Website

A website is the set of pages your business owns at its own address, for example yourbusiness.com or yourbusiness.ph. You decide what goes on it, how it looks, what a visitor can do there and who is allowed to change it. That ownership is the whole point. Everything else you use online, a Facebook page, a Shopee shop, a Google Business Profile, sits on land somebody else owns and can change the rules on tomorrow.

In short

• A website is pages at an address you own and control.
• It is not the same as a Facebook page, and it does not replace one.
• Its job is to turn a visitor into a message, a call or an order.
• Most of what makes a site good is invisible: speed, structure and clarity.

What a website is actually made of

Four separate things have to exist before a website works, and they are usually sold separately. Knowing which is which is what stops you being confused later about who to call when something breaks.

The domain is the address people type, like siite.ph. You rent it yearly from a registrar. It is yours as long as you keep renewing it, and it is the one piece you should always register in your own name rather than your developer’s. A lapsed renewal takes the whole site offline, which is why the renewal notice should reach you and not somebody who left the company.

The hosting is the computer that stores the files and sends them to a visitor’s phone when they ask. Read more under hosting.

The design and content are what people see: the layout, the photos, the words, the buttons. This is the part everybody has an opinion about, and the part that matters least if the three around it are wrong. It is also the part usually agreed twice, first as a wireframe showing what goes where, and only afterwards as something with colours in it.

The graphic design decides whether a stranger takes the business seriously in the first few seconds, before they have read anything.

The system underneath is what lets someone update the site without writing code. WordPress, Shopify and Webflow are all examples. Whoever builds your site should tell you which one they used and hand you the login on the day it goes live.

Why a Facebook page is not a website

In the Philippines a lot of businesses run entirely on a Facebook page, and it works, up to a point. Facebook is where the conversation already happens and Messenger is where most inquiries land. Nothing here says stop using it.

But a Facebook page has limits you cannot argue with. You do not choose who sees your posts; the algorithm does. You cannot lay the page out the way your business actually works. You cannot be found on Google for what you sell, because Google indexes almost none of what is inside a Facebook page. And if the page is suspended, which happens for reasons nobody explains, you lose the audience and the message history on the same afternoon.

There is a quieter cost too. On a Facebook page, every competitor sits one swipe away, and your business appears in the same frame as everyone else’s. On your own site, for the length of the visit, you are the only option on the screen.

A website does not have those limits. The two work best together: the Facebook page for reach and conversation, the website for the part where somebody decides to buy.

What a website has to do for your business

A website is not a brochure. It has one job, and everything on it either helps or gets in the way.

• It has to be found. If nobody searching for what you do ever sees it, the design does not matter. That is the work described under SEO.
• It has to answer the question in the visitor’s head. Usually something plain: do you do this, do you serve my area, are you open, how much notice do you need, how do I reach you. Most sites answer none of these above the fold.
• It has to make the next step obvious. One clear action per page. A form, a booking button, an add to cart. If a visitor has to hunt for it, most will not.
• It has to work on a phone, on mobile data. This is not a detail in the Philippine market, it is the main case. Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on data rather than fibre, sometimes on a signal that comes and goes.
• It has to be believable. Real photos, a real address, real names. A stranger deciding whether to hand over money is looking for reasons to trust you, and stock images of people who are not your staff quietly work against that.

The pages almost every business site needs

There is no fixed list, but most business sites are built out of the same small set of page types, and each exists to do one job.

• A home page that says what you do, who for and where, in the first screen. Its job is to route people, not to explain everything.
• One page per service or product. This is the single most common thing missing. Each page can then answer one search properly and rank for it.
• A page per location if you genuinely operate in more than one, with something real on each. Duplicating the same text with the city name swapped is a pattern Google recognises and discounts.
• An about page, which is read far more often than owners expect, usually by somebody deciding whether you are a real company.
• A contact page with the ways you actually answer, and your hours.
• Proof. Reviews, photos of finished work, before and after. This does more persuading than any amount of copy.

How websites get built, and what the choices mean

You will be offered one of roughly three routes, and they trade the same things against each other.

• A website builder such as Wix or Squarespace. Fastest to start and the cheapest in effort. You are limited to what the builder allows, and moving away later usually means rebuilding.
• A content management system, most often WordPress. You or your team can edit pages, and there is a plugin for nearly everything. The cost is maintenance: plugins and core need updating, and an unmaintained WordPress site is the most common way small business sites get hacked.
• A custom build. Everything is exactly what you specified, nothing is loaded that you do not need, and it is usually the fastest to load. It needs a developer to make structural changes, so it suits businesses whose site is a working tool rather than a leaflet.

None of the three is correct in general. The question is who will maintain it and how often the content changes.

What makes a site slow, and why that costs you customers

Slow sites lose people before the page finishes drawing. The most common causes are boring and fixable.

Photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone are the usual culprit. A single image can be several megabytes when it only needed to be a small fraction of that. Multiply by twelve on a homepage and you have a page that takes a long time to appear on mobile data.

After that come stacked plugins, video backgrounds, chat widgets, tracking scripts and font files loaded from four different places. Each one is a small delay. Together they are the difference between a page that appears and a page somebody abandons.

Distance matters as well. If the server is in Europe and the visitor is in Davao, every request makes a long round trip before anything is drawn.

Google measures all of this and uses it. So do your customers, without knowing they are doing it.

Words you will hear, and what they mean

• Responsive. The layout adapts to the screen it is on, rather than there being a separate mobile site. This is now the default, not a feature to pay extra for.
• Landing page. A page built for one specific purpose, usually the page an ad sends people to. It has one action and no distractions.
• CMS. Content management system. The admin area where you edit pages.
• HTTPS and SSL. What encrypts the traffic between the visitor and the site. A site without it is marked as not secure, which most people will not click past.
• Above the fold. What is visible before anyone scrolls. On a phone that is a small space, and it decides most visits.
• Bounce rate. The share of visits where somebody arrived and left without doing anything. High bounce on a service page usually means the page did not answer the question fast enough.
• Staging site. A private copy where changes are made and checked before they go live.

What to check before you approve a new site

Ask these five questions of anyone building your site, whoever it is.

1. Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be yours, not the agency’s. Ask to see it.
2. Will I get the admin login? If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
3. What happens after launch? Updates, backups and security do not stop being necessary on launch day.
4. How does it look on a mid range Android phone on mobile data? Ask them to show you, not to describe it.
5. How will I know if it is working? There should be tracking, and somebody should be able to tell you how many inquiries came from the site last month.