If you're starting a business and you don't have a website yet, or you have one and you know it's not great, this is the list I'd give my own mum.
A website is not complicated. Most of the things agencies tell you it needs are either vanity, upsells, or things that made sense in 2015 and don't now. The truth is small: twelve items, all of them cheap or free, and if you've got them all, your website is working.
Here's what really matters.
01 A proper domain name.
Your domain is the bit after the www., like yourbusiness.co.uk. Buy it from a proper registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare, or Gandi are fine). It costs about £10 a year. Don't overthink it.
What to actually get
- .co.uk if you're UK-based and serving UK customers. It signals trust locally.
- .com if the .co.uk is gone or you sell beyond the UK. That's it. Everything else (.shop, .online, .biz) looks cheap.
- Match it to your business name as closely as possible. yourbusinesswolverhampton.co.uk is fine. yb-webs-official.co.uk is not.
Don't buy a domain through your website builder or hosting company. They'll mark it up 3× and hold it hostage if you ever want to leave.
02 Hosting that won't bite you.
Hosting is where your website actually lives. For a small business site, you need something cheap, fast, and not shady. That's it.
- If it's a simple site (a few pages, no shop): Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Both free. Both genuinely good.
- If it's WordPress: Krystal (UK) or Kinsta. Not GoDaddy. Not 123-reg.
- If it's a shop: Shopify. Everything else is more pain than it's worth for a small business.
The cheapest hosting is almost never the cheapest hosting, because when it goes down you'll spend three hours on hold with Mumbai.
03 A site that works on phones.
More than two-thirds of your visitors will be on a phone. If your site looks broken on a phone, text cut off, buttons overlapping, images spilling past the screen, you're losing two-thirds of your leads before they've read a word.
Test your own site right now: open it on your phone. If you have to pinch to zoom, or scroll sideways, it's broken. Fix it or get it fixed.
04 A site that loads fast.
If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, roughly half the people trying to visit will give up and go back to Google. That's not me being dramatic, it's what Google's own research says.
Paste your URL into PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile score is under 50, something's wrong. If it's green (90+), you're fine.
You almost certainly don't need a "speed optimisation plugin" that costs £9/month. 9 times out of 10 the site is slow because of heavy images and too many tracking scripts, both free to fix.
05 A working contact form.
This is the one I see broken most often. A contact form is the thing that turns a visitor into a customer. If it's broken, if the emails are going into your spam folder, if the reCAPTCHA is blocking real people, if it's silently failing, you'd never know. You just… get no enquiries.
Test yours properly
- Fill it in yourself from a different device, with a different email
- Check it arrived in your actual inbox (not spam)
- Check the "reply to" email works, click reply and see where it goes
- Do this every three months. Forms break. That's not a maybe; it's a certainty.
06 A Google Business Profile.
This is the free listing that shows up when someone Googles "[your service] near me", the map, the reviews, the phone number, the hours. If you're a local business (plumber, cafe, clinic, consultant), this matters more than your website for new customers.
Set it up at business.google.com. Free. Takes about 20 minutes. Then, and this is the bit most people skip, collect reviews. Ask every happy customer. A business with 30 reviews beats a business with 3 reviews every single time, regardless of who's better.
07 Real proof you're real.
Strangers buying from strangers is a trust problem. Every good small business website solves it the same way: real photos, real names, real reviews. Stock photos of fake smiling people in call centres actively hurt you. A phone photo of you in your actual workshop helps.
- A photo of you (the human behind it)
- Testimonials with a first name + last initial at minimum, full name + photo ideally
- A link to your Trustpilot / Google / Facebook reviews
- Company number, VAT number if you have one, signals you exist
08 Copy written in plain English.
Small business websites die from bad copy more than bad design. The crime is always the same: writing about yourself when you should be writing about the customer, and using words like "bespoke solutions" and "synergy" because you think that's what websites are supposed to sound like.
Rules:
- Say what you do in the first sentence. "We make custom cakes for Wolverhampton weddings." Done.
- Say who it's for. "For couples who want something that isn't a Pinterest clone."
- Say what it costs, roughly. Even "from £250". Hiding prices doesn't build suspense; it breeds suspicion.
- Cut every word that sounds like an agency wrote it. If you wouldn't say it out loud to a customer's face, don't put it on the site.
09 The bare minimum SEO.
Most "SEO" sold to small businesses is a scam. Here's what actually matters, and what you can do yourself in an afternoon:
- Every page has a clear title tag, this is the blue link in Google. Make it descriptive.
- Every page has a meta description, this is the grey text underneath. Write it like a sentence, not a keyword list.
- You submit a sitemap.xml to Google Search Console. Free. Takes 10 minutes.
- You have the right pages for your business: a homepage, a services/products page, an about, a contact. Each with their own URL.
A £200/month "SEO retainer" is the most common way small businesses get fleeced. If you're paying for SEO and you can't see what they did this month, in plain English, you're being robbed. For most small local businesses, Google Business Profile + a decent website is 80% of the job.
10 Lightweight analytics.
You need to know how many people visit, where they come from, and which pages they look at. You do not need a 40-tab dashboard with heatmaps.
- Free path: Google Analytics 4 + Google Search Console. Good enough for most.
- Nicer path: Plausible or Fathom. About £9/month. Privacy-friendly, no cookie banner needed, simpler to read.
Install it. Check it once a month. That's the whole job.
11 A privacy notice that isn't scary.
If you collect any data at all, and a contact form counts, you need a privacy notice. It's a UK legal requirement under GDPR. But it doesn't have to be a 4,000-word document. A short, honest page that says what data you collect and what you do with it is enough. The ICO has free templates.
12 An SSL certificate (the padlock).
The little padlock icon next to your URL in the browser. It means the connection is encrypted. Without it, browsers will show a scary "Not Secure" warning and half your visitors will run away.
Good news: it's free and automatic on almost every decent host (Cloudflare, Netlify, Shopify, WordPress.com, Squarespace). If you're paying extra for one, your host is ripping you off.