How to make a website for your business, step by step

1. Decide what a visitor should do in 30 seconds

A designer who builds sites for local businesses wrote on r/smallbusiness that the hard part is rarely the code. It is working out what the business needs. The question they now start every project with: what should a visitor be able to do within 30 seconds?

For a plumber, that is call. For a salon, book. For a consultant, send an enquiry. Write that one action down. Every page decision after this gets checked against it.

2. Register your domain yourself

Buy the domain before anything else, in your own name and on your own card, at a registrar such as Cloudflare, Porkbun or Namecheap. A .com runs about $10 to $15 a year. If you later hire someone, add them as a user on your account rather than letting them register it for you.

This is the single most repeated piece of advice from people who have been burned. Our domain and hosting guide explains why, and how to get a domain back if someone else holds it.

Set up an email address on the domain too. One owner of a tech company said the clearest sign a business does not have it together is a Gmail address instead of its own.

3. Choose how you will build it

You have three realistic routes. Each one is fine for a basic business site; they differ in cost, effort and how much control you keep.

Our website builder comparison goes through the platforms in detail, and the hiring guide covers the questions to ask if you go that way.

4. Plan the five pages most businesses need

Most small businesses do not need a big site. Five pages cover what customers want to know before they get in touch.

If you want to rank on Google for each service, give the bigger services their own page. A commenter on r/Entrepreneur put it this way: for organic search you usually want pages dedicated to the specific services you provide so Google has enough to go on.

For deciding what else belongs on the site, one owner's rule is simple: anything customers ask more than twice by phone or email goes on the site, in the words they used to ask it. That usually means price ranges, what happens after they contact you, your service area, hours, and who you are not a good fit for.

5. Write the homepage for a stranger on a phone

Designers in these threads kept describing the same mistakes: a stock photo of people too happy about a laptop, a tagline like "Your Trusted Partner in Excellence", and three scrolls before you can tell whether the business is a plumber or a marketing agency. Someone who had rebuilt their landing page five times said the version that finally worked just said what they do, who it is for, and had one big button.

The test several of them suggested: open your homepage on your phone as if you had never heard of the business, and count the seconds until you know what it does, where it works and how to get in touch. If that takes more than one scroll, the wrong things are at the top.

• Headline about the customer's problem or the service, in plain words, with your town or service area.
• Phone number or booking button at the top on mobile, as a tap-to-call link.
• Proof right next to that button: your star rating and review count, two or three recent reviews with names and dates, photos of real work. A marketer on r/smallbusiness noted that visitors often find the number, go back to Google to check reviews, and call someone else.
• A real photo of you or your team. One commenter said adding a real photo and a one-paragraph story to a landing page nearly doubled its conversion rate.

6. Check speed, mobile and accessibility

Most local visitors arrive on a phone. Run each page through Google PageSpeed Insights and fix what it flags, especially huge images and autoplaying video. Someone searching for an emergency plumber at 10pm will not wait for a slow page or fill in a long form.

For accessibility, Chrome has a free Lighthouse report (right-click, Inspect, Lighthouse) and the free axe DevTools extension checks against the WCAG standard. An owner who ran Lighthouse found missing alt text, unlabeled buttons and poor contrast, and fixed most of it in an afternoon. A blind developer in the same thread added a fair warning: automated tools catch some problems, and a site can pass them and still be unusable with a screen reader, so try navigating your own site with only the keyboard.

7. Test the boring parts before launch

• Submit every form and make a test booking from a phone, then confirm the message arrives where you expect. A coach on r/smallbusiness found out their Wix booking system had been taking bookings without notifying them.
• Set up a notification that does not depend on the website, such as payment emails from Stripe, Square or PayPal, so a silent failure cannot go unnoticed for weeks.
• Add a privacy policy, and a cookie notice if you use tracking. Commenters who build sites raised legal pages as something owners forget to ask about.
• Create Google Search Console and Google Analytics in your own Google account, connect them to each other, and submit your sitemap.
• If you are replacing an old site, redirect every old page address to its new one so you keep whatever rankings the old pages had.

8. After launch: connect it to Google and get reviews

Google stopped hosting the free websites it used to make from Business Profiles in 2024, so your Business Profile now needs to link to a site of your own. Add the website link to your profile, make sure your name, address and phone match exactly on both, and list the same services.

Then work on reviews, because they drive both the map results and the decision to call. In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 97% of people read reviews for local businesses, 47% said they would not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and 74% only care about reviews from the last three months. Ask every happy customer on the day of the job with a one-tap review link, and reply to every review.

The same survey found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or similar tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. Those tools read your website, so clear service pages and plain answers to common questions help there too.

9. Keep it current

A site that still shows last year's hours or a disconnected number does more harm than having no site. Put a reminder on your calendar every three months to check hours, prices, photos and the phone number, and to add your newest reviews.

If you would rather not do any of the building, we make five-page WordPress sites for small businesses with no design or development fee, and you keep the domain, hosting and admin login. See what a free small business website includes.