Section
Mattresses
Guides built from brand terms, published specifications and primary research — not from press releases.
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Why a side sleeper's mattress has a different job to do
Side-lying carries the same weight on 18% less contact area at 50% higher pressure. The mechanics are real; the firmness numbers sold to solve them are not.
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Get it right with the UK’s biggest mattress retailers
Dreams, Bensons, Emma, Simba, Silentnight and Nectar — what each actually offers on trials, guarantees and delivery.
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Twelve mistakes people make buying a mattress
The errors that cost money, several of which void the guarantee before the bed is made up.
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What a mattress guarantee actually covers
Pro-rata scales, sag thresholds from 2cm to 7cm, and the exclusions that end a claim on day one.
How we approach mattresses
Almost everything written about mattresses online is written by someone who wants to sell you one. That is not a conspiracy — it is simply how the category is funded, and it shapes what gets said.
We do not sell mattresses and we have not slept on the ones we write about. So rather than pretending to a verdict we have not earned, these pages do something the brands cannot: read the published terms and specifications side by side and report what they actually say. That turns out to be more useful than another opinion, because the differences between brands are real, documented, and almost never laid out in one place.
Where the evidence is thin, we say so. A great deal of mattress marketing rests on claims we could find no study or published standard behind — spring counts, firmness scales, replacement intervals, "orthopaedic" support. Where we searched and came up empty, we say that, rather than claiming nothing exists.
Start here
- UK bed and mattress facts — sizes, guarantees, trials and slat gaps, with the date each figure was checked.
- Twelve buying mistakes — the practical version, including the ones that quietly void your cover.