Answers

How do I rank higher on Google for a particular search?

By deserving to, which is a slower answer than anybody wants but the only honest one.

In practice it comes down to three things. There has to be a page that genuinely answers the search, rather than a page that mentions the words. The page has to be technically sound, which means loading quickly, working properly on a phone and being readable by the machines that index it. And other people have to link to you, because that is still how search engines judge whether anybody takes you seriously.

What matters most is which search you are chasing. A specific one, “wholesale hot dog suppliers” rather than “food”, is a realistic target for a small business and usually brings better customers, because somebody searching for exactly what you sell is much closer to buying. Broad, valuable search terms are contested by companies with budgets you would not enjoy competing against.

Nobody can guarantee a position, and anybody who does is selling something.

This page is slow on my phone. Can you make it faster?

Almost always, yes, and it is usually worth doing, because slow pages lose customers before anybody sees what is on them and search engines mark them down for it.

The usual causes are photographs that were uploaded straight from a camera at ten times the size they are displayed, a page loading scripts it does not need before it shows anything, and a stack of plugins each adding a little more weight. Fixing it means serving images at a sensible size and in a modern format, letting the parts a visitor sees load first, and removing what turns out not to be earning its place.

The result is measurable, which is the useful part. We can show you what the page scored before and after, and what it did to how long people stay.

How do I get star ratings showing in Google’s search results?

Two things have to be in place. You need reviews, and the page has to carry the structured data that tells Google what they are, which is a piece of code behind the page that visitors never see, marking up each review and the average score.

Reviews you have gathered yourself are perfectly good for this. Customer reviews sitting on your own product pages will produce stars, provided they are genuine and marked up properly, and there is no need to be paying a third-party review service to make it work. The exception is ratings of your business as a whole rather than of a product, where Google is far more sceptical about a company publishing its own score, and the stars people see there come from Google’s own listing and from independent review sites instead.

Doing it properly makes stars possible rather than certain, because Google decides when to show them and changes its mind periodically. It is still worth doing: a result with stars gets clicked more often than the one above it without.

The part most businesses skip is simply asking. Customers who are happy will usually leave a review if somebody asks them at the right moment, and almost nobody does. An automated review request will work for a very small – but nonetheless welcome – percentage of customers, but a personal request will have a much higher success rate.

Which payment gateway should we use?

For a straightforward small shop, most of the leading providers will do the job perfectly well. Make your decision based on cost, cash flow and how well the provider fits the way you sell, rather than on a long list of features you may never use.

Consider three factors. First, what each payment costs, including both the percentage and any fixed fee per transaction; a small difference becomes significant once you are turning over large sums. Second, when you receive the money, including normal settlement times and whether funds can be held in reserve. And third, what happens when something goes wrong: refunds, chargebacks (when a customer asks their bank or card issuer to reverse a card payment), account reviews (when the payment provider may withold payments pending a risk check) and whether you can get useful human support when you need it.

The other consideration is what you sell. Subscriptions, deposits and balance payments, trade accounts on payment terms, marketplaces, international sales and unusual payment flows can all narrow the field. It is much better to identify those requirements before choosing a provider than to discover afterwards that your preferred gateway does not handle them as neatly as you need.

A useful test is to take your actual last month’s orders and calculate what each provider would have charged.

Can we put this PowerPoint or Word document on the website?

We can, and it is usually the wrong thing to do.

A document sitting on a website is close to invisible. Search engines make little of it, it reads badly on a phone, people using screen readers often cannot get at it at all, and nobody can link to a particular part of it. It also freezes: the moment a price or a date changes, there is a stale copy of it in circulation.

Almost always the better answer is to turn the content into a proper page, which takes an hour or two and makes it findable, readable on a phone and simple to keep current. Where a document genuinely needs to be downloadable, a form or a price list somebody has to print, we do both: a page that can be found, with the file attached to it.

My web developer has stopped replying. What should I do?

Before chasing them again, find out what you actually control, because that determines how serious your situation is and what you can do about it.

There are three things to consider. The domain name is the important one, because whoever controls that controls your email and your web address. Look up your domain on a public whois service and see whose name is on it. Second is the hosting, which is where the site physically lives, and which could be an account in the developer’s name with your site inside it. Finally the site itself, meaning the files and the database, and an administrator login that belongs to you rather than to them.

