How to Build a Small Business Website (DIY Guide)

You can build a small business website yourself in a weekend using a five-page structure, a drag-and-drop builder, a .com.au domain and a short list of non-negotiable elements, and this guide walks through each in the order you'll need them. It's written for service businesses (tradies, consultants, clinics, cleaners, salons) that want a site that turns searchers into phone calls, not a design showcase.

Start with the five pages, not the platform

Most DIY sites go wrong before anyone opens a builder: the owner picks a template, fills it with whatever comes to mind, and ends up with a home page that says "Welcome to our website" and no obvious way to get a quote. Decide the pages and write the words first. Five pages cover almost every service business.

Page	Its one job	Must include
Home	Tell a stranger what you do, where, and how to reach you in five seconds	Headline naming the service and area ("Emergency plumber, Geelong and Bellarine"), phone number visible without scrolling, a "Get a quote" button, three or four trust signals (years trading, licence number, insurance, review score)
Services	Explain each service in plain language and how pricing works	One section or page per main service, who it's for, what's included, "from" prices where you can, a call-to-action on every section
About	Show there's a real, competent person behind the business	Your name and photo, how long you've done this, qualifications and licences, the areas you service
Reviews	Prove other people were happy	Embedded Google reviews or testimonials with first name and suburb, before-and-after photos if the work is visual
Contact	Make contacting you effortless	Click-to-call number, short form (name, phone, what you need), email, service area or address, hours, embedded Google map

Write these in a document before you touch a template. Use the words customers use ("blocked drain", "bookkeeper for tradies", "kids' haircuts") rather than industry jargon, and put your suburb or region in the home page headline. That single habit does more for local search than any plugin.

Choosing a platform when you're not technical

The four platforms most Australian owners choose between are Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and WordPress. All four produce a perfectly good five-page site. The differences are in how much freedom you get, how much you have to maintain, and what it costs over three years rather than three months.

Platform	Best for	Honest downside	Cost picture (as at September 2026)
Squarespace	Service businesses that want a clean, professional site with the least fiddling	Fewer layout choices; you'll hit walls wanting custom functionality; you can't move the site to another host later	Monthly subscription including hosting; annual plans include a free domain for the first year (AUD pricing is on Squarespace's site)
Wix	Owners who want drag-anything-anywhere control and built-in apps (bookings, quotes)	Easy to build something cluttered and slow; also can't be exported elsewhere	Monthly subscription including hosting; AUD prices vary by tier at wix.com
Shopify	Anyone whose business is mainly selling products online	Overkill and comparatively expensive for a site that just needs phone calls; content pages are basic	Basic plan A$56 a month, or A$42 a month paid annually, plus 1.75% + 30c per online card payment
WordPress (self-hosted)	Owners who want full control, unlimited pages and room to grow into anything	You handle updates, security and backups; a bad theme or too many plugins makes it slow	Free software; Australian shared hosting typically A$5.50 to A$18.50 a month, plus your domain

WordPress.com (the hosted service) is different from self-hosted WordPress: its plans start at A$9 a month on annual billing (as at September 2026), but the cheaper tiers are restrictive and most owners who want WordPress are better off self-hosting on Australian hosting.

A plain recommendation

If you run a service business and "FTP" means nothing to you, use Squarespace. If you want more design freedom, use Wix. If you sell products and expect to keep selling them, use Shopify. Choose WordPress only if you're happy to spend an hour a month on housekeeping or you're paying someone to. Whatever you pick, the subscription is a minor line item; the full picture of what a site costs to build and run is in our guide to small business website costs in Australia.

Getting your .com.au domain

Australian customers trust .com.au, and the extension signals to Google that your business is local. The rules are set by auDA (.au Domain Administration) and registration goes through an auDA-accredited registrar.

To hold a .com.au you must:

• be a commercial entity with an Australian presence, which in practice means holding an ABN or ACN (a sole trader with an ABN qualifies);
• choose a name that matches or is an acronym of your company, business or personal name, is an exact match of your Australian trade mark, or is a match or synonym of the goods or services you provide. (auDA's 2021 licensing rules replaced the older, looser "close and substantial connection" test with these narrower categories.)

