Here’s a problem we hear from people time and time again. They’ve got a website. It’s been there for a while. They’re pretty sure it’s not doing what it should be doing. But they don’t know why, and they definitely don’t know what to do about it.
That confusion is real, and it’s completely understandable. Most business owners aren’t marketers. You know your trade inside out, whether that’s running a logistics company, managing a recruitment firm, or building specialist software. You didn’t get good at what you do by spending your evenings reading about conversion optimisation and keyword strategy. So when your website quietly fails you month after month, it’s not immediately obvious what’s broken or where to even begin fixing it.
The starting point, then, isn’t the website itself. It’s the conversation you have before you touch a single pixel.
The Problem With Getting Ahead of Yourself
Before we get into what your starting point should look like, let’s talk about a couple of things it definitely shouldn’t be.
The first is a “coming soon” page.
We still see these. A business is having a new site built, so they take down the old one and put up a placeholder that says something like “We’re working on something exciting. Stay tuned!” This feels proactive. It feels like good housekeeping. It isn’t.
From an SEO standpoint, a coming soon page is essentially a void. Google will find it, note that there’s almost no content, and quietly move on. Any rankings you’d built up with your previous site don’t get put in a holding pattern, they erode. And when your shiny new website eventually launches, you’re not picking up where you left off. You’re starting again from nothing, often with a domain that Google now associates with a stretch of inactivity and thin content.
The 2020 Google BERT update did soften this somewhat. These days, Google won’t necessarily index a coming soon page the way it once did, which means the immediate damage is less severe than it was. But “less damaging” is very different from “a good idea.” At best, you’ve bought yourself a few months of digital silence. At worst, you’ve handed your competitors a head start they didn’t earn.
If your existing site is genuinely embarrassing, and let’s be honest, some of them really are, our advice is almost always to keep it live while the new one is being built. A bad website that answers basic questions is almost always more useful than no website at all. Your phone number is there. Your location is there. Your services are listed, however imperfectly. A coming soon page gives visitors nothing.
What About a One-Page Website?
This one’s a bit more nuanced, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what your business actually is.
The one-page website had a bit of a moment. The thinking was that mobile browsing had changed user behaviour, that scrolling was more intuitive than clicking, and that the discipline of fitting everything onto a single page forced businesses to be clearer about what they were offering. There’s something to all of that.
But in practice, we think the one-page website is only a genuinely good fit for a fairly narrow type of business, the very local, very specific, sole-trader kind. Think a gardener who covers a few postcodes, a handyman who does small domestic jobs, a mobile dog groomer. If your services are simple, your geography is tight, and your work comes almost entirely through word of mouth or local recommendations, then a clean single-page site can absolutely do the job.
Here’s why it works in that context: your website isn’t really functioning as a discovery tool. Nobody is Googling “handyman near me” and expecting to land on a polished multi-page site with case studies and a blog. What they’re doing is following up on a recommendation. Someone has mentioned your name, and they want to verify you’re legitimate and find your number. A one-page site handles that perfectly. Pair it with a well-maintained Google Business Profile, and for that kind of business, you’ve probably got everything you need.
But if you’re a medium-sized business trying to grow, attract new clients, and compete for search traffic? A one-page website is going to hold you back. Every separate page on your website is an opportunity to rank for a specific term, to go deeper on a particular service, to answer a question your ideal client is actually typing into Google. Compress everything into a single page and you sacrifice almost all of that.
So the question isn’t really “should I have a one-page website?” The question is “what does my business actually need from its website?” And that brings us back to where we started.
Diagnosis Before Action
When a client comes to us with an underperforming website, the first thing we do isn’t redesign anything. It’s ask questions.
What we find, almost every single time, is that the problem isn’t the one the business owner thought it was. They often arrive thinking the site looks a bit dated and needs a refresh. And sometimes that’s true. But more often, the visual stuff is almost beside the point. The real problem is that we can’t quite figure out what the business does, what makes it different, or why we should choose it over anyone else.
That’s not a design problem. That’s a communication problem.
We recently worked with a client who ran a specialist training business. Their website looked reasonably professional. The copy was grammatically correct. There was a services page, an about page, a contact form. On the surface, nothing was obviously wrong. But when you read it, you came away with almost no sense of what actually set them apart, or why their approach was worth paying attention to. It was all just there, technically correct and completely forgettable.
When we sat down with the business owner, within about twenty minutes we understood something their website had completely failed to convey: they had developed a genuinely distinctive methodology based on years of working in their field. They were passionate about it in a way that was immediately compelling. Their clients got measurably better outcomes than they would have done elsewhere. None of that was on the website. The website had been written to fill the space rather than to communicate the value.
This is, in our experience, the most common failure. Not that the website looks bad. Not that the forms don’t work. But that there’s a genuinely compelling business hiding behind copy that could have been written by anyone, for anyone, about anything.
What You Should Actually Do First
If you’re reading this because you suspect your website isn’t working as hard as it should be, here’s our honest advice: before you commission a redesign, before you brief a copywriter, before you start talking to anyone about new features or a platform migration, go and speak to a web or marketing expert. It doesn’t have to be us, though obviously we’d be happy to have the conversation.
What you’re looking for from that initial conversation is clarity. Not a quote, not a proposal, not a sales pitch. Just someone who can look at what you’ve got, ask you the right questions, and help you understand what the actual problem is.
Because here’s the thing: you might come to us expecting to need a complete rebuild and find out that what you actually need is a restructure and some new copy. Or the other way around. The point is that you don’t know yet, and frankly, neither do we until we’ve had a proper look.
What we won’t do is simply build what you ask for. That might sound strange coming from a web design agency, but think about it this way: if you called an electrician to your house and stood over them telling them exactly which wires to connect, you’d probably end up with a problem. You hired them because they know things you don’t. The same principle applies here. You tell us what’s not working. We’ll tell you what we think needs to happen. Then we figure out together whether that’s the right approach for your budget and your goals.
Getting the starting point right matters because everything else follows from it. Spend your budget on the wrong thing first, and you’ve got less to spend on the thing that would actually have made a difference. Get clear on the diagnosis first, and you’ve got a fighting chance of building something that actually works.
So if you’re confused about where to begin, that’s okay. The beginning is the conversation. Come and have it.
