How to build an effective small business website

For one reason or another, many business owners and management teams still haven't quite nailed the basics of running a website for their business.

In fact, one of the most common statements we hear from client staff is that they feel the website is “too confusing," or “doesn't add to the bottom line."

If you feel like your web presence needs a refresh, and you're looking for a quick guide to build an effective small business website, the following process is your guide.

Keep in mind: less is often more, and messaging trumps design.

This guide to building a small business website will work for the vast majority of small businesses out there, and will allow you to scale (for example, adding ecommerce or calendar booking functionality later).

Decide on the goals for your website

Before you ever publish a single pixel online, you need a firm understanding of exactly what you want to accomplish with your website.

And this must be specific—not, “oh, I want the site to grow our business," or “our site should look cool so people trust us more."

Those are certainly possible outcomes, but they aren't specific enough to drive messaging and design development.

Some examples of goals for a small business website:

• Our site will be the main booking tool for clients to arrange time with our sales team
• Our site will house all of our product specifications and protocols so they can make an informed buying decision
• Our site will have three separate landing pages for our three main services so we can run digital marketing to those pages and make sales
• Our site will update our users on upcoming events with and ticket pricing with an updatable calendar

These are specific enough that you can use them as a guide when you are planning your messaging, the pages you will need, and the overall design that will showcase your brand online.

And you don't have to limit yourself to just one goal if your business does more than one thing—but knowing exactly what your site needs to accomplish will be your guiding light for how you approach the build for each page of your site.

Decide on your website platform

In recent years, a number of DIY website builders have come out and have made it possible for small businesses to get... rather creative with their online presence.

Sometimes this works well, sometimes it works “well enough," and sometimes it becomes a huge mess (think: mobile pages that have overlapping text, scrolling off page, and 10s+ load times).

A few examples of these DIY builders include Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.

Wix and Squarespace, in particular, cater almost entirely to the DIY crowd and promise low–or–no–code development and easy–to–use templated webistes.

The rest of this article could be spent trying to persuade you not to use those builders for many different reasons, but they are indeed an option.

They tend to be great for really small local businesses that do one thing consistently and that don't intend to run Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing or more complete marketing programs.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a complete tool for both DIYers and more formal web design agencies.

There are many (so many) other options out there aside from these as well, but WordPress powers more than 40% of the internet and is capable of driving scalable business results with the right structure and strategy.

For the purposes of this guide, we'll assume you're moving ahead with a WordPress site, which means it will come with your hosting when you get to that step.

You don't need to purchase anything yet to “get" WordPress; it will be automatically installed when you spool up your hosting server.

Purchase a domain

Your business name is important—it's your brand identity and the thing that you hope your customers will recall when they need your service.

So if you don't already own the “.com" for your domain, this is a good moment to step back and look at what options you have.

Choose a registrar

You will never truly own a domain.

We're all just leasing them a year at a time from an authorised registrar who can sell you the rights to use that domain for a yearly fee.

Choosing a good registrar is important because you will need to interact with your domain name from time to time in order to make certain connections (eg. verifying your domain for email or Google marketing).

Again, there are so many choices out there, including GoDaddy or Google Domains, but a solid option that has worked for us for every site we have built is Namecheap.

They are simple, secure, and the customer service has never left us hanging.

Choose your TLD (Top Level Domain)

.com? .org? .ca?

There are many options out there and basically... they're all fine.

There is functionally no difference between a .com website or a .io website.

Certain TLDs come with legal requirements (eg. you must be a Canadian resident or business to use a .ca TLD), and some come with brand implications (I might not trust a site that chooses .xyz or .fun).

If you can, get the .com or the TLD for your country.

Sometimes, they're already taken though, or perhaps they're for sale at a ridiculous price.

Get creative and look at the options available, but avoid long domain names or descriptive names (don't buy “thebestcalgaryrealtor.ca" for your realty business).

Make your purchase and get access to DNS

DNS (Domain Name Service) access typically comes with most domain name registrar options, and it certainly does with Namecheap, so make sure you find that screen under the management section for your domain.

It's a way of tying together external elements (like your website server, email server, or other 3rd party services) to your domain name.

You will be using DNS to connect your hosting to your domain in the next step.

Set up hosting

Hosting, again, has millions of options.

But don't cheap out on hosting; it can literally make or break your business if you get hacked, or your site goes down, or your get long load times during high traffic periods.

Our recommendation: go with Cloudways.

If you're self-managing, or even if you intend to work with an IT firm to manage your website administration, Cloudways is going to be flexible and professional enough to take your business wherever you want to go.

Yes, it's USD $12/month for a 1GB server (which is likely what you need at this point), but that's $12 well spent to have everything work as it should and to have great site speed.

Spool up a new WordPress site, and you'll get an IP address.

Connect hosting to your domain

Go back to your DNS now and create a new A Record.

Set “@" as your Host and the IP address as the value.