The newer .au direct extension (yourbusiness.au) only requires an Australian presence, with no commercial-entity or name-match test. If both are free, register both and point the .au at your main site so nobody else trades on your name.

Expect to pay roughly A$10 to A$25 a year for a .com.au, with first-year discounts common: VentraIP, for example, was advertising .com.au and .au registrations at A$9.95 for the first year against a standard A$22.95 (as at September 2026). Three rules save real grief later:

1. Register it in your business's name with an email you control, not your web designer's. The registrant owns the domain; if that isn't you, you can't move it.
2. Turn on auto-renew and keep a valid card on file. Lapsed domains get snapped up by squatters within days.
3. Buy the domain separately from the builder. Squarespace and Wix will sell you one, but keeping it with an Australian registrar makes switching platforms later far simpler.

Before registering, search ASIC's business names register and IP Australia's trade mark search. A domain that infringes a trade mark can be taken off you.

Hosting and security

If you use Squarespace, Wix or Shopify, hosting is included and you can skip ahead. With self-hosted WordPress, choose an Australian provider with servers in Australia (distance shows up as load time), daily backups and a free SSL certificate. As one example of typical pricing, VentraIP's shared plans were listed at A$5.50 a month for standard hosting and A$9.25 for WordPress-specific hosting on introductory terms, rising to A$11 and A$18.50 on renewal (as at September 2026).

Whatever the platform, the site must load over HTTPS (the padlock). Browsers flag plain HTTP as "not secure", Google treats HTTPS as a ranking signal, and a form collecting names and phone numbers over an unencrypted connection is a problem you don't want. Every major builder and reputable host includes this free.

The elements every small business site needs

These separate a site that rings the phone from one that just exists. Check every one before launch.

Mobile first, literally

Most people searching for a local service are on a phone, often in a hurry. Build and check every page on your own phone before you check it on a laptop: text readable without zooming, buttons big enough to tap, phone number one tap away on every page.

Speed

Google's Core Web Vitals set the benchmark: the largest element on the page should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to taps within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shouldn't jump as it loads (a cumulative layout shift of 0.1 or less). Run the live site through Google's free PageSpeed Insights. The usual culprits are enormous photos straight off a phone (resize to under 200KB each before uploading), auto-playing video banners, and a pile of unnecessary plugins or apps.

Click-to-call

Every phone number should dial when tapped. In HTML that's <a href="tel:+61312345678">03 1234 5678</a>; in Squarespace, Wix and Shopify you choose "phone" as the link type. Put the number in the header so it's on every page and make it the primary button on mobile.

Forms that get answered

Keep the enquiry form to three or four fields: name, phone, suburb, what they need. Every extra field costs enquiries. Send submissions to an inbox you check daily (and to your phone), test it yourself before launch, and switch on the builder's spam protection. Then reply fast; a quote request answered within the hour converts far better than one answered tomorrow.

If you collect personal information through forms, sort out a privacy policy. Businesses with annual turnover under A$3 million are generally exempt from the Privacy Act, but health service providers and businesses that trade in personal information are covered regardless of size, and a clear privacy page builds trust anyway. Treat the exemption as shrinking rather than settled: the Government has said it intends to remove it in a later tranche of privacy reform, and some small businesses (including those brought into the AML/CTF regime from 1 July 2026) are already covered. Our guide on whether you need a privacy policy covers the rules.

Google Business Profile embed

Your Google Business Profile is what appears in the map results, and it's usually where first contact happens. Embed the map on your contact page and pull your Google reviews onto the reviews page (most builders have a widget; on WordPress a free plugin does it). Make sure name, address or service area, phone and hours on the site match the profile exactly. If you haven't set the profile up yet, do that first with our Google Business Profile guide.

