A slow website doesn’t just frustrate visitors. It quietly costs you rankings, enquiries, and sales, often before you even know there’s a problem. Google has used site speed as a ranking factor since 2010, but the way it’s measured has changed significantly. Speed is one factor among many.
You built your website, launched it, and moved on. Now someone’s mentioned you should be “maintaining” it, and you’re not sure if that’s a real thing or just an upsell. It’s a real thing, and this post explains exactly what it involves and whether it makes sense for you.
Most web agencies will tell you they use “the best tool for the job.” That’s true for us too, but it’s also a bit of a non-answer. Here’s the honest version: what we actually build on, why we chose it, and the handful of situations where we’d point you somewhere else.
You want a website. Someone tells you to “register a domain.” You nod, open a new tab, and realise you’re not entirely sure what that means or where to start. Domain name registration doesn’t need to be complicated.
Most small business websites are written for the wrong person. Owners spend weeks polishing paragraphs about their history, their values, and their philosophy, then wonder why the phone isn’t ringing. Your visitors don’t care about your history yet. They care about their own problems. Here’s how to close that gap.
If you’re already on Facebook, have a Google Business profile, and most of your work comes through referrals, it’s a fair question: do you actually need a website? The honest answer is: it depends. But most businesses that think they don’t need one are underestimating what they’re leaving on the table.
When a homeowner needs a leaking pipe fixed in an emergency, they rarely just type “plumber” into Google. They type things like “emergency hot water plumber open now in Claremont.
If your website isn’t showing up when people search for what you offer, keywords are usually the first place to look. Not because stuffing the right words into a page will magically fix things, that thinking is about fifteen years out of date.
You’re planning a new website, and someone has told you it could be built in two different ways: a traditional CMS like WordPress or a static site generator like Astro. Now you’re trying to figure out what that actually means for you.
If someone wants to know which accounting software suits a small business, or whether to hire a developer or use a website builder, there’s a real chance they’re not Googling it anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT. Or Perplexity. Or getting a direct answer from Google’s own AI Overview before they’ve seen a single link.