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There are a multitude of options for time-poor business owners to create their own website nowadays. As a small business owner you can bypass web designers and developers and still have a nice shiny website. With easy-to-use DIY platforms like Wix and WordPress.com, virtually anyone can build their own website. It might not be the best spend of your time though — there’s a certain learning curve and if you’re time-poor, there’s probably plenty of other things taking priority.
Given that anyone can create a website nowadays, anyone can sell them too and the price of a new website can be very attractive but the problem is that what’s under the hood can create headaches down the line.
In the last number of months, I’ve seen a handful of examples where small business owners paid for what looks like a bargain — a low-cost website that certainly looks good but unfortunately performance was not fully considered, which ends up costing far more money in the long run. This is a symptom of a fragmented marketing strategy, where businesses limp from one sporadic marketing effort to the next without seeing the results their investment deserves.
This can result in a website that doesn’t fulfill the business need, is a time and money drain and eventually gets lost in the ether or gathers virtual dust in some far away corner of the internet’s attic. Before paying for a new website, a conversation with a digital marketing consultant can save you a lot of time and money.
What do you need a website for anyway? Some businesses exist without a website but for most, a website is an important online anchor for your business — a place to make sales (eCommerce); generate leads; bult trust; showcase services; provide customer support; build a brand etc.
There are many purposes but the primary purpose will help to determine what your website requires under the hood. You could easily end up paying an annual subscription for functionality you just don’t need. For example, if you never intend to sell a product online, you probably don’t need an eCommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce.
Similarly, if you want leads or bookings you want a website that allows you to easily create sign-up forms or booking calendars or integrate with a calendar platform like Calendly.
Think of your website as your business’s digital home — the place people go to find you, trust you and take the next step, whether that’s buying, booking, or getting in touch.
Nearly all platforms now have SEO “included” to some degree but not all platforms provide the same level of customisability and best practices can still be overlooked. For example, a web page URL should ideally be no longer than 60-70 characters (without query strings), yet I’ve seen examples of web pages with 160-170 characters. Below are some key things to look out for to ensure you’re not stuck with another invoice down the line to rectify what should be standard practice.
I’ve gone into more detail on site structure here. It’s important to ensure your website is structured for scalability and capable of adapting to the growing needs of your business. Having a deliberate strategy for internal links is part of that same process and can be a game changer for your websites performance in organic search.
Even the most basic free platforms have adapted to have SEO-friendly URLs. Search engines like Google want concise URLs (< 75 characters) that are descriptive and readable with 1-2 target keywords included. Excessively long URLs or URLs with unreadable query strings are not user friendly and impact crawl efficiency which affects how you appear in search engines.
Look at the URL of this page as an example: https://paulmadden.ie/marketing/why-you-should-talk-to-a-digital-marketing-consultant-before-you-build-a-new-website/
it follows the following structure which is easily read and understood by the reader and the search engine crawler:
domain-name/category/name-of-blog-post
One of the absolute must-haves from a new website is good page speed. People (and search engines) have a low tolerance for websites that take ages to load. Tools like Google’s Page Insights can be used to assess a page’s load speed and diagnose issues with page performance. The size of images uploaded to the site is a regular culprit in slowing down a website, particularly if it’s a high resolution image of your business logo which appears in the header on every page of your website. Things like image optimisation are not always considered by low-cost web providers but they will hurt your site’s performance in search results and will annoy users if pages are slow to load.
It should be a given now that website owners (or admins) have the ability to edit title tags, meta descriptions, headings (H1, H2, H3) and image alt tags. These are the basic building blocks of SEO. Producing regular content which includes these SEO basics will help to establish your brand as an authority in your specific field.
Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are available to everyone and are relatively easy to install. There should be no reason why these can’t be installed before your website goes live. If included from the day your site goes live, these tools can give valuable insight into site performance and usage and help to identify how visitors are engaging with your content. Submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console as soon as possible to help identify issues as they arise. These analytics tools are often overlooked but they can save you a lot of hassle tracing issues in website performance.
Virtually all website platforms are now mobile optimised out of the box. At least they should be! Maybe some HTML sites are not but they are rare in modern times. Even when sites are mobile-optimised, some are prone to usability issues. For instance, on a drag & drop website builder like Wix, I’ve seen instances recently where elements are too close together, which makes them hard to click for some users. Similarly, colour choices can be troublesome because they may be difficult to read (e.g. light coloured text on a light background). There are tools to test out accessibility including Lighthouse.
Website platforms often provide tiered service levels where costs increase when you use more functionality. The costs can snowball relatively quickly.
Domain name control and hosting are other considerations. What happens 12 months down the line when you want to move to another platform? Do you have control over the domain name? Are there other costs associated with hosting and domain name renewal? Ask your website provider for a breakdown of recurring costs and a guideline on extra costs for new functionality once the website is built.
As a rule of thumb, when you hear “that’s included” ask for details.
Cheap websites are tempting, no doubt about it. But they can lead to headaches. Seeing your website fail to get traction in organic search can be disheartening. Having to spend more money to fix SEO and performance issues down the line is painful. It’s best to ensure that these SEO and performance best practices are included from the start to ensure your website can hit the ground running on launch day!
You can get the best of both worlds by being armed with the right information before you strike a deal for a new website. It’s possible to get your new website relatively cheap and still have the basic performance boxes ticked. It’s just a question of knowing which questions to ask!
It’s also no harm to ask to speak to a previous customer to get a sense of customer satisfaction from the website provider.
