In my 10+ years of building websites, I know that understanding the entire lifecycle of website design and management can help small business owners choose the right approach, budget properly, and optimize their online presence.
This post will cover the key tasks involved with website design and management for small businesses, some of the best tools to help you create your website, and some common mistakes to avoid. By the end, you’ll walk away with a decision framework that’ll make your choice easy.
Table of Contents
- Best Website Design Tools and Services for Small Business
- What does website design and management include?
- Website Design and Management Mistakes Small Businesses Often Make
- Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business Website Design and Management
HubSpot's Free Website Builder
Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.
- Build a website without any coding skills.
- Pre-built themes and templates.
- Built-in marketing tools and features.
- And more!
What does website design and management include?
Small business website design and management includes planning, implementation, maintenance, and continuous improvement. Understanding everything that goes into the process is essential for small businesses to decide whether to build their own websites or hire an agency.
Planning (Design and Information Architecture)
Before small businesses can move into actually creating a website, the website design cycle starts with planning.
Proper planning for a website includes setting a budget, developing user personas, structuring the information architecture, creating the UI/UX design, and building mockups and wireframes. These tasks are essential for building the foundation for the rest of the website design and implementation process.
Included tasks and outcomes:
- Set a budget, as this will dictate how to approach implementing the website. For example, using a small business website builder or hiring an agency.
- Create user personas for the people who will use the website, including the desired user experience for these personas.
- Create the information architecture to plan website structure, navigation, and content hierarchy. For a small business brochure website with a few pages, this might not matter much. However, it's essential for larger websites with more content.
- Plan the basic design of the website using wireframes or mockups. Wireframing tools can help small businesses create simple designs.
In my experience, the planning phase is one of the most important parts of creating a website, but it's also something that many people choose not to spend a lot of time on. This problem is exacerbated further by the rise of small business-friendly website builders, as these tools allow small business owners to jump straight into creating a website without any prep work.
I use and recommend website builders to small businesses, but a website builder cannot replace planning your website‘s user personas, design, and information architecture in advance. If you put in the work to get these things right before you start building, you’ll end up with a much better finished product.
Implementation (Website Setup and Content Creation)
The website implementation phase covers all of the tasks related to making a working website. These tasks include writing content as well as building the website, whether that's using a small business website builder or hiring a developer/agency to create a custom solution.
Included tasks and outcomes:
- Write all the content for the website, including important website pages such as the homepage, about page, contact page, etc. Small businesses can save time by using AI writing tools for assistance.
- Build the website. Rather than coding from scratch, small business owners can use no-code website builders. HubSpot Content Hub makes it easy for marketers to build a website using templates and a drag-and-drop editor.
- Create images by hiring a designer or using AI image creation tools.
In my experience, while some business owners might find the implementation process to be intimidating, I actually think it‘s one of the easier parts of the process, as long as you’ve done the planning! Planning a website is hard – but once you've done the work, most website builders make it easy to translate your ideas into a working website.
Day-to-Day Management and Maintenance
Post-launch, it's essential for small business owners to manage and maintain their websites to avoid problems. Key small business website maintenance tasks include software updates, backups, performance and uptime monitoring, and content updates.
Included tasks and outcomes:
- Promptly apply software updates to avoid problems with security and compatibility. Hosted website builders like HubSpot Content Hub handle updates for you, making it a great choice for small businesses that don’t have the resources to handle website maintenance.
- Create regular backups to ensure data integrity.
- Monitor website performance and uptime. Automated monitoring tools can save small businesses time and send alerts if there are problems.
- Update website content to ensure basic accuracy and relevance.
- Test key website functionality, such as lead generation forms or checkouts.
- Check for broken links, including internal links and external links.
In my experience, it's essential to create a clear, structured plan for website maintenance, instead of leaving it up to chance. Small businesses should assign a key stakeholder for these tasks to ensure they get done. Clear governance prevents ownership gaps and ensures key tasks are performed on time.
If you want to avoid as much maintenance as possible, I recommend using a hosted website builder like HubSpot Content Hub instead of a self-hosted tool like WordPress. Hosted website builders will handle key tasks such as software updates and backups so that you and your team can focus on other parts of running your small business.
Continuous Improvement
To get the best results, small businesses should view their website as a tool that can be continuously improved, rather than a finished product. Having this perspective can help small businesses find ways to improve user experience, revenue, and other business metrics.
Small businesses can find ways to improve their websites by monitoring analytics, updating content, improving search engine optimization (SEO), and optimizing conversion rates.
Included tasks and outcomes:
- Monitor website analytics to discover areas that are working well and areas that could be improved.
- Improve the website's search engine optimization (SEO) to increase its findability in search engines like Google. Optimizing for search engines can include updating existing content to follow best practices and adding new content to target new search terms.
- Optimize the website's conversion rates to improve business metrics, such as revenue and leads. Small businesses can optimize for conversion rates by adjusting copywriting, making small design changes, and running A/B tests.
In my experience, this emphasis on continuous improvement is something that a lot of small businesses lack. However, it‘s worth putting in the time to test new content and design ideas, as you might find an improvement that provides a meaningful boost to your business’s bottom line (or at least just creates a better experience for your customers).
