How to Set Up a Website for a Small Business

Setting up a website for a small business is less complicated than it looks from the outside, but the order you do things in matters. Get the first decision right and the rest follows. Get it wrong and you end up rebuilding in a year.

This is the sequence we use, whether we are building the site or you are. If you are still deciding whether you need one at all, start with do I need a website for my business.

1. Decide what the website is for

Before anything technical, answer one question: what do you want a visitor to do? Ring you, book a slot, buy something, request a quote, or find your opening hours. Pick one primary action. Sites that try to do five things do none of them well.

Write it down in a sentence. “I want a plumber’s customer in Folkestone to ring me about a boiler.” That sentence decides your pages, your photos and your buttons, and it settles arguments later when you are choosing between two designs.

2. Get your domain name

Your domain is your address, and it is the one part of this you should own outright and personally control.

• Register it in your business name, not your designer’s, and keep the login yourself.
• Shorter is better, and easier to say down the phone is better still.
• For a UK business serving UK customers, .co.uk and .com both work fine. Buy both if the budget allows and point one at the other.
• Avoid hyphens and clever spellings. If you have to spell it out every time you say it, it is the wrong name.
• Set the renewal to automatic, and check the card on file has not expired.

Expect to pay somewhere between a few pounds and about twenty a year. A lapsed domain takes your website and your email with it, so this is the single cheapest thing worth being careful about.

3. Choose how it gets built

There are three realistic routes for a small business, and the right one depends on your time more than your budget.

If you are building it yourself, the platform choice matters, and we compared the main three in Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace. If you are hiring someone, how to choose a web designer covers the questions worth asking before you commit.

4. Work out the budget honestly

Two numbers matter, and people usually only plan for the first one: what it costs to build, and what it costs to keep running.

• The build. A small business site is typically a few hundred to a few thousand pounds depending on size and whether you are selling online.
• The running costs. Domain renewal each year, hosting, and either your own time or a maintenance plan to keep it updated and backed up.

We broke the build side down in how much a website costs, and the ongoing side in how much website maintenance costs.

5. Plan the pages before you design anything

Most small businesses need fewer pages than they think, and each one should earn its place.

• Home. What you do, who for, where, and one clear next step.
• A page per service. Not one page listing everything. One page each, because that is how people search.
• About. Real photos and real names. People buy from people, particularly locally.
• Proof. Past work, reviews, before and after photos, whatever you genuinely have.
• Contact. Phone, form, and the area you cover.

Five to eight pages covers most small businesses properly. Add more when you have something real to put on them.

For a sense of what that looks like in practice: Best Price Windows and Doors, a Kent double glazing installer, first messaged us on 25 July, had three homepage designs back on 27 July, a full five page draft on 31 July, and the site live on 4 August. Ten days start to finish. Charles, who runs it, said afterwards: “thanks for a supa quick service and professional website”. The build was never the slow part. Waiting on photos and approvals usually is.

6. Write the words first, then design

This is the step that stalls more projects than any other, and doing it in the wrong order is why. Design around real words, never lorem text, or you end up with a beautiful layout that your actual content does not fit.

• Write like you speak. Read it aloud, and cut anything you would not say to a customer.
• Lead with what the customer gets, not with how long you have been trading.
• Be specific. “We cover Ashford and 15 miles around it” beats “we cover a wide area”.
• Answer the questions you get asked on the phone every week. Those are your best pages.

If writing is the part you are dreading, it is worth checking whether whoever builds the site includes it. We do, because a site with placeholder words never goes live. It matters most when the work is hard to explain. Jamie, who runs a bespoke steel fabrication business, told us after reading his draft: “i really like the tone of the text and youve captured the complex nature of what we offer well.” That is the bar. Not clever copy, just an accurate account of what you actually do.

7. Get the photos sorted

Photography is usually what separates a site that looks like your business from one that looks like a template. You rarely need a professional shoot to start.

• Real photos of your work, your van, your premises, your team beat stock images every time.
• A modern phone camera is fine in good daylight.
• Shoot more than you think you need, in landscape as well as portrait.
• Resize before uploading. A photo straight off a phone is often several megabytes and will slow the site down.

8. Set up the basics before launch

Small things, easy to miss, awkward to add later.

9. Test it properly, then launch

Do this on a real phone, on mobile data, not on the office wifi.

• Submit your own contact form and confirm the email arrives somewhere you read.
• Tap your phone number and check it dials.
• Read a full page on a phone without zooming.
• Click every link in the menu and footer.
• Ask someone who does not know your business what you do, after five seconds on the homepage.

Get the awkward parts right first

If your site will take payments, hold logins or store customer details, build that part properly at the start even if it delays the pretty part. This is the one piece of sequencing we would argue about, because it is the one that is expensive to undo.

The reason is simple. Once real people have accounts with you, changing how the site handles their data means moving live customer records, not editing a page. A business we spoke to this year was close to launching a membership service and was understandably focused on getting it live. The advice we gave, which cost us the larger job in the short term, was to stop and get the foundation right first, because retrofitting it after a few hundred members had signed up would have been slower and dearer than doing it once.

Design, extra pages and content can all be improved after launch. Anything holding personal data really cannot, not cheaply.

10. Plan for after launch

A website is not finished at launch, it is just started. Prices change, services change, software needs updating, and backups need taking. Decide now whether you are doing that yourself or having someone do it, because the default is that nobody does and the site quietly rots.

Six months after launch, run through our website audit checklist and see how it is holding up.

The short version

Decide what the site is for. Buy the domain in your own name. Choose how it gets built. Budget for running it, not just building it. Plan fewer pages, write real words, use real photos. Set up the basics, test it on a phone, and decide who looks after it.

If you would rather have it handled, that is what we do: web design for small business, one fixed price agreed before we start, and the site and domain stay in your name. Tell us about your business and we will come back the same working day.