How to make a website for a small business

Building a website for a small business follows the same order every time, whatever trade or service you are in: buy a domain, choose a builder or WordPress, decide the handful of pages you need, write them in the words a customer would use, add real photos of the actual business, and make the contact details impossible to miss. Do these steps out of order, or skip one, and the result looks like a website while working oddly for everyone who lands on it: a homepage with a photo slider and no phone number, or five services hidden inside one paragraph nobody reads to the end of.

This guide covers each step in order, what a UK small business should expect at each stage, building it yourself against paying someone else, and the point where doing it yourself stops making sense.

Before you build: decide the one job your website has

Most small business websites try to do too much at once. Before touching a domain or a template, decide what a visitor should do once they land on your site. For most trades and local services, that is one of two things: call you, or fill in a short form.

Everything on the site should point towards that one action. A page that tries to build a brand, sell a story, and educate the visitor before mentioning how to get in touch usually manages none of the three. Decide the job first. The design and the words follow from that decision, not the other way round.

Step by step: making a small business website

1. Buy the domain. Choose something close to your business name, ideally the .co.uk if you trade mainly in the UK. Domain prices vary by registrar and often carry a cheap first-year offer that renews higher, so check the renewal price before committing. 123-reg currently lists .co.uk domains at just under four pounds for the first year, which gives a sense of the entry cost, though shop around before buying.

2. Pick a builder or WordPress. A website builder such as Wix or Squarespace gives you a template, hosting, and a monthly subscription in one package, which suits a business that wants to manage the site itself without touching code. WordPress needs separate hosting and more setup, but gives you more control over how the site works as the business grows. Neither choice is wrong. The right one depends on how much time you want to spend maintaining the site versus how much control you want over it.

3. Decide the pages that matter. A small business site rarely needs more than a home page, a page per main service, an about page, and a contact page. If you cover more than one town or area, give your busiest service its own page for each area rather than one page trying to cover everywhere at once.

4. Write in the words customers actually type. A page titled "Our Solutions" tells a visitor nothing. A page titled "Boiler repair in Croydon" or "Wedding photography in Leeds" tells them exactly what they are looking at within a second. Write each page around the specific job and the specific place, using the plain phrase a customer would say out loud, not the phrase your industry uses internally.

5. Add real photos. Stock photos of a generic tradesperson in a hard hat convince nobody. Photos of your actual van, your actual team, and finished jobs you have actually done carry far more weight, even when they are less polished than a stock library shot.

6. Make the contact routes obvious. A phone number that is click-to-call on a phone screen, a short form asking only for what you need to respond, and an address or coverage area stated plainly. If a visitor has to hunt for how to reach you, a good number of them will simply go to the next business instead.

For a full breakdown of what each of these steps costs in the UK, including builders, WordPress hosting, and paying a professional, see our guide to website costs.

Building websites for small businesses: yourself vs paying someone

Both routes work. They suit different situations.

	Doing it yourself	Paying someone
Upfront cost	Low, mostly a builder subscription or hosting	Higher, a one-off build fee or an ongoing programme
Time needed	Several evenings to several weeks, depending on confidence	Handed over, though you still supply photos and copy
Ongoing upkeep	Falls to you: updates, backups, fixing anything that breaks	Usually included or offered as a care plan
Best suited to	A single service, a tight budget, or wanting full control	Multiple services or areas, or limited time to learn a builder

A one-person business testing an idea can reasonably build the first version themselves on a builder like Wix or Squarespace. A business already busy with paying work, or one that covers several services and areas, often loses more in time than it saves in cost.

The mistakes that quietly lose customers

A handful of mistakes show up again and again on small business websites, and each one loses customers without the owner ever knowing it happened:

• No address, no phone number, no clear coverage area. A visitor unsure whether you cover their street will leave rather than ask.
• Everything crammed onto one page. A single scrolling page can work for a very small, single-service business, but most trades outgrow it fast. Our guide to one-page websites covers when one page is enough and when it starts costing you enquiries.
• A slow site on a phone. Most local searches happen on a mobile signal, not office wifi. Oversized photos straight off a phone are the usual cause.
• Generic stock photography. It reads as generic because it is, and visitors notice.
• No obvious next step. A page that ends without a phone number or a form leaves the visitor to work out what to do next. Most will not bother.

For the fuller list of what a site needs to convert a local visit into an enquiry, see what your website needs to win local customers.

How to make sure people can find it on Google

A website that nobody can find does not help the business, however well it is built. Two things matter most for a small business.

First, set up and complete a Google Business Profile, and make sure the business name, address, and phone number match exactly across your website, your profile, and any directories you appear on. Mismatched details confuse Google about which business is which.

Second, build your pages around the specific service and the specific place, as covered in step four above. A page written for "boiler repair in Croydon" gives Google a clear, specific answer to give a specific searcher, in a way a single general page covering ten services and five towns cannot.

Neither of these is a one-off task. Both need checking and updating as the business changes, which is where a lot of DIY sites quietly go stale.

When to stop doing it yourself

Doing it yourself makes sense while the site is simple and you have time to maintain it. A few signs suggest it is worth paying someone instead:

• You cover more than a couple of services or areas, and building a proper page for each one is starting to feel like a second job.
• The site has not been updated in over a year and small changes now feel like a chore rather than a five-minute job.
• You are relying on the site to bring in new customers, not just to look credible to people who already found you elsewhere.
• Something on the builder or WordPress install is broken, slow, or insecure, and you do not have the time or confidence to fix it.

At that point, the cost of paying someone tends to be measured against the hours you would otherwise spend, and against the enquiries a properly built site brings in that a half-finished one does not.

If you would rather hand the whole thing over, SEO Pages builds websites designed to get found on Google from the start, with results tracked on a live client dashboard rather than left to guesswork. See what a done-for-you website includes.