There is no best website provider for a small business, which is an unsatisfying answer to a reasonable question. There are four routes, they are good at different things, and the right one depends on your budget, how much time you have, and how much you want to be involved afterwards.
What follows is what each route is genuinely good and bad at, the questions that tell the good ones from the bad ones within each category, and how to check somebody out before you hand over money. We are one of the four, so read that section with the appropriate scepticism.
Route one: a freelancer or small studio
Good at: value, for a straightforward small site. You deal with the person doing the work, which means decisions happen in one conversation instead of three. A good local freelancer will understand your market, take your calls, and build you something perfectly sound for less than any agency.
Bad at: continuity. One person gets ill, gets busy, gets a full time job, or moves on to something else. The most common way a small business ends up stuck is a site built by somebody who has stopped answering emails. They also tend to be stretched on the parts that are not building: content, search, and chasing you for the photographs.
Ask: what happens if you are unavailable for a month, who else could pick this up, what do changes cost after launch, and can I see three sites you built more than two years ago that are still running.
Route two: an agency
Good at: capacity and accountability. There is a process, there are several people, and somebody is responsible for the timeline. If you need a bigger site, integrations, or work alongside advertising and content, this is the route that can actually deliver it. You also get taste, in the cases where taste matters commercially.
Bad at: small jobs, and price. An agency has overheads and they are in the quote. Being the smallest client in an agency is not much fun either, because your work is the work that moves when a bigger client shouts.
Ask: who will actually do the work and will I speak to them, what happens to my project when a larger client has an emergency, what is included after launch, and can you show me something you built at my budget rather than at your best client's.
Route three: doing it yourself on a platform
Good at: control and cash. Modest monthly subscription, tools that are genuinely capable now, and you can change anything at midnight without asking anybody. For a business whose owner enjoys this sort of thing, it is hard to beat.
Bad at: your time, and the invisible parts. Assembling seven pages is a real job that competes with running the business, and most people get a decent homepage and stall. The search basics, speed, and the things you do not know you do not know are where self built sites usually fall down.
Ask yourself: honestly, have I got the evenings, have I finished a project like this before, and what is my time worth. If the answer to the first two is no, the subscription is not the cost.
Route four: renting or paying monthly
Good at: removing the lump sum and removing the maintenance. Somebody else builds it, hosts it, updates it and fixes it, and the whole thing is one predictable monthly figure. Nothing to find up front beyond the first few months, and nothing to think about afterwards.
Bad at: being yours. You are licensed to use the site rather than holding the files, and over five or six years a one off build plus modest hosting is usually the cheaper arithmetic. It is also the wrong route for anything genuinely custom, because packages are built to a pattern.
Ask: what is the minimum term, what does leaving cost, can I buy it and for how much, are content changes included, and whose name is the domain in. The full comparison is in should you own your website or rent it.
Which route fits which business?
Rough guidance, and there are exceptions to all of it.
- A sole trader or one van trade: a good local freelancer or a rental. An agency is buying you design time you do not need.
- A business with an owner who enjoys computers and has time: a platform, done properly, with a weekend blocked out for it.
- A practice, shop or firm with five to twenty staff: freelancer, small studio or rental depending on whether you want to own it.
- Anyone selling online at volume: a platform or an agency, and budget for the running properly.
- Anyone needing integration with existing software: an agency or a specialist. This is not package territory.
- Anyone whose website failing would cost real money by the hour: pay for a support contract with response times in it, whoever builds it.
How to check somebody out before you pay them
The same five checks work whichever route you are looking at, and they take half an hour.
- Look at three sites they built, on your phone. Not on the portfolio page, on the actual live sites. Time how long they take to appear. See whether the phone number is obvious. Read a page of the words.
- Check those sites are still live and still theirs. A portfolio full of sites that have since been rebuilt by somebody else tells you something.
- Ring one of their clients. Most will happily give you a name. Ask what happened when they needed a change.
- Check how long they have been trading. Companies House is free. A limited company with a filing history is not a guarantee of anything, but it is a data point.
- Send an awkward email and see how fast the reply comes. Whatever their response time is before they have your money is the best it will ever be.
The things that should worry you, whoever you are talking to
- They will not put the price in writing, or the price keeps moving as the conversation goes on.
- They want the domain in their own name. There is no good reason for this.
- They cannot tell you what changes cost after launch.
- They guarantee rankings. Nobody can, and anyone saying so is either misinformed or hoping you are.
- The contract has a long tie in that was not mentioned until the paperwork.
- They talk about design and nothing else. A site that looks lovely and cannot be found has failed.
- You cannot work out who actually builds it.
There is a longer version of this as a pre payment checklist in ten things to check before you pay a web designer.
What about the ones who ring you?
Every small business gets these calls. Somebody has noticed your website is dated, or that you are not appearing for a search, and they have a solution for a monthly fee. Some of these callers are perfectly legitimate small agencies doing ordinary sales. Some are not.
The test is simple and it costs you nothing: never buy anything on the call. Ask them to email the proposal with the price, the term and what is included, then look at three sites they have built before you reply. Anybody worth dealing with is fine with that. The ones who are not will apply pressure about an offer that ends today, which is your answer.
Be particularly careful with anything sold as a package of website plus advertising plus search on a long contract, because it is very hard to tell afterwards which part of the money did anything. If you buy it, buy it with the elements priced separately so you can stop one without stopping all of it.
How involved will you have to be?
Worth knowing before you choose, because this is where the mismatch usually happens.
- Freelancer: moderate. A couple of conversations, then you supply content, then you review. Expect to chase occasionally.
- Agency: more than people expect. Discovery sessions, workshops, sign off stages, and feedback deadlines. That is what buys the accountability.
- Platform: completely. It is your project from start to finish and nobody else will finish it.
- Rental: least. You supply the details and the pictures, approve the design once, and then it is somebody's job rather than yours.
If you have no time at all, do not pick the route that needs the most of it and then be surprised when the project stalls. That single mismatch accounts for most of the unhappy website stories we hear.
What matters more than which route you pick
Honestly, two things, and neither is on anybody's sales page.
The first is turning up organised. A clear list of pages, your words drafted, your photographs in one folder, and one person who can make decisions. Projects that go badly are almost never bad because of the supplier's skill. They go badly because nobody could get the content finished. There is a method in how to brief a web designer.
Do not get talked out of that by anyone who says the content can come later. It cannot, in practice. The projects that finish on time are the ones where somebody had written the words before the first meeting, and that is true whether you spend four hundred pounds or fourteen thousand.
The second is what happens after launch. Whoever builds it, somebody has to own the site afterwards: updates, changes, a monthly test of the contact form, and the domain renewal. Decide who that is before you start, and if the answer is nobody, pick a route where it is included.
Where we fit, plainly
We are route four. We build small business websites and rent them monthly, from £49 a month excluding VAT for a single page up to £149 for ten, with hosting, SSL, business email, a free .co.uk domain and a yearly redesign included, the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. One design revision comes with the build, content changes are unlimited and free, you can cancel any month with a month's notice, and you can buy the site outright at any point for twelve times the monthly as a separate payment that is not reduced by the rent already paid.
That suits people who do not want a lump sum or a maintenance job, and it suits people who know they will not keep on top of updates themselves. It does not suit everybody, and if you want to own an asset, or you need something custom, one of the other three routes is the better answer. You can price up your website to see the number, and take it away to compare against whatever else you are considering.