LocalBusiness schema

Schema is a small block of code that tells Google, in a format it reads reliably, what your business is, where it is and when it's open. Squarespace and Wix add some automatically; on WordPress an SEO plugin generates it; or paste it into the site header yourself. A minimal version:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "Bayside Plumbing",
  "telephone": "+61312345678",
  "url": "https://www.baysideplumbing.com.au",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "Brighton",
    "addressRegion": "VIC",
    "postalCode": "3186",
    "addressCountry": "AU"
  },
  "areaServed": "Bayside, Melbourne",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 07:00-17:00"
}

Swap "Plumber" for the most specific schema.org type that fits (Electrician, Dentist, HairSalon, AccountingService, or plain LocalBusiness), then check it with Google's free Rich Results Test.

The footer

Put your registered business name, ABN, phone, email, service area and links to your privacy policy and terms in the footer of every page. It reassures customers, and it's where Google and suppliers look for the legal entity behind the trading name.

SEO basics that matter for a small site

You don't need an agency for a five-page site. You need to do a handful of things properly.

• One unique title tag and meta description per page, naming service and location: "Bookkeeper for Tradies in Newcastle | Smith Bookkeeping". Every builder has a field for these under page settings.
• One H1 per page in customer language, with H2s for each section.
• A page per core service if you offer several. "Hot water repairs Hobart" deserves its own page; one "Services" page listing eight things ranks for none of them.
• Descriptive image names and alt text ("bathroom-renovation-hawthorn.jpg", not "IMG_4471.jpg").
• Google Search Console: verify the site, submit the sitemap (builders generate one at yoursite.com.au/sitemap.xml) and check for errors monthly.
• Consistency: the same name, phone and address on your site, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and directories.

Honest claims matter as much as clever ones. Everything you say about services, prices and qualifications is advertising under the Australian Consumer Law, so no "award-winning" or "Melbourne's number one" unless you can back it up. Local search has a few more moving parts; once the site's live, work through our local SEO guide.

Launch checklist

Run through this the day before going live, on a phone and a laptop.

• Every page has a unique title tag, meta description and H1
• Phone number is click-to-call in the header and footer
• Contact form tested end to end and landing in an inbox you check
• Site loads over HTTPS and http:// redirects to https://
• Photos resized and compressed; PageSpeed Insights mobile score checked
• Google Business Profile details match the site exactly; map embedded on the contact page
• LocalBusiness schema added and validated
• Privacy policy and terms linked in the footer, with ABN and business name
• Domain registered in your business's name with auto-renew on
• Google Search Console verified and sitemap submitted
• Analytics switched on so you can see what happens next
• Spelling, prices and licence numbers checked by someone who isn't you

Once it's live, resist the urge to redesign. Spend the next three months adding reviews, adding a suburb or service page a month, and watching Search Console for what people actually search. For an outside read on how the site and the rest of your marketing stack up, run our free marketing health check and fix whatever it flags first.

Key takeaways

• Write the five pages (home, services, about, reviews, contact) before you pick a template; the words and the phone number matter more than the design.
• Squarespace is the easiest choice for a service business, Wix for design freedom, Shopify if you sell products, and self-hosted WordPress only if you'll maintain it.
• A .com.au needs a commercial entity with an Australian presence (your ABN) and a name that matches your business; register it in your own name with auto-renew on.
• Mobile layout, load speed, click-to-call, a short form and a matching Google Business Profile are what turn visitors into enquiries.
• Add LocalBusiness schema, unique title tags and Google Search Console, then keep adding reviews and service pages rather than redesigning.

Where to get help

• auDA (auda.org.au) for the .au licensing rules and the list of accredited registrars.
• ASIC Connect and IP Australia's trade mark search to check a name is free before you register the domain.
• Google Search Central (developers.google.com/search) for PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and Search Console documentation.
• OAIC (oaic.gov.au) for Privacy Act obligations if you collect customer information.
• ACCC (accc.gov.au) for the advertising rules that apply to claims on your site.
• business.gov.au for general guidance on setting up online.
• A local web designer or marketing consultant if you'd rather pay for a few hours of setup than learn a builder; your accountant can confirm how website costs are treated at tax time.