Hit save, and go back to Cloudways.

On your application, go to Domain Management and set your domain name as the Primary Domain.

You now have a site with a domain name connected to a hosting server, and, quite frankly, a more professional setup than most small businesses out there.

4 pages every basic website needs

Forget your “Mission Statement" page or a gallery of your latest Instagram posts.

Those can come later, or even be woven into your foundational pages.

The bare-minimum, must-have pages for any basic site are:

1. Home page
   The home of your site where you make compelling statements about what you do, who should work with you, and what results they can expect.
   
   
2. About page
   A place to outline who you are, why you do what you do, and maybe some information of how your business is different than your competition.
   
   
3. Offer page
   Your most important page. This is where you leave it all on the table and write your main offer.
   
   
4. Contact Page
   A place for people to get in contact with you, see office hours, find your address, and maybe even book a meeting directly in your calendar.

If you're feeling cheeky and would like a fifth page for launch, make it a “Results" page where you show prospective customers what you do with case studies, pictures, and testimonials.

Write your messaging before you design

I can't tell you how many sites I come across where it's so obvious that they chose some design template first and built a whole site around that, and then added in the words as an afterthought.

Don't be that business.

You could have the most polished, well-designed site in the world, but if your messaging doesn't convey value to readers, your site will never be anything more than an annoyance and a cost to you.

Spend the time to get your messaging right.

This means wireframing (drafting your site design), even on a piece of paper, and creating the flow of your messaging for each page from opening statement to your final CTA (Call To Action).

Consider the purpose of each page, and then consider the purpose of each section as readers work their way down the page.

Create a logical argument and supporting points for everything you will write, and keep it short.

Nobody wants to read a paragraph before they're further into your ecosystem and they're at a stage of consideration.

There's nothing worse than going to a website and being asked to read an essay to decide if they're the right provider—keep your messaging succinct and value-oriented.

Design and publish your pages

Short of going to design school and building a beautiful custom look for your site, you'll probably be leaning on some sort of template.

WordPress has hundreds of thousands of templates (called “themes") out there that you can choose from.

Some are free, some are paid, and most of them are likely to give your site an aesthetic that you can at least tolerate until you hire a designer at some point.

For the record, we're huge fans of Thrive Themes and their custom building tools that allow you to drag–and–drop build pages and your own custom theme.

Take the wireframe you sketched and start making your pages and sections.

Skip the overly complicated design element options and stick to the basics.

Message over mechanics for everything.

Set up a form or conversion tool

Some themes come with a form builder, and sometimes you will need to download a plugin for WordPress to get the type of form you want.

At a base level, have it set up to capture the prospect's name, email/phone, and a message from them about what they want.

Some options for form plugins include WPForms (free) or Gravity Forms (paid), but you can look at the options and decide what will be best for you.

Make sure you at least have this form on your contact page, and perhaps at the bottom of your other pages, too, if you feel like maximizing the chances of people contacting you.

Set up tracking and analytics

This is another rabbit hole, depending on the laws of your region, and the regions you intend to sell to.

At a basic level, most sites use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics will give you important information about how many people use your site, what pages they look at, and how long they stick around.

There is much more you can do with a proper analytics setup to measure important actions on your site, but again, if you have Google Analytics on your site, you will have access to better information than many small businesses out there.

It's free, and you can set up your account here.

Then, take the code provided and add it to the <head> section of your site (some themes will make this super easy, and some will require you to go into the theme code to make an update).

Google Site Kit is a plugin that will also take care of this for you.

Set up your SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service

Here's a piece of the puzzle that many business owners (and cheap design agencies) totally miss.

Your new WordPress site can send emails (for example, an email notification when someone fills out your form).

These are called “transactional emails."

However, because it's so easy to make a WordPress site and have it send emails (essentially spam), most email providers immediately send those emails straight to the spam folder.

So your nice new website may never actually let you know when a customer has requested a meeting or a quote from you.

This is where your SMTP server comes in.

Go to Mailgun and make a free account.

Follow the instructions to set up a sending domain (it might be mg.yourdomain.com), and then add the necessary DNS records to your domain to tie it all together.

When you are verified, you can create login credentials in Mailgun to add Mailgun as the sending server on Cloudways.

Add your credentials into the SMTP tab on your Server settings and voila.

Your WordPress site will now send emails that don't go to spam.

Launch and promote your site

That was the simple part.

Now you have to work to promote your site.

How you promote it is out of the scope of this guide, but in short, there are many options to promote your site to potential customers, including:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Paid Search Ads
• Paid Social Ads
• Organic social posting
• Word of mouth
• Flyers
• QR codes
• And much more

If you neglect to promote your site, you will have a powerful tool that doesn't get the job done.

Kind of like a sports car but without gasoline.

Promotion is growth, and it is its own skill.

But at least you will always have a functional small business website to point your marketing campaigns to.

And you can definitely stop wondering if something particular about your website is what's holding your business back.