HOW TO SET UP A KILLER WEBSITE IN 2022
Nik Rawlinson has been creating websites for almost two decades. Here, he shares advice on how to get started, from registering a domain to climbing the Google rankings
T he process of setting up a website hasn’t greatly changed over the past ten years. At its most basic, it requires web space and code. It’s becoming less common for broadband providers to bundle a small amount of web space, so third-party hosting is usually required and, on that basis, so is a domain.
If you’re just getting started yourself, sorting out these latter two requirements is where you should spend the most time. Hosting prices run from free to tens or even hundreds of pounds a month, depending on a range of features: think capacity, transfer caps, speed and contention. Domain prices, too, vary enormously, with first- year prices ranging from 99p for pcpro.org.uk to £115 for pcpro.guitars and £5,040 for pcpro.th.
Rreesgigisntaratitoionn?… or
You might think all the best domains have been taken. But don’t resign yourself to settling for something obscure. The range of generic top level domains (gTLDs) is growing, and extensions such as .art, .vip, .online and .site have increased the number of potential second-level domains sitting below them exponentially.
They don’t have the instant recognition of longer-established TLDs of .co.uk and .com, but that’s becoming less important. Most traffic is now organic, coming from search engines and social media, rather than direct from a typed web address. So, unless you’re planning on putting your domain on your van or business card, the content is almost certainly more important than its address.
“People don’t tend to be typing in a web address,” said Daniel Foster, managgingg director of Manchesterbased host 34sp ( 34sp.com). “Normally they Google for something, and so long as Google has found your site, found it to be relevant and moved it up the search rankings, then that’s what really matters. Google doesn’t really care what your domain name is.”
But, depending on context, you might not want to overlook it entirely. While you might be able to register your domain with a .istanbul, .email or .fitness extension, the disconnect may be sufficient to send potential customers back to their preferred search engine if your business doesn’t relate specifically to those areas, services or interests. In such cases, a less relevant name in a generic TLD may be more appropriate. After all, Amazon does very well on a domain that doesn’t relate specifically to its retail operations, entertainment services or cloud computing division.
“With more obscure TLDs, you might have a slight recognition problem,” Stuart Birchall, director of Zen Internet ( zen.co.uk), confirmed. “But generally, the shorter and less convoluted the name, the better.”
Some domains are restricted to qualified buyers. If you want to pick up a .ltd.uk, you’ll only be able to
register it if the domain matches your official Companies House registration (see section 11, “Specific rules for the .ltd.uk and .plc.uk SLDs”, at pcpro.
link/329ltd). Similarly, since the UK left the EU, .eu domains held by
British organisations and people with no connection to the remaining 27 member states are being reclaimed (see pcpro.link/329eu).
Some other domains can be registered for specific reasons, such as .scot, although the degree to which such conditions are applied varies greatly. According to the official guidance ( pcpro.link/329scot),
“anyone is eligible for a .scot domain if they identify as Scottish or have an affinity for Scotland”. This is fairly broad, but you may be asked to explain why you require a domain within that TLD (as we know from our own experience).
If you’re unsure whether you’re eligible to register within a specific domain space, check with the TLD administrator. Often this can be found by adding the TLD to nic (short for Network Information Centre). For example, if you type nic.scot then you’ll be redirected to a site that provides guidance on registering domains with that TLD. Likewise, nic.com or nic.gg. For the rules governing EU domains, check eurid.eu.
In most cases, the NIC will link to third-party registrars, rather than allowing you to register directly, and here there’s another consideration: whether to take advantage of first-year discounts at one registrar and host elsewhere, or to buy your domain and connectivity from the same supplier.
Birchall sees benefits to the latter approach. “From a convenience point of view, you’ve just one bill and you’ll have a provider often giving you things like auto setup so that your hosting is linked to the domain name... often in the same control panel, so you can get the benefits of having the integration without necessarily worrying too much about piecing that together yourself.”
Foster has “no problem with people not wanting to put all their eggs in one basket. Plenty of people do [and] because of everything working in sort of a standard way, there’s no problem doing so.” But he also points out that by handling the two through the same supplier there’s the added benefit of a single point of contact in the event you have problems. Content management
While it was once the case that only the largest sites would require a content management system (CMS), it’s now more difficult to justify not going down that route. Even singlepage landing sites benefit from the simple setup and maintenance of a site running Joomla, Drupal and, in particular, WordPress. The latter now underpins almost 40% of the web.
There are several reasons for WordPress’s popularity. One is its maturity; another its familiarity to a
large proportion of the developer community. Being widely deployed means it’s well supported and, for anyone getting started, it’s easy to get help from an active user community.
While it’s possible to download and install WordPress manually, many hosts have distilled the installation and update process into one-click operations as part of their hosting package control panels, which greatly simplifies deployment and the ongoing task of maintaining a secure installation. Or you may prefer to go direct to wordpress.com and order one of its packages.
“[WordPress] doesn’t have many bugs,” said 34sp’s Foster. “All those sorts of things were ironed out years ago [and even] the likes of News International use WordPress for some of their larger websites.”
While it’s been providing “regular” hosting for more than 20 years, 34sp has latterly carved a niche for itself as a specialist provider of WordPress hosting packages, using a control panel it developed in-house to simplify the user experience.
“As a company, we know and understand WordPress... we’ve put effort into making hosting packages that are built to run WordPress, so they’ll always be updated and secure, and run quickly and efficiently. That obviously provides a better experience for people using your website.”
