A checklist of what you need to set up on your business website to be ready to launch, as well as recommended tools
Photo by Avel Chuklanov, Unsplash
When it comes to launching a digital business, there are few things more daunting than figuring out your business website.
The proposition of creating this beast, with multiple moving parts, and multiple technologies plugged into it, can be incredibly overwhelming.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Now, more than ever, there are technology companies popping up all over the place, that are effectively lego-ising everything you need to create a digital business.
But what does that mean in reality? Well, it means that these tools fulfil individual parts of your business, and have built in, user friendly integrations as part of their setup, that easily connect with whatever platform you decide to use.
Which is amazing for those just starting out. It means you no longer need expensive development to integrate custom or complex services.
It means you can conceivably create a great looking website, get it live, and hook up everything you need in less than a week.
So what do you actually need? Well, I’ve broken this down into 6 different things that you need to setup in order to get your business website up and running. They are:
So without further ado, let’s get into each one.
When setting up your website, you need somewhere to host it, and something to build it.
Now, you can get hosting separately, but the easiest and most user friendly way to do this if you are a small business, is to use a platform that already includes hosting, a domain, and an SSL certificate.
Now, you don’t need to know these in any more detail, just know that all of the platforms I’m going to recommend have these options available at setup. These 3 are all things you need, and will be part of the platform you choose.
The second thing you need is a CMS, which stands for content management system, and is how you create pages, products, blog articles, and anything that exists on your website.
My recommendations for platform based on being the most straightforward to setup and get live are:
Once you have a platform in place, you can get started choosing a template or theme, mapping out your web pages, building your content, and getting stuck in with those design tweaks to align with your brand.
Wherever possible, I would fully recommend paying for a decent theme if you are using a pre-built theme. These themes are much more likely to be structured correctly for SEO, be built to respond correctly to all browser sizes, and just give you peace of mind that every page will look great on every device.
Now you have your website platform selected, you have your domain name, and your site security setup, you’ll next need to setup your email platform. This is also known as customer relationship management.
Simply put, this tool will give you a way to:
There are a few tools out there, but the one you want to choose will be based entirely on your usage.
My recommendations for email tools are:
Great! So now you have your website with a few pages, you have a domain and security, and you have your email tool in place!
Now you can create some forms in the email platform you’ve chosen, and embed them on your website. If you’re using any of the platforms I recommended they provide easy ways to embed forms or to link to forms you have created on any of these email platforms. Just refer to the platform documentation to get your email form setup.
The second thing you’ll want to do as well is create a welcome automation. Just a few emails, a day or so apart, that users will get when they sign up to your email list that just introduces them to your brand, what you offer, and redirects them back to your products or services again at a later date. We could go into this is so much detail but I’ll save that for a later piece…
Now we need to provide users a way of paying for our products or services. This step is actually only relevant if you want to sell a product or service directly to a user on your website — where they pay for it up front.
There are a few great options here, and all of them are great choices and easy to set up.
Now we’re rolling. You’ve got your website, it’s secure, your email form is ready to collect emails, you’ve set up a welcome automation for people who sign up, and you’ve got your payment provider in place for your products.
So create some products, see what the pages look like. Try out the user journey and see if it makes sense, then optimise it so you’re happy.
At this point, you can also setup one of my favourite tools to use for business websites. Now this is a little more advanced and totally optional, but if you’re willing then stay with me…
Create an account on Zapier, a tool that connects and creates flows between multiple third party tools.
Then, link a successful payment action to your payment gateway of choice, to then add the email address of the customer as a subscriber to your email platform, and then add them to a segment on your email platform. Once you’ve done that, you can then create an automated workflow in your email platform that triggers when a user is added to this segment (call it ‘purchase workflow’ or something similar). Then, within that workflow, send your customer a series of emails related to their order, or that asks for a review after 2 weeks, or that prompts them to refer other customers to your brand.
This is the second most important email automation journey you need in your email platform. This is how you turn your customers from just customers, to loyal brand advocates. Again, there is so much to unpack with this automation that I’ll save it for another article.
We’re nearly there, we’re on the home straight. You’re doing great!
The next thing you need to setup on your website is two things.
The first of these, is called Google Tag Manager.
The reason you need this, is to easily and quickly inject tracking and marketing scripts into the header and footer of all pages on your website.
This means you can track the users on your website and you won’t need to write any code to do it.
