How to build a
business website.

Before anything else, write down what the site has to achieve. Not "look professional" — something you could measure. Book consultations. Get phone calls from people who already know your prices. Let existing customers place repeat orders without emailing you.

This single decision drives everything after it. A site built to generate enquiries has a different structure, different content and a different home page from one built to sell products or to reduce support load. Skip this and you get a site that looks fine and does nothing in particular.

List the three or four questions someone asks before they buy from you. Price, timeline, whether you handle their situation, what happens first, whether you are credible. Those answers are your website. Everything else is supporting material.

The most common failure is writing for yourself rather than the buyer. A page explaining your history matters far less than a page answering "can you do this for a business like mine, and roughly what does it cost?"

Site builders (Squarespace, Wix) suit small brochure sites where you want to make edits yourself and do not need anything unusual. Fastest to launch, cheapest up front, limited when you outgrow them.

WordPress suits content-heavy sites that will grow — plenty of plugins, plenty of developers, and it needs genuine maintenance. Neglected WordPress sites are the most commonly hacked sites on the internet.

Custom builds suit sites where performance, unusual functionality, or a specific integration matters. More expensive to start, cheaper to run at scale, and nothing you do not need.

A good rule: pick the simplest option that will still fit in two years. Rebuilding early is expensive; over-building at the start is expensive too.

Sketch your pages and how they link. Most business sites need a home page, a page per service, an about page, a contact page, and proof — case studies or results. That is it to start with.

Give every service its own page. A single page listing five services competes with itself in search and forces every visitor through information they did not want. One page, one topic, one job.

Keep important pages within two clicks of the home page. If a page needs four clicks to reach, both people and search engines treat it as unimportant.

Design built around real content works. Content poured into a finished design gets cut to fit the boxes. Write first, even badly, then design around what you actually need to say.

Lead each page with what the reader wants, not with a welcome. Be specific: "Same-week emergency callouts across Cook County" beats "quality service you can trust" every time, because it is checkable and it is a reason.

Mobile first. More than half your traffic is on a phone and Google indexes the mobile version of your site.

Speed. Compress images before uploading — oversized images are the single most common cause of slow business sites.

HTTPS. Non-negotiable, and free through most hosts.

Titles and descriptions. Every page needs its own. Duplicates across pages actively hurt you.

Analytics. Install it before launch, not after, or you have nothing to compare against.

Before launch: check every form actually delivers to an inbox someone reads, test on a real phone, click every link, and set up redirects from old URLs if you are replacing a site. Skipping redirects is the fastest way to lose rankings you already had.

After launch, the site is a starting position. Watch which pages get found, which get read, and where people leave. A site that never changes after launch is the one that gets rebuilt from scratch in two years.