Choosing a business website: what to check before you commission one

Commissioning a website often starts as a design conversation: “I like this colour”, “make it look like that company’s site”. A few months later, the questions keeping the owner up are different: why aren’t enquiries coming in, why aren’t we on Google, why does a small change take weeks? Here are seven things to settle before you sign.

1. Give the site one primary goal

A website that tries to do everything does nothing well. Pick the main goal first: calls or WhatsApp enquiries, online orders, bookings, or simply a credible presentation. That choice shapes the page structure, where the buttons go and even the tone of the copy.

2. Whose name are the domain, hosting and code in?

One of the most common problems we see: the business uses the site, but the domain and hosting account belong to whoever built it. When the relationship ends, the site is effectively held hostage. Your contract should state plainly that once paid in full, the domain, hosting account, source code and content are yours.

3. Mobile speed matters as much as design

Most visitors arrive on a phone, often over mobile data. Google measures speed with Core Web Vitals: the main content should load (LCP) within 2.5 seconds, interactions should respond (INP) within 200 milliseconds, and layout shift (CLS) should stay below 0.1. Make these targets a condition of the project and ask for them to be measured at handover.

• Avoid heavy background videos and auto-playing animations.
• Serve images as WebP or AVIF, sized for the screen.
• Every extra widget (chat, social feed, counter) slows the site down — keep only what earns its place.

4. Lay SEO foundations from day one

SEO can be “added later”, but it costs more that way. At minimum you need: a unique title and description per page, a sensible heading hierarchy, an XML sitemap, robots.txt, canonical URLs, hreflang on multilingual sites and structured data about the business. We cover a fuller checklist in why a site doesn’t appear on Google.

5. Who will update the content, and how?

If prices, menus, news or vacancies change often, you should be able to update them yourself. If changes happen once or twice a year, a complex admin panel is an unnecessary cost — handling them within a monthly care plan is simpler and safer.

6. Where do enquiries actually go?

A form can look great — but where does a submission end up? Emails land in spam; spreadsheets go unchecked. Decide in advance who receives enquiries, through which channel, and how quickly they reply. For many small businesses, WhatsApp is the fastest channel.

7. What happens after launch?

A site’s technical life begins at launch: certificates renew, updates ship, hosting can change. Ask who makes backups, who notices when the site goes down and what a small change costs. A proposal without answers may look cheap, but it rarely is in the long run.

Quick checklist

1. The site’s primary goal is written in one sentence.
2. Ownership of domain, hosting and code is in the contract.
3. Mobile performance targets (LCP, INP, CLS) are agreed.
4. A technical SEO foundation is in scope.
5. There is a clear process for updating content.
6. It’s clear where enquiries go and how.
7. Post-launch support and its cost are in writing.

Use this list to compare any proposal. To see how we work, read about our process or tell us about your project.