How to make a website yourself: a step plan for a business owner’s first site

Start with one visitor and one action, not with a template

Most people who search how to make a website yourself begin by comparing tools. Begin one step earlier, with a sentence on paper: who comes to the site and what single thing they should do there. Call, book a visit, order, ask for a quote. Google’s own page on getting a site into Search puts one thing first: giving users the best possible experience. That starts with a page that answers the visitor’s question and shows the next step.

That one action decides almost everything that follows. A dental clinic wants a booking, so the phone number and the free slots belong on the first screen. A furniture maker wants a photo of the room and a request for an estimate, so the form matters more than the company history. Write it on one sheet: what you sell, to whom, where, and what happens after the button is pressed.

The domain name: an address you rent, registered in your own name

A domain name is the address people type and the name in your email. ICANN, which accredits registrars, calls the person or company that holds the rights to a registered name the registrant. The verb buy misleads here. ICANN’s questions and answers say you do not own a domain name: it is more like leasing it from the registry operator, and you keep it by renewing before each term ends. So the first practical risk is a missed renewal.

The second risk is whose name sits in the registrant field. ICANN warns that a developer hired to help may have registered the name using their own contact details, even when you paid, and so may be listed as the registrant of record. In a 2018 post it advises against listing website designers, hosting providers or other third parties as registrants. Register the name yourself, with your own email and a registrar account only you control.

Website builder, WordPress or code: what each route asks of you

There are three routes: a website builder, WordPress, or code written for you. According to W3Techs, on 10 October 2026 WordPress was used by 40.1% of all websites, Shopify by 5.4%, Wix by 4.2% and Tilda by 0.8%, while 31.6% used none of the systems W3Techs monitors. A builder asks for the least knowledge: you pick a template, replace the blocks and pay a subscription. The Wix Help Center says a free site is published at an address of the form siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress and that connecting a custom domain requires upgrading to a plan. Tilda’s pricing page puts connecting your own domain in its Personal plan, not in Free.

WordPress asks for more and gives more room. WordPress.org describes it as open source software under the General Public License. Its download page says installing it yourself is for anyone comfortable getting their own hosting and domain, and the requirements page recommends a host that supports PHP 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 or greater, and HTTPS. Updates, backups and security then sit with you. Code written from scratch asks for a developer’s skills and is rarely an owner’s route. Choose by what you are ready to maintain for years.

Which pages a first site needs and how to order the home page

A first site needs fewer pages than it seems. A home page, a page for each main service or product group, prices, a page about the company with contacts, and the legal pages are enough to open. Give a service its own page when people look for it with their own words. Google’s SEO Starter Guide notes that the way content is organised can affect crawling and indexing once a site has more than a few thousand URLs, so a site of ten pages can simply be arranged for the visitor.

On the home page, put the blocks in the order in which a stranger’s questions arise. First, what this is, for whom and where, with the button for your one action. Then proof that it is real: work, photographs, reviews with names. Then the services with prices, or at least what the price depends on. Then the questions customers always ask and the contacts with the same action once more. Decoration can wait; a missing answer cannot.

Texts and photographs only the owner can supply

A template gives you the frame, and the words are yours to write. Google’s starter guide says that content people find compelling and useful will likely influence a site’s presence in search results more than any of its other suggestions, and that length alone does not matter for ranking. So write what only you know: what exactly you do, for whom, what it costs, how long it takes, and what you explain on the phone ten times a week. Nobody else has those answers.

Photographs follow the same logic. Show your own work, your premises, your team and your product. Google’s guidance asks for images that are sharp and clear and placed near the text they relate to, and for alt text, a short line that explains how the picture relates to the content. A modern phone in daylight is enough for a start. Reduce the files before uploading, because every megabyte has to travel to the visitor’s phone.

Phone screens first, then loading speed in Google’s numbers

Check the site on a phone before you check it anywhere else. Google’s page for site owners states that most searches are now done from mobile devices, and its documentation on mobile-first indexing says Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking. The same documentation recommends responsive design, where one page adapts to the screen, as the easiest pattern to implement and maintain. In a builder this means choosing a responsive template and opening every page on your own phone, on mobile data.

Speed has numbers too. Google measures three things it calls Core Web Vitals: the main content should appear within the first 2.5 seconds of loading, the page should respond to a tap in less than 200 milliseconds, and the layout shift score should stay under 0.1, so that a button does not jump from under the finger. Google says its ranking systems use these metrics. An owner can do most of the work alone: keep photographs light, do not let video start by itself, and remove widgets and fonts you do not use. Google suggests tools such as Lighthouse for testing a page.

Getting found: titles, Search Console, Yandex Webmaster and the legal pages

Every page has two lines that show in search results: the title and the description. Google’s starter guide calls a good title unique to the page, clear and concise, and an accurate description of its contents. A good meta description is short, unique to one page and includes its most relevant points. Two old habits can be dropped: Google states that its search does not use the keywords meta tag, and that keywords in a domain name alone have hardly any effect.

Then tell the search engines the site exists. Google says you usually do not need to do anything except publish the site, and that it can take a few weeks for a new site to be noticed. Search Console is a free Google service: signing up is not a condition of appearing in results, but it confirms that Google can find and crawl the site. For Yandex the same job is done by Yandex Webmaster, whose help says that only a site with its own domain can be added, that adding it does not guarantee a place in the results, and that after the robot’s visit pages can appear in search within two weeks.

The last pages are the legal ones, and they depend on the country you work in. In Russia, article 18.1 of Federal Law No. 152-FZ on personal data obliges an operator that collects personal data over the internet to publish its processing policy on the pages of the site through which the data is collected. In the European Union, the official Your Europe portal explains that the GDPR also covers companies outside the EU that offer goods or services to people there, and that people must be told who processes their data and why. This is not the whole list and not legal advice: check your own case with a lawyer before launch.

Where a self-made site reaches its ceiling and when ordering costs less

A self-made site is a sound start, and it has a ceiling. The ceiling is rarely the template. It is your time, and the tasks that need a trade: online payment, a link to the booking or accounting system, a catalogue with hundreds of items, a second language. The signs are easy to notice: evenings go to the editor instead of to customers, and requests get lost between the form and the phone. None of this makes the first site a mistake; it taught you what the business needs from the next one.

Ordering becomes the cheaper decision when your own hour is worth more than the hour of a person who does this every day, or when a mistake costs money. Prepare the same things in either case: the sheet with the one action, the domain in your name, the texts, the photographs and the list of pages. With that on the table, a studio such as VITON13 Studio can name the scope and the timeline exactly. The question of how to make a website yourself then turns into a calmer one: which parts to keep in your own hands.