds, entry strategies and bizarre competition terms for hours), but sometimes you just want someone to point you towards the goodies.
So that’s exactly what the new directory does.
You can now head over to the competitions section and browse free competitions from around the UK, with all the useful bits pulled together in one place.
And when I say free, I mean free.
There are no paid-entry competitions, no purchase-required promotions, no gambling or casino offers and no adult content mixed in amongst them.
Website competitions? Yes.
Email competitions? Absolutely.
Instagram and Facebook comps? Of course.
Postal competitions? Those are welcome too – although where you need to pay for a stamp or postage, I’ll make that clear. Because “free” suddenly feels rather less free when nobody mentions you need to find a stamp, an envelope and possibly remember what a postbox looks like. 😁
No more hunting around for the important bits
You know the drill.
You find what looks like an amazing competition, click through, scroll past seventeen paragraphs of marketing, hunt for the terms, discover they’re hidden in a PDF somewhere, and eventually realise the competition closed three days ago.
Not ideal.
The new listings are designed to give you the useful information before you go wandering off around the internet.
Where the information is available, you’ll be able to see things such as:
- what you can win
- who is running the competition
- the closing date and time
- who is eligible to enter
- how to enter
- how many times you can enter
- any important entry requirements
- the answer, where a competition requires one and it can be verified
There’s then a direct link to the original competition itself, rather than sending you through a chain of mysterious websites, plus a separate link to the official terms and conditions.
Much nicer.
And I’m keeping an eye out for new ones 👀
This isn’t going to be one of those competition directories that gets enthusiastically updated for a fortnight and then quietly sits there displaying a competition to win an iPhone 7 from 2018.
The system checks for new competitions up to four times a day, and new finds are checked against the organiser’s original competition page and terms before being added.
That part was really important to me.
There is an awful lot of recycled competition information floating around online, and once one site gets a closing date or prize detail wrong, the mistake has an annoying habit of spreading everywhere.
So the original promoter is the starting point wherever possible.
There are also checks on links and prize details, together with previous competition records, to help stop the same competition appearing over and over again in slightly different disguises.
Because nobody needs to get excited about winning the same KitchenAid three times before realising it’s actually one competition. 😂
You can actually search the things!
This sounds like a ridiculously basic thing to get excited about, but I LOVE this bit.
You can search the directory across much more than just the competition title. The search looks through prizes, organisers, eligibility details and entry information too.
So if you’re specifically on the hunt for holidays, vouchers, cash, beauty goodies or competitions from a particular company, you have a fighting chance of finding them without scrolling endlessly.
There are filters too.
You can narrow competitions down by prize category or entry method, which is especially handy if, for example, you love website competitions but would rather stick pins in your eyes than make another “LIKE, FOLLOW, TAG THREE FRIENDS AND SHARE TO YOUR STORY” Instagram entry.
We all have our limits. 😆
And if you’re a bit more methodical about your comping, there are plenty of ways to sort everything as well.
You can sort by things including:
newest added, closing date, known prize value, title, organiser, prize, eligibility and entry limits.
Personally, I suspect “newest added” and “closing date” are going to get quite a workout.
The “ending soon” section may be dangerous…
…because I already know exactly what I’m like.
There are little New and Ending soon labels throughout the listings, so it’s easy to spot competitions worth looking at quickly.
The sensible strategy would probably be to use “Ending soon” to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
My strategy will almost certainly be to see seventeen competitions ending tomorrow and suddenly decide I MUST ENTER ALL OF THEM IMMEDIATELY.
Same thing, really.
The whole directory has also been made nice and compact so you can scan through lots of competitions quickly, whether you’re sitting at a computer or doing a sneaky bit of comping from your phone while waiting for the kettle to boil.
And when they’re gone, they’re gone
Another little improvement that makes me surprisingly happy: competitions now disappear from the live listings automatically once they close.
They’re not deleted completely, though.
Closed competitions have their own archived pages, clearly showing that the promotion has finished, and the entry button is removed.
That means old listings can still be useful for reference – without anyone accidentally wasting ten minutes trying to enter something that ended six months ago.
It’s the little things.
Come and have a nose around
So there we are.
After an embarrassingly long disappearing act, Online Competition is alive again – and this time there are rather a lot more competitions involved. 🎉
The new directory is already up and running here:
👉 Browse the latest free UK competitions
Have a poke around, try the searches and filters, and see what takes your fancy.
I’m hoping it becomes the sort of page you can bookmark, pop back to whenever you have ten minutes to spare, and very quickly see what’s new and what’s about to disappear.
And, after being away for so long, it is genuinely lovely to be writing here again.
Now I suppose I’d better make up for those missing eighteen months, hadn’t I? 😁
Happy comping! 🎉