Best Website Design Tools and Services for Small Business
Small business owners can create a website by leveraging tools for small business website design and management or by hiring an outside agency.
Hiring an outside agency will require a larger budget, as most web agencies charge thousands of dollars for even simple small business brochure websites.
By using a website builder, small businesses can reduce the costs of building and managing a website. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for an outside agency, they can use a website builder to create a website for under $30 per month.
Here are five of the best website design tools and services for small business owners:
HubSpot Content Hub
HubSpot Content Hub offers a maintenance-free hosted website, drag-and-drop builder, and built-in lead generation tools, all essential features for a small business website.
Small business owners can create a unique website by customizing pre-made themes or using HubSpot's AI website generator. Then, they can customize everything using HubSpot's drag-and-drop builder, including tools to customize both the desktop and mobile design of the site.
HubSpot Features
Hands-Off Website Maintenance
Content Hub is a hosted website builder, which means that small business owners do not need to manage software updates, backups, and other basic maintenance tasks.
Instead, the HubSpot Content Hub platform automatically handles all of those tasks, which lets small business owners focus on attracting business and delivering excellent customer experiences.
Built-In Lead Generation Features
HubSpot Content Hub helps small businesses generate more leads with a custom form builder, built-in customer relationship management (CRM) platform, content personalization, and more.
Unlike most other small business website builders, HubSpot Content Hub offers a built-in integration with the free HubSpot CRM. Thanks to this integration, it’s able to automatically save customers' information to the CRM and track other important metrics, such as website activity and interactions.
Tools for SEO and Marketing
HubSpot Content Hub helps small business owners reach more customers with built-in tools for marketing and SEO.
Small businesses can access tools to optimize for search engines, including small business SEO best practices, proactive SEO suggestions, local SEO, and more. In addition to SEO, Content Hub includes built-in tools for email marketing, customer live chat, and content personalization.
Small business owners can also more efficiently create content with Content Hub's built-in AI content tools, including tools to write short or long-form content, generate images, and even create podcast episodes.
With its built-in SEO tools and content creation assistance, HubSpot Content Hub is one of the best content management systems for SEO.
HubSpot's Free Website Builder
Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.
- Build a website without any coding skills.
- Pre-built themes and templates.
- Built-in marketing tools and features.
- And more!
HubSpot Pricing
HubSpot Content Hub has a free plan that lets small business owners create a custom website with up to 30 pages.
To expand beyond that and access more advanced features, Content Hub's paid plans start at just $9 per month.
What I Like About HubSpot
HubSpot shines as a unified customer platform. That means that instead of being a standalone website builder, its Content Hub is connected to all the tools you need to manage and grow your business, including a CRM and sales and marketing tools. This helps you gain insight into what’s actually driving revenue from your website. For marketing teams, it’s the ultimate platform.
However, for developer-centric businesses seeking the most flexibility, a hosted CMS like Content Hub might not be the best choice. While HubSpot is developer-friendly and offers extensive API documentation and serverless functions, it doesn’t expose the entire codebase in the same way an open-source CMS like WordPress (which we’ll talk about next) does.
WordPress
WordPress is a popular open-source content management system that can help small business owners create all kinds of websites, including simple brochure websites or more advanced implementations with ecommerce or booking functionality.
WordPress is self-hosted software, which means that small businesses will need to purchase their own web hosting, install the WordPress software, and then perform updates themselves. Small business owners can then extend the core software with themes (for design) and plugins (for adding functionality).
For small businesses that don't want to handle things themselves, there are also website design services for WordPress that can do the work (for an extra fee, of course). One example is WordPress.com's website design service, which handles both website design and management.
WordPress Features
- Self-hosted and open-source content management system (CMS).
- Thousands of pre-made themes to choose from, including designs for pretty much any small business niche.
- 60,000+ free and premium plugins to add features and integrations.
- Option for visual, drag-and-drop design (by installing a page builder plugin like Elementor).
- Many marketing and lead generation plugins. For example, the HubSpot WordPress plugin helps small businesses integrate WordPress with the HubSpot CRM.
- Option to add booking or ecommerce features, including adding them at a later date without needing to rebuild the website.
WordPress Pricing
While the open-source WordPress software itself is free to use, there are some unavoidable costs related to creating a small business website with WordPress. The costs of running a WordPress website include hosting, plugins, themes, and any required custom development work.
Of these costs, web hosting is the only one that's unavoidable. While budget hosts do start at $5-$10 per month, a more realistic budget for a small business website is in the $20-$30 per month range for quality WordPress hosting.
A premium WordPress theme usually costs around $60, and a realistic plugin budget for a small business is usually in the range of $100-$200+ per year.
What I Like About WordPress
My favorite thing about WordPress is its flexibility. With its massive library of plugins, you can find a pre-made solution to add pretty much any feature or integration imaginable. When you combine this with the fact that WordPress is open-source and self-hosted, you get one of the most flexible website builders for small businesses.
However, the downside is that WordPress has a larger learning curve than