How to create a website for your small business.

Step 01 of 08

Define what the site needs to do.

Before you pick a platform, theme, or developer, write down two short lists.

The top three actions you want visitors to take

Examples: book a consultation, request a quote, buy a product, download a guide, ring you. Three is the limit. Anything more dilutes the homepage.

The top three business outcomes

Examples: ten qualified leads a month, a hundred newsletter signups a quarter, twenty online sales a week. These are the numbers you’ll use after launch to judge whether the site is working.

Most websites fail not because they’re ugly but because nobody decided what they were for.

Step 02 of 08

Choose a domain and hosting.

Two separate decisions, often bundled together. Try not to bundle them.

Domain

Buy your domain from a reputable registrar (Cloudflare, Hover, Gandi, NameCheap). Avoid GoDaddy. Keep the registrar separate from your hosting , if your host goes wrong, you don’t want to lose your domain too. A .co.uk is fine for a UK business; .com is fine if you can get the matching one.

Hosting

For a small-business WordPress site, expect to spend £20,£50 a month on managed hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways, Pressable). Cheap shared hosting at £3 a month will cost you in performance, reliability and security. The longer story is in the article on why decent WordPress hosting is worth paying for.

Step 03 of 08

Pick a CMS (or no CMS).

Three honest paths for a small business in 2026:

• Squarespace, Wix , if you’ll never need anything custom, your editor is non-technical, and you’d rather pay a monthly fee than think about it. Genuinely fine for some businesses.
• WordPress , the sensible default for most small-business sites with a real content strategy. Mature, flexible, well-supported. Covered in detail in WordPress development.
• Custom (Statamic, Laravel) , when off-the-shelf has stopped serving you, or when you need a calmer editor experience and unique design.

The full decision walk-through is in the how-to on choosing between WordPress, Laravel and Statamic.

Step 04 of 08

Plan your pages and content.

Most small-business sites need fewer pages than people think. A useful starting structure:

• Home , what you do, who for, why someone should care.
• Services , one page per offer, or one page total if you have one offer.
• About , story, team, location. Buy-from-me page.
• Get in touch , one form, an email, a phone number. Office hours if relevant.
• Optional: case studies, blog, FAQ. Add these only if you’ll keep them current.

For each page, write down the h1, the two or three h2 sections, and the one action you want the reader to take. That’s ninety percent of the IA work done.

Image needs

Decide early: are you commissioning photography, using stock, or working from existing assets? Photography turns most small-business sites from passable to good. Stock photography is rarely worth it , people can tell.

Step 05 of 08

Decide DIY vs hire.

An honest framing.

DIY makes sense when

• You have time (it will take longer than you think).
• The site is genuinely simple , brochure, contact form, maybe a blog.
• You enjoy this kind of work, or want to.
• Budget is < £1k.

Hiring makes sense when

• The site is part of how you make money , lead gen, e-commerce, bookings.
• You don’t have ten to twenty hours a week to learn a new tool well.
• The site needs to look credible to enterprise buyers, finance, or recruiters.
• Budget is > £3k.

Most small businesses I work with are in the second bucket but tried the first one for six months first.

Step 06 of 08

Build a brief if hiring.

A good brief gets you accurate quotes from good developers. A bad brief gets you wide-ranging quotes from a mix of developers, most of whom guessed. The seven sections every brief needs:

1. Goal , in one sentence.
2. Audience , who’s the site for, and what do they need from it?
3. Must-have features , the non-negotiables.
4. Constraints , budget, timeline, brand, technical.
5. References , three to five sites you like, with a sentence on why.
6. Decision authority , who signs off, and how quickly.
7. Success metrics , how you’ll know it worked.

A dedicated how-to on briefing a developer is coming , in the meantime, the same structure works for any project.

Step 07 of 08

Launch checklist.

Whether you’re launching yourself or signing off the developer’s work, here’s the minimum viable checklist:

• DNS , pointing at the right host, including www and apex records.
• SSL , certificate active, HTTPS enforced, no mixed-content warnings.
• Analytics , GA4 or Plausible installed and firing on every page.
• Search Console , site verified, sitemap submitted.
• Sitemap and robots.txt , both present, robots.txt not blocking everything (a surprisingly common launch bug).
• Redirects , old URLs mapped to new ones, especially if you’re migrating.
• Backups , running on day one, off-site, tested.
• Forms , submit a test enquiry. Then a second one. Then check it actually arrived.
• Speed , run Lighthouse on the homepage and one inner page. Aim for green-band Core Web Vitals.
• Cross-browser check , Chrome, Safari, Firefox, mobile Safari at minimum.

Step 08 of 08

Care and maintenance.

The site is launched. The work isn’t over , it’s just changed shape.

Monthly

• WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates (test on staging if possible).
• Quick analytics review , top ten pages, top five referrers.
• Backup verification , does the most recent one actually restore?

Quarterly

• Plugin audit , remove anything you’re not using.
• Performance check , Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights.
• Security review , admin users, password rotation, two-factor auth.

Yearly

• Content refresh , remove anything dated, update what’s changed.
• Strategy check , is the site still doing the job you set it for in step 01?

Either you do this work, or you pay someone to. There’s no third option that ends well. The article on ten common WordPress mistakes has more on what happens when you don’t.