But the front end, while important, is only half of the story. While you might interact with the hosting account dashboard less often than you would with a CMS editing screen, you need to be sure it’s going to give you access to the features you require. Where hosts don’t roll their own solution, they’ll frequently deploy cPanel or Plesk, which, like WordPress itself, are well documented, well supported and well understood, with plenty of help to be found online.
It’s not all that important which dashboard your chosen host has deployed, says Foster, since any hosting company is going to provide the same functionality. The dashboard, at the end of the day, is just a way to access and tweak the associated controls. “The only reason to prefer one over another is if you’ve got experience already... but otherwise they’re much of a muchness.”
Nonetheless, it’s worth checking with your preferred host what controls they expose. Do they, for example, allow you to update PHP, Python and your preferred CMS on your own schedule and, if not, what’s their in-house upgrade policy? Do they wait for versions to bed in, or deploy bleeding-edge code?
Depending on the size and spread of your audience, it’s also worth considering whether using a content delivery network (CDN) would pay dividends. These provide resilience by duplicating your assets across multiple data centres and, since these are geographically diverse, you have the added benefit of fractionally better response times, as visitors should always receive content from the centre best placed to serve them.
“If your audience is very wide and spread around the world, it can make sense to use a CDN... particularly if your site is static asset heavy,” said Foster. “So, if you’re serving a lot of images, JavaScript files and other things that don’t change, then the CDN can make a lot of sense. A CDN can be a good way of mitigating bandwidth bills, but in terms of user experience it gives the best impact – particularly if your users are spread around the world.”
It’s not for everyone, though. “If you’re running a special interest website serving a particular community, and you may expect to have several hundred visits a day at most, then a CDN isn’t really going to give you a great deal of advantage,” said Zen Internet’s Birchall. “CDNs do offer some security benefits, in terms of being able to handle certain types of denial-of-service events, or offering some additional security services, but generally, you need to be getting up into the higher echelons of performance [before] CDNs start to come into play.”
Deploying a CDN needn’t be difficult. If you’re building your site using WordPress, Cloudflare has a dedicated plugin ( pcpro.link/
329cloudflare), while Automattic, which oversees WordPress’s ongoing development, offers CDN features through its Jetpack plugin
( pcpro.link/329cdn). Climb up the rankings
Beyond price, one of the primary differentiators will be support – and where it’s provided. Is it local and, if not, does it keep UK hours? What about out-of-hours support for sites that serve a global audience? Saving money by opting for a package with community support and no servicelevel agreement might be a practical option for a hobby site but, for an ecommerce operation, any extended downtime that results could end up costing more than that initial saving.
What’s more, there’s a location consideration on the data front, too.
If your data resides in the same country as the majority of your users, it may result in slightly better performance, as it will perform fewer hops on its journey from server to browser. This could even impact your search position. Google’s summer 2021 page experience update ( pcpro.link/329page) outlined that developers should aim to have the main part of each page (the Largest
Contentful Paint in Google terms) be ready within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load. Naturally, smarter coding can help here – and so can moving bulky payloads, such as style sheet and JavaScript calls into the footer – but server load and location will play a part.
There’s only so much you can achieve on the technical front, however. Although Google doesn’t reveal the specifics of its ranking mechanism for content, providing something relevant, non-spammy and clearly structured, with captioned pictures (use ALT tags) and headings that incorporate keywords helps.
“All that matters is that your content is relevant to your users,” said Foster. “Google will see that people are clicking on it and staying on your site, and it will understand that your content is good. So, it will rise up in the rankings.”
Frequently, businesses will outsource content creation to marketing specialists, who make it their business to keep on top of SEO strategy updates, and what does and doesn’t work. Those that also offer web design services can go one step further, and act as an intermediary for their clients, buying reseller accounts from their preferred host and reselling capacity at a mark-up. This simplifies matters for the client and allows the developer to offer an all-in-one package, which could attract more business and, while it makes them the first point of call when things go wrong, they’re not necessarily on their own.
Zen Internet’s reseller package presents clients and their end users with broadly similar dashboards, based on cPanel, with several additional controls exposed to the reseller themselves. “That lets you set quotas and packages that the user can install,” explained Birchall. “But that user can still get end user support from Zen as they require it. It depends on the relationship you want to have. If you want to be the focal point for your customer, then you just need to get up to speed on how that functionality works.”
If you want to go down this route, it’s important to check, therefore, the level of support that the end user can get, and whether it’s by phone, email or knowledge base articles.
“The other thing to consider is the housekeeping of the platform,” Birchall said, before going on to mention data protection, backup regimes and service level agreements.
“Another is noisy neighbour syndrome. So, if you’re in a shared environment, you want some understanding of the ratio – the number of other users that are on that platform, how it’s designed to scale and the level of performance you can expect... Obviously, if it’s [a budget hosting package] it might be a heavily loaded, highly contended platform... so ask questions about the ratios, the functionality you need, and the level of access that you need into the stack to be able to configure things.”
Each of these should be a consideration for non-reseller customers, too, whoever the host, and Birchall also stresses the importance of clients maintaining
their own backups, not simply relying on the host to do it for them. Go host
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: it’s never been easier to create your own website. As we explain above, it’s even possible to host it yourself. If that sounds like too much hassle, then buying commercial hosting packages is as cheap as ever. Even more important than price is ease of use: not just in deployment, thanks to WordPress-specific bundles from
ISPs, for example, but in how simple modern content management systems such as WordPress are to use.
Getting the perfect domain remains an issue, even with the roll-out of a raft of new gTLDs, but the scarcity of memorable short names has been ameliorated by the rise of social and search as the primary route through which people arrive at a site.
If you’ve not already set up your own home on the web, there really are fewer reasons than ever to continue putting it off – aside from having nothing to say.