How To Make A Website For Your Small Business In 2025

The dirty secret of web design is that there is no one way to do things. No website is perfect and no step-by-step guide fits every situation. However, taking extra time to plan upfront will lead to better results, faster progress and fewer mistakes during the building process.

1. Pick a Website Purpose

For small businesses, the overall goal of your website is always to connect with customers, but how will it connect? The specific purpose of your website will affect everything from budget to hosting to whether you hire a pro or DIY the site.

For example, do you need an informational website, the equivalent of an online business card, or do you need a robust online storefront for e-commerce? Knowing what you want to accomplish will determine the type of website you need to build.

2. List Potential Domain Names

It might seem a little early to be listing domain name possibilities but not having a list of alternatives is the biggest mistake I see from small businesses as they are setting up websites.

There’s something about staring at that “domain name not available” message during a registration process that triggers an urgency to get something, anything registered, as though there was a ticking bomb beside you.

That’s when bad decisions happen as you try adding a location to the end of the name first, then abbreviating a name, then reordering parts of the domain and so on until it is completely nonintuitive and hard to remember.

That’s why I always suggest small business owners start thinking of a list of 10 to 15 potential domain names very early in the process. Spend time with the names and look at your list over several days or weeks to make sure you are happy with every name on your list before you start the domain registration process later on. Choose names that are relatively short, easy to spell, easy to remember, are accurate representations of what your company does and don’t create unfortunate new words where parts of your name are run together.

Likewise, think about what top-level domain (TLD) options fit for your business. The TLD is the part after the dot. Examples include .com, .org, .store, .buzz and .info. There are hundreds of TLDs, and while many are available to anyone, some are restricted to specific groups. Be sure to choose several just in case the domain registrar or host you choose doesn’t offer your preferred domain extension.

3. Plan Your Website Pages and Functions

Even if you want a single-page website that people scroll through without clicking anywhere to change pages, you need to plan what content and functions should be included on the page. For small businesses, this is where it gets a bit tricky because beyond planning the pages you want, there is a lot of legislation out there that affects you.

Laws and Regulations and Guidelines, Oh My!

Some laws might apply because of your physical location, but others apply based on where your traffic comes from. For example, if someone from Devonshire, U.K., visits your Vermont bed and breakfast website as part of planning a vacation, and your website uses any kind of cookies or collects any personal data, your website probably falls under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) thanks to treaties.

Before creating your small business website, it is important to do your research and check with a lawyer familiar with these regulations. A few of the major laws and guidelines you may have to take into account include:

• Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

I know that all sounds scary and it drives even experienced web designers crazy trying to keep track of it all. Thankfully for DIYers, many website builders include templates and boilerplate text for the most commonly required pages and notices. Some platforms, such as Wix, also include third-party accessibility plugins to make compliance with ADA rules easier.

These commonly required pages and forms include:

• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Statement
• Cookie consent
• Shipping and return policies
• Ability to opt out of private information being sold or shared

Basic Website Pages

The near-universal set of website pages are behind the five-page website quotes you’ll see from a lot of professional designers for entry-level packages.

The core five pages of most websites are:

• Home. Often called a landing page, this is the first page visitors see of your website.
• About Us. Tells the story of your company. Make the text here good because journalists, Chambers of Commerce and content writers tend to look at this section to explain your company in articles.
• Contact Us. Your physical location and contact information, including phone numbers, business email addresses and social media links.
• Products or Services. Whether you are building an e-commerce website or just informational, you need to include information about what your company does and sells.
• Legal Notices. Originally, many websites just had a disclaimer or copyright notice. Now, there are many more laws and regulations to follow locally, nationally and internationally. Some of those require separate pages.

Of course, you may need more pages, but these five are generally the bare minimum needed, whether you put them on separate pages with their own URLs or as sections on one long homepage.

While there are no hard rules about what pages to use, most websites have a standard set of pages at their core.

Some of the most common additional pages to add to your website are:

• FAQs. Including a frequently asked questions section adds value for your customers and saves you or your customer service team a lot of time repeating themselves. It can also help you hit additional keywords for SEO.
• Reviews and Testimonials. Social proof, what others think of your business, is powerful. Adding testimonials and reviews to your website help reassure potential customers.
• Work Portfolios. Showing off completed work such as house remodels, great hairstyles and wedding photography is important for service-related companies and often takes the place of product catalogs.
• Blog. Keeping your website updated with fresh information helps SEO. A blog of content related to your business is a great way to keep your website fresh.
• Instructions and Troubleshooting. Helping customers with products they buy adds value, but it also helps attract new customers who find your business while looking for help with products they already own.

Special Functions

Even for an informational site, you may need special functionality from your website and you need to plan those out ahead of time. For example, you may want a live chat customer service option.