Simply create an account on Google Tag Manager, follow the installation instructions, and then copy and paste the code it gives you onto the right setup page on your web platform of choice.
If you are unsure, each of the web platforms I recommended has documentation explaining exactly how to set it up. Just google ‘Shopify google tag manager setup,’ for example.
The second thing you need to do, is use Google Tag Manager to install an analytics tool of your choice.
Analytics lets you see how many people are on your website, what pages they view, what actions they take, where they are from, and so much more. Analytics gives you insights into your website that allows you to make better business decisions based on who exactly is viewing and using your website.
My recommendations for these are:
All you need to do here is to create an account, and then follow the instructions on your account to setup your analytics tag in google tag manager, and then publish the tag!
This can seem daunting and complicated, but persevere with it, it’s not that hard once you really follow the steps.
Once that’s done, let’s go to step 5…
This is one of the more difficult steps, but keep going, we’re nearly done.
First, assuming you want to do some digital marketing for your business, you need to setup your ad accounts on the platform of your choice. For most businesses, Facebook and Instagram are the best choices — they offer the biggest user base, with the widest variety of targeting options.
For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is often the best choice, as it gives the best level of targeting when it comes to company type/size, and job roles/seniority. In regard to the ad manager, it functions very similarly to Facebook and Instagram.
Once you’ve set up your ad account on the platform of you’re choice, you’ll then need to create an insight tag to use on your website.
What an insight tag does, is it tracks the users who have come from your campaigns on your marketing platform, through to your website, and allows you to see what they have done in your marketing data.
This means you can track how many people convert from your ad by measuring it based on how many people visit the order confirmation page for example.
There is a huge amount of detail you can get into when it comes to digital marketing, that I won’t cover here, but you can find in a load of places across the internet if you want to learn more about creating and optimising marketing campaigns.
Once you’ve found your insight tag in your marketing platform, you’ll then need to take that insight tag information, and create a new tag in Google Tag Manager. Choose the tag type of the platform you are using, enter the tag details, and then set it to fire on every page of your website.
Once you’ve done that, click publish in tag manager, and you’re marketing insight tag will be live.
The last thing you need to do, especially if you’re in the UK or EU (GDPR), is to set up your cookie and privacy policy consent banner.
This basically means you’ll be legally compliant with the latest privacy laws, and allows your users to agree to be tracked (contrary to their beliefs, it is partially in their interest, as the data from tracking often helps improve the service or experience they get!)
There are several tools to do this, and a quick google will show a lot, but one of the most easy to use tools I’ve found for this is one called Osano.
You simply create your policies based on what your business does, copy those policies to a new page on your website, and then copy and paste the code it gives you into the <head> of your website (your web platform will have documentation on how to do this).
Once you’ve done that, a cookie and privacy policy message will show up on your website — simple!
Ok everyone, final step now, and this is a fun (albeit optional) one!
Now you have everything you need setup on your website, you are legally compliant with privacy laws, can market your product or business and measure conversion, can see what your users are doing on your website, can take payments, can collect and automate email flows, and can create and control your website.
So what more could we possibly need to do?
Well, in all seriousness, when you’re starting up, probably nothing.
This next one is for the businesses that have been around for a little bit, and are starting to get more traffic to their website.
This one is for those of you who want to create test variations of your website pages, in order to see what works better. In order to increase your conversion rate, or get more people to buy.
To be honest, there’s not harm in setting it up in advance. And it couldn’t be simpler.
When it comes to optimisation tools, for small businesses and those starting out, there is really only one non-enterprise option worth considering:
On this platform you can target a specific page on your website, and make changes to copy, code, and more, in order to see what works best.
These are called A/B tests and Multi-variate tests in the business world, and can be incredibly powerful when you have your business rolling, and want to get more from your existing setup.
If you have 1 in 100 people buying every day from your product page for example, that is 1% conversion rate. If you can increase that by a tiny amount to just 2%, then you’ve doubled your sales. Small changes make a big difference at scale, and Google Optimise is your first port of call to testing those changes, and measuring them.
You simply create an account, and setup using your tag manager, just as you did with analytics.
Hopefully, this has helped demystify the website creation process for those looking to setup their business website for the first time.
The internet is full of loads of tools, and they may not be right for you. I want to help save you time in choosing the right tools, and in making sure you get the right tools set up in the right order.
This seems like a lot, but if you really get stuck into it, you could easily have a business website setup in just a week.
And if not, well I’d love to help you.
