How to create a website for your business

Buy the domain before anything else, and buy it yourself — in your own name, on your own account. The most common regret we see is a business whose domain is registered to an agency or a cousin who has since vanished. It costs 10-40 EUR a year and it is the one asset that must never depend on a third party.

Pick the shortest version of your business name that people can spell after hearing it once. A local extension (.it, .de, .fr) is perfectly good for a local business and often cheaper; .com is worth it if you sell beyond your country.

There is no universally best platform, only the one that matches how much time you will realistically spend. WordPress is the most flexible and the most work. Wix and Squarespace are easy but you rebuild everything by hand. An AI builder generates the site from your existing material and lets you refine it by chat — fastest to launch, and the sensible default if your current site is old or nonexistent.

Whatever you choose, check two things before committing: you can point your own domain at it, and you can export or keep your content. Anything that traps your content is a liability.

Five pages cover almost every small business. Adding more before these are right is procrastination with extra steps.

• Home: what you do, for whom, where — visible in the first three seconds, no scrolling required.
• Services: one page per main service if you want to rank for each; one combined page if you have two or three.
• About: the photo of the real person or team. This page converts far better than owners expect.
• Contact: phone, email, address, map, hours — as plain text, not only inside an image, so search engines and assistants can read it.
• Blog: empty at launch, but the section that turns the site from a brochure into a channel that brings customers.

The most expensive mistake in small business copy is writing about yourself. Replace every sentence that starts with our company with one that answers a customer's question: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens first, what could go wrong. Put prices or ranges on the page — the visitor who cannot find a number leaves for someone who published one.

Write plainly. Short sentences. The words your customers actually type into Google. That is also exactly what makes a page quotable by ChatGPT and Perplexity, which increasingly answer questions before anyone reaches a website.

Publishing the site is not the finish line — it is the starting line. A brand new site has no authority, no history, and nothing for Google to rank beyond your homepage. The sites that win keep publishing useful pages: answers to the questions customers ask, guides for your city, comparisons of the options they are weighing.

This is where the vast majority of business websites quietly die. Do the first four steps in an afternoon, then solve step five deliberately — by writing weekly yourself, hiring it out, or automating it.