While some extended functions, such as scrolling animations, may be included in certain website builders, most rely on plugins and connecting third-party apps to your website. Many website builders have app stores with free and paid applications and CMS platforms such as WordPress use plugins.

Common extra functions include:

• Live chat
• Password-protected pages for gated content
• Animations
• Reviews
• Share to social media buttons

E-commerce is a special function in itself, but it is also a category of functions, many behind the scenes that your visitors won’t see. Some of the e-commerce-specific functions you might want include:

• Shipping integrations
• Automatic sales tax calculations
• Reviews
• Live chat
• Connection to marketplaces such as Amazon
• Print-on-demand integration
• Integration with your accounting app
• Loyalty programs
• Affiliate programs
• Dropshipping

Knowing ahead of time which features you want to use will help you pick a platform and host and plan your budget.

4. Choose Your Platform and Website Host

This is where all of that time and research start to pay off. You now have a shopping list of what you want and need when looking for how to build and where to host your website. This makes it much easier not to get lost in the plan comparison lists.

Start by deciding between a CMS and a website builder.

CMS or Website Builder

Website builders are graphical interfaces, usually employing a drag-and-drop interface, where users need no coding or design experience to create a website. However, that ease of use comes at the cost of flexibility in many cases. Some of the best website builders include large app markets, but they are still usually very limited when compared to third-party plugins available for a CMS.

Most websites start off with templates, whether using a CMS or website builder.

A content management system (CMS) is a software program that helps create and manage online content. Some include website builders and others integrate with third-party website builders such as Elementor. Unlike website builders, which are usually locked to one specific website host, you can generally use any host for a CMS-based website and migrate your website to a new host later if needed.

However, while the best CMS platforms often offer much more control and flexibility in hosting, they come with a steeper learning curve than a stand-alone website builder. WordPress is the most common CMS, but other options include Joomla, Drupal and Magento.

CMS and website builders are available for any budget, with free or cheap website builders and CMS available.

Website Hosts

Hosting is what makes your website visible on the internet. Your website host stores your files and delivers them to visitors. Hosting will be one of your main continuing costs of having a website. Regardless of whether you use a website builder or CMS, you’ll need to compare multiple factors before deciding.

Important hosting features include:

• PCI-DSS security (for e-commerce sites)
• Storage
• Bandwidth
• Pricing
• Type of hosting (shared, VPS, dedicated or cloud)
• Control panel
• Managed or unmanaged
• Uptime
• Customer and technical support

If you are using a stand-alone website builder, sometimes called an all-in-one platform, it should have hosting plans attached to it. As mentioned earlier, you likely won’t be able to move your website to another host later in those cases, so take extra time when comparing features and pricing before signing up.

Hosting choices for a CMS-powered website are more flexible, and you can usually change hosts as needed, but not all hosts accept all CMS systems, so be sure to check compatibility.

Read more: Learn how to host your own website.

5. Register Your Domain Name

While hosting is your website’s home, your domain name is your website’s address. It’s necessary for visitors to find your website. This is when you need to pull out your list of names you created earlier.

Part of signing up for web hosting is adding your domain name to your account. Most web hosts and website builders have the option of registering a domain name with them, but you can also buy your domain name with a third-party domain registrar.

While purchasing outside of your host might mean an extra step in setup and the process of how you register a domain name, it can protect your domain if you part ways with your host later. While domains should always be transferable to a new registrar and have the freedom to be pointed to a new host later, some hosts make you jump through hoops to make those moves. Domain renewal costs are also often inflated by hosts.

Because of that, I almost always recommend registering your domain outside of your web host. However, if you need a free domain to start, you may want to consider the first-year-free offers available from most website hosting providers.

6. Pick and Customize a Template

Regardless of whether you use a stand-alone website builder or a builder within a CMS, the vast majority of us will start with templates. Templates, sometimes called themes, are pre-built outlines of websites. You can customize these as little or as much as you want, although different systems allow different levels of customization.

For example, WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org) does not allow you to customize colors on the free plan.

At the very least, adjust the colors, favicon (an icon users see on the address bar in their browser next to your URL), logo and menu to match your company branding.

Core items to customize on a template include:

• Colors
• Fonts
• Logos
• Favicon
• Pages used
• Sections on pages
• Menu
• Header
• Footer

7. Add Content

This is where you add text, images, video, e-commerce catalogs and other unique information to your website. The bare minimum information should be to fill out the five most common website pages we mentioned earlier, along with your company name and contact information in the header and footer.

While many AI text generators are available, I strongly recommend against using them for anything more than a starting point that you then heavily edit. AI is infamous for jumbling topics and hallucinations, where it gets information wrong or just flat makes it up.

One oddly specific cautionary AI tale I ran across was a group of independent pizza parlors in different parts of the country that had nearly duplicate AI-generated “about us” text. That text also encouraged visitors to check out other restaurants in town instead of the pizza parlor itself.

