How to build a website for your business.

Step 1 — Decide what the site is for

Before comparing platforms, answer one question: what should a visitor do? Call you, book a slot, buy a thing, request a quote, join a list. One primary action, chosen deliberately.

Sites that fail usually failed here. "Somewhere people can find us" is not a goal you can design toward or measure, so every later decision — layout, copy, which button is biggest — gets made on taste instead of purpose.

Step 2 — Secure the domain properly

Buy the domain yourself, on an account in your own name, with your own card. This matters more than it sounds: domains registered by a developer "to make it easier" are one of the most common ways businesses lose control of their own address.

• Prefer .com where you can get it; a strong local extension (.co.uk, .com.au) is equally fine.
• Short, sayable over the phone, no hyphens or creative spellings.
• Turn on auto-renew and WHOIS privacy immediately.

Step 3 — Write the content before you build

This is the step everyone skips and the step that stalls projects for months. Design is easy to arrange around finished words and painful to retrofit around missing ones.

For a standard business site you need: a homepage, one page per service, an about page, a contact page, and your legal pages. For each, write the headline, the two or three things you want understood, and the call to action.

Write plainly. Say what you do, who for, and what it costs or what happens next. The word counter helps keep titles and meta descriptions inside the lengths search engines actually display.

Step 4 — Choose the platform, last

Now that you know what the site must do, the choice is simple rather than agonising:

• Brochure site, you build it — a hosted builder is fine and fastest.
• Selling products — a dedicated commerce platform; do not bolt a shop onto a brochure site.
• Content-heavy or many contributors — a CMS.
• Logins, bookings, integrations — custom development. See custom software.

Whatever you pick, confirm you can export your content and point the domain elsewhere later.

Step 5 — Build for phones first

The majority of first visits to a small business site come from a phone. Design the narrow layout first and let it expand, rather than shrinking a desktop design and hoping.

Non-negotiables: tap targets you can hit without aiming, text readable without zooming, a phone number that dials when tapped, and forms short enough to complete one-handed. Every field you add to a contact form measurably reduces the number of people who finish it.

Step 6 — Do the SEO basics, ignore the rest

You do not need an SEO strategy on day one. You need the basics done correctly:

• A unique title and meta description on every page — the meta tag generator handles the formatting.
• One h1 per page describing that page.
• Compressed images. Photos straight from a phone are frequently 4–8 MB and are the usual reason a site feels slow; the image compressor fixes this in seconds.
• Descriptive alt text on every meaningful image.
• A Google Business Profile, if you serve a local area. Often worth more than everything else combined.

Step 7 — Launch before it is perfect

Check the essentials — every link resolves, forms actually deliver, it loads on a real phone, HTTPS is on, legal pages exist — and publish.

A live site at 80% teaches you things no amount of internal review will: which pages people read, where they leave, what they ask. A perfect site that never launches teaches you nothing. Iterate against real behaviour instead of guesses.