A total of 83% of people. That’s how many people do searches online before purchasing a product. The question is, will they find your products or one of your competitors.

That’s why it’s essential to create a website for your small business.

If you’re planning to create a website for small business, there are a few essential steps you need to take. Keep reading to learn the steps to creating a website for a small business.

Decide on Your Platform

You don’t have to create a new website for small business from scratch anymore. There are many content management platforms available that will help you get your website up and running on a hosting platform in no time. The question is, which one should you pick?

The most popular choice of the best web development services company is WordPress. It’s free and has been around what seems like forever. On top of that, hosting providers typically provide a one-click install option for the platform.

That, plus the many plugins and themes available, make it a great choice.

Of course, there are many other platforms available for free. Do your research to figure out which product will meet your needs best for your website.

Pick Your Hosting Platform and Domain Name

Once you pick your website platform, you’ll need a way for your visitors to access your site. That’s what your hosting provider and domain name will do.

Ideally, you want to buy these products from separate companies. Purchasing every product from one provider might be convenient, but it’s also one point of failure. If your domain name and hosting are separate, you can move your site if something ever goes wrong.

Your website hosting provider should have the software you need to easily install your website platform. Look through the features to verify this. If you don’t have much traffic initially, you should be able to get away with a shared host.

The next step is your domain name. Ideally, you’ll find the exact match for your business name. If not, try to find one that matches as much as possible.

Once you have your domain name, you’ll need to get the nameservers from your website host. Enter this information into the nameserver fields for your domain name, and you’re done.

Get a Web Design

Once you have your website online, it’s time to get your website designed. Luckily, this isn’t too difficult.

If you want to handle things yourself, you can head to a theme marketplace to look at your options. There are free and paid themes available.

Free themes have fewer options but are great if you’re starting on a budget. Paid themes, on the other hand, have loads of options and offer a lot of customization. Some even have page builders built-in that let you visually design your website pages yourself.

The most significant cost to create a website for a small business comes if you decide to hire a professional designer. They’ll work with you to customize your brand design. In most cases, you’ll earn more money from a professionally designed website than you would if you relied on themes and web designs you did yourself.

Prepare Your Content

Once you finalize your website design, the next step to creating a website for a small business is the content creation phase. A great design isn’t worth much if your content doesn’t provide value to your visitors.

Your first page is your homepage. It serves as the introduction to your company. Think of the most essential parts of your business, and make sure you tell visitors that information in an easy-to-read way.

Your next section is your products and services. Make sure to clearly describe the problems your products are designed to solve and why your business is the best at doing so.

Your next content area is your blog. If you plan to get SEO traffic on your website, you need great SEO-optimized content. Your blog is designed to take advantage of popular keywords that get a lot of search traffic.

Add Functionality

Once you have your primary content up to date, it’s time to start adding features. If you want a basic content website, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you need to think of what features you want your site to have.

Luckily, most modern content platforms have a large plugin ecosystem that provides any feature you can think of. From appointment scheduling, contact forms, and eCommerce systems, you can find a plugin for the job.

In most cases, you’ll need a contact form at a minimum. From there, you can add an opt-in form to collect emails and tracking scripts to see where your users come from.

Test Everything

Once you have your site ready to publish, you have one last task. You need to test your website for problems.

Go through each of your pages to make sure everything looks as intended. Check your content for grammar errors and make sure everything is easy to read.

Once you look through your content, you’ll need to test your design. Don’t only look at everything from your desktop computer. Load your website on your phone to make sure everything looks great on mobile.

After you finish with your design testing, you’ll need to test your website features. Go through each plugin that adds functionality to make sure everything works. Or, you can just subscribe to website monitoring to help you find, fix and prevent availability issues, performance issues of your website once it is published online.

Now You Can Create a Website for Small Business

While it’s easier than ever to put a website online, it’s not easy to do it correctly. Follow the steps above to create a website for small business. If you take the proper steps, you’ll get a website that not only looks great but will also increase revenue for your company.

Once you have your website online, you’ll need to focus on driving traffic. Check out the blog for great tips to help you drive potential customers to your new small business website.