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How To Make A Small Business Website

April 15, 2021
Bill Kimball

create a small business website

We’ll help you create a beautiful website to impress and engage new customers – and establish your business online. We hope this article helped you learn how to create a small business website in 5 simple steps. And also read our expert answers on how much does a website cost before starting your website. These plans are affordable and offer good services for small business websites.

  • There are more than 800 professionally designed templates to choose from, covering all types of business from makeup artists to vintage car dealers.
  • And even if you’re being more realistic, adding your content and customizing the code shouldn’t take longer than a day.
  • You can use these plugins to add incredible features to your site without editing a single line of code.
  • Weebly is another small business website builder that has been around for a while and has remained popular with small businesses.
  • Every design includes a unique mobile experience that matches the overall style of your website.

That said, having tested over 50 website builders, we can confidently say that Wix is our top choice for building a business website, withSquarespace and Weebly also great options. You can’t go far wrong if you pick any one of these platforms, but you can check out our best website builders for business article for even more choice. Whether you’re promoting your business, showcasing your work, opening your store or starting a blog—you can do it all with the Wix website builder. As you can tell after reading this article, creating a great small business website may not be as simple as you first thought.

Ashley Easter Made With: Squarespace

You should also think about the expected traffic to your website. If you’re going to sell products online, you may receive a lot more attention than a local business that relies on in-person sales.

Along with website builders, we’ve tested a whole range of hosting providers (we aren’t called Website Builder Expert for nothing!), so we know which hosts have the most. Bluehost scored brilliantly in all areas of our research, taking the overall top spot. WordPress is extremely popular, powering one third of all websites today. However, unlike website builders, WordPress is not quite an all-in-one package.

What’s more, layout features like Cover Pages – also known as single scrolling pages – can really make your small business website stand out from the crowd. Another option when it comes to choosing a small business website builder is GoDaddy. They are best known as a company that started registering domain names. However, they now allow their customers to build their own websites, and offers ecommerce capabilities, at low prices. As you may have read in our Shopify vs. GoDaddy review, there are some limited capabilities compared to competitors, but it still works well for your purposes.

Squarespace is a small business website builder largely known as a service for creative industries and those hoping to start an ecommerce business. However, Squarespace still has something to offer most small businesses. Wix might be the best small business website builder for you. WordPress also comes with a strong analytics tool and SEO capabilities—which is great if you’re interested in how people are finding your site, and how it’s performing on the internet. WordPress offers one of the easiest website and blog building platforms for beginners.

create a small business website

IsItWP is a free online resource that offers WordPress tutorials, tools, product reviews, and other resources to help you build a better WordPress website. Once your website is ready, you should perform a few tasks that are necessary to make your business website work well on the internet. The WordPress repository has over 50,000 free plugins that you can use to add features to your site. Simply install and activate the ones you want, and you’ll be on your way. Once you get rolling, you can add more pages like a blog page, separate brand pages for each product, and more. If you want to add or update any information on the published pages, then you can simply edit them from your WordPress admin area.

With Wix, you have the freedom to create a small business website that oozes real personality. There are more than 800 professionally designed templates to choose from, covering all types of business from makeup artists to vintage car dealers.

The Freedom To Create The Websites You Want

This is our favorite step, as it’s the first time you’ll get a real sense of how your business website could look. If you want to create a visually stunning website for businesses in more creative industries, such as photography or design. Wix is a strong all-around web builder that’s great for beginners, while still offering tons of creative control and cool features. It’s important to mention at this point that there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to choosing the right business website builder. Different businesses will have vastly different needs – a trendy new restaurant, for example, will require something totally different from a small law firm.

create a small business website

Sara’s Wix website allows her to manage bookings and take sales for her knitting business. These help buttons make it easy to fix issues by yourself, without having to wait for customer service. That said, you can Wix directly over the phone from Monday to Thursday, 5am-5pm EST. Wix doesn’t offer 24/7 phone support, but its editor is so easy to use that you won’t feel like you’re missing out. We also like Wix because it provides fantastic customer support.

Build Your Brand

Webs is another small business website builder that offers all the top tools available to business owners—many templates, drag-and-drop capabilities, social connectivity, and so on. Duda provides an easy small business website builder solution that’s especially useful if you’re looking for desktop, tablet, and mobile capabilities. With Duda, you can convert your standard desktop website into a mobile site, or build a mobile site from scratch. Squarespace has a variety of beautifully designed templates—if you want your small business website to have real visual appeal, a Squarespace website will really wow your customers.

This is quite the downside, as marketing tools are crucial for growing a small business website. Duda is a drag-and-drop builder, making it easy to move elements around the page and to update text boxes. Its templates are visually appealing but very structured, meaning you can only place items within certain areas on the page.

Start A Successful Online Business With Our Powerful Tools

There are help buttons everywhere on the Wix site, so if you’re having trouble building a specific section of your site, you can click on the button and find a specific answer to your question. Wix also offers a completely free plan you can stay on for as long as you want – but for a professional first impression, we’d definitely recommend upgrading ASAP.

It has over 50,000 to choose from, both free and paid, which are all really easy to install from the plugin directory. According to our research, SiteBuilder comes out as the easiest to use website builder, with Wix in a close second place. Users don’t like slow websites – the majority will abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to fully render – and therefore neither does Google. Make sure you ‘compress’ any images you upload – this is an easy way to reduce file size in just a few seconds, without visually compromising image quality. You see, it’s all very well and good having a beautiful website, and adding that all-important contact page to encourage your customers to connect with you. You can even add an interactive Google Map app that will lead them to your door.

create a small business website

For example, Wix allows you to create a business email address by purchasing a subscription to G Suite Mailbox within their dashboard. If you want to keep things simple, then Wix is definitely the builder for you.

If your business generates sales and interacts with customers on social media, then you’ll need a website builder that can build a bridge between your website and your social media channels. There’s an easy way to make a few bucks online without breaking the bank. Check out Square Online Checkout Links, which you can add to your small business website for free to take payments directly from visitors. Jimdo Creator is very simple, yes – but that’s no longer anything special in the world of website builders. Duda is far from the best small business website builder, but it’s suitable for users who want a well-designed website and aren’t too bothered about marketing features.