If all three are in your name, you are fine and you are simply changing supplier. If the domain is in somebody else’s name and they have gone quiet, that is the thing to deal with first and it is worth being persistent about, because without control of your domain you’re at an impasse. Everything else can be rebuilt, but without your domain you are back to square one. Your registrar will have a dispute process for issues like this, so don’t be discouraged.

In the meantime, don’t rush into having your site rebuilt on the offchance the old one can’t be recovered. It nearly always can, and the people who say otherwise are usually quoting for the alternative.

Should I use an agency or a freelancer or hire somebody to look after my site?

That depends much less on the size of your business than on how often the website changes.

An agency suits a project with a clear start and end and a budget to match, where you want a team and a process and you are prepared to pay for the overheads that come with both. They are set up to deliver a build. Most are not set up to answer a two-minute question next April, and the ones that are will sell you a monthly plan to cover it.

A freelancer is cheaper and more direct, and the risk is the obvious one: one person, one set of holidays, one career that may go somewhere else. That works well until suddenly your regular supplier moves on and you realise you have no Plan B.

When your website is a direct source of income, you probably need somebody on call who can make upgrades, fix problems and manage content updates. But think carefully about how your fees are calculated. When you pay a fixed monthly fee for a set number of requests you may sometimes be paying for a service you aren’t using, which is quite different to being billed for the time worked.

If your site genuinely never changes, and some do not, none of this applies and you should pay somebody occasionally when something needs doing.

How much should a small business pay for website maintenance in the UK?

There are two models and it is worth knowing which you are being quoted.

Monthly care plans are the common one, typically somewhere between £40 and £200 a month for a small business site. That usually buys software updates, backups, security monitoring and a set allowance of small changes, often expressed as a number of requests or a number of hours. Above that allowance you pay extra, and below it you pay the same.

The other model is paying for the time actually worked, at an hourly rate. Independent developers and small firms in the UK generally charge somewhere between £40 and £90 an hour, with agencies higher. Our own rate is £54 an hour plus VAT, published on the pricing page along with everything else.

Which is better depends entirely on how much you use. A plan might be worth having if you reliably use the allowance, and a poor deal if you do not, because the months you need nothing still cost you. Time billed in arrears is worth having if your use is uneven, which for most small businesses it is.

The question worth asking a supplier is what happens in a month when you need nothing at all. The answer tells you which model you are really being sold.

Who owns the website, the domain and the hosting if I change supplier?

You should own all three, and it is worth checking now rather than at the point you want to leave.

The domain name should be registered in your company’s name, with your own contact details on it. Not your developer’s name, not their agency’s, and not “care of” anybody. This is the one that causes real damage when it is wrong, because you depend on your domain for email as well as your website.

The website itself, meaning the design, the content and any code written specifically for you, should be yours once the invoices are paid. Software that sits underneath it may not be, and that is normal: a commercial plugin or theme is licensed rather than owned, and the licence should still be in your name so it can be renewed without going through anybody.

The hosting should be an account you could take over, on a service you could log into. If your site lives inside a reseller account belonging to your supplier, moving means a migration rather than a handover.

If any of that is currently wrong, it can be corrected while everybody is still on good terms, which is a great deal easier than correcting it afterwards. We keep our clients’ domains and licences in their own names for this reason, having picked up rather too many businesses whose previous supplier held the domain and then disappeared with it.

How do I take over a website that nobody has maintained for years?

Start by finding out as much as possible about how it was put together, because an old site is usually not documented and the first job is working out what you have inherited.

Establish what platform or framework it was built on (including the version number, if applicable), where it is hosted, who pays for the hosting, where the domain is registered, who has access to it, and whether there are backups. A neglected site frequently has accounts belonging to people who left years ago, which is worth clearing up early. If there is no documentation, start writing things down in a secure location.

Then take a full backup before touching anything, and save it somewhere other than the server the site is on.

After that, look into any security issues because an unpatched site exposes you and your business to a number of risks (legal, financial and reputational); then anything actually broken. Then tackle any content that is wrong or out of date, like prices, opening hours and people who have left. Redesign, if it needs one, comes last and will be better if you take your time.

Learn where the error logs are kept on the server. They can be very useful because updating an old site might break something and the error logs will tell you what went wrong. If the site has been moribund for a few years, a breakage is more of a probability than a possibility, but it is easier to deal with the screen going ominously white when there is a backup ready and the worst case scenario is to start again.