For graphics, images and video, be sure that you upload appropriately sized versions. Pixel needs for the web and print are very different, and images that are too large can slow down your website load speed, especially for mobile devices. Common pixel needs online for full page width graphics usually range from 1068 pixels to 1400 pixels.

8. Optimize for Mobile and SEO

Part of getting your website seen is ensuring that search engines understand your topic and that visitors can view the website easily on mobile devices.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization used to be an afterthought, but the reality is that more users will see the mobile version of your website than your desktop version. Over 64% of web traffic is mobile, making mobile optimization vital.

Mobile optimization affects user experience and SEO as search engines prefer mobile-optimized websites. So, what is mobile optimization? At its core, mobile optimization is simplifying menus, reducing file sizes and adjusting the display from horizontal to vertical formatting.

It can become very complex—to the point where some large enterprises build out completely separate mobile and desktop versions of their websites—or it can be done automatically by your template (although this method often results in some glitches, such as extra images in the header overlapping in the mobile version).

Every website builder and CMS will handle mobile optimization a little differently. In general, look for systems that offer basic automatic optimization plus allow for manual tweaks as needed.

SEO

While you can sort of skip the line and jump to the first search engine ranking pages (SERP) for Google with a Google Business Profile if you are a local business, you still need to follow good SEO practices as part of a solid SEO strategy.

Filling in alt text and captions on images, including primary keywords in the first two paragraphs of text and sprinkling (not cramming) important keywords throughout text, using hierarchical tags such as H1, H2 and H3, entering page title tags and keeping redirect pages up to date are all part of website setup and maintenance to help your visibility in search engine results.

Bear in mind that your platform can affect your SEO options. For example, WordPress uses plugins such as Yoast SEO to enhance SEO features and some website builders do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for you, such as Wix automatically creating sitemaps. Use some sort of analytics tool to help measure your results, but bear in mind that it may take a few weeks for you to start seeing traction.

SEO tools vary widely by platform.

If your budget is big enough, there are also stand-alone SEO services to help you supercharge SEO, but they do have relatively high starting costs compared to most smaller plugins.

9. Test

Once everything is done, it’s time to take your new website for a test ride. Use the preview function in your builder and start scrolling. Click every button and every link, hover over images, right-click media to see if original files can be accessed (especially if they shouldn’t be), make test purchases for e-commerce and process those test orders from your dashboard.

10. Launch

Launching your website is technically as easy as pushing a publish button. Congratulations! After hitting publish, your website is live!

However, I strongly suggest a soft launch, where you publish the website and then continue testing for several days or a week to make sure everything works properly on all devices in the live environment before you tell people about your new website.

Check out our Website Launch Checklist to help ensure you have all your bases covered when creating your new site.

After your small business website is live, you still have more work to do. It isn’t nearly as involved as the initial setup. Mostly, it’s about getting the word out and keeping your website active with new content.

Tasks after your website goes live include:

• Notify customers. Use email, social media and signs at your physical location to let customers know about your website.
• Add your domain to branding. Add your domain name to business cards, email signatures, social media accounts (including your Google Business Profile) and any advertising.
• Update your content. At least once a month, update content or add new content to your blog to keep your website fresh for customers and search engines.
• Manage updates. Any plugins or apps you are using need to be updated occasionally. If you chose managed hosting, your web host may handle this for you.
• Review analytics. Traffic reports often help you pinpoint your most popular content and decide what topics you need to add more information about.
• Monitor security. Watch for security issues. If you have managed hosting or an all-in-one builder platform, the host likely manages this for you.
• Pay hosting and domain renewal fees. Don’t let hosting or domain registration lapse; be sure you keep those bills paid.

Now that you have your website, you need to use it to build a cohesive online presence. If your website, social media profiles, ads and other online presences don’t work together, you’re damaging your business.

Creating a cohesive online presence is vital for integrated marketing, strengthening your reputation and increasing sales. As part of a cohesive online presence, your website forms the lynchpin, the central single point of truth that all of your other efforts link back to and build from.

Branding

It’s important to keep your branding consistent across platforms. Your social media accounts, advertisements, business cards and website should all be cohesive and reflect your overall brand look and tone. This will include items such as your logo, color palette, typography and imagery style used.

Teamwork

Each department and marketing campaign should work together. You can’t position yourself as the low-price leader and the pinnacle of quality in customer minds. Messaging should be consistent across all channels and work towards unified business objectives.

Cross-Channel Communication

Your channel managers all need to know what the other channels are doing. For example, if you are running a sale on Amazon or discontinuing a product, your social media manager needs to know. As small businesses grow, I often see a lack of communication between new and existing departments that eventually leads to marketing misfires and poor customer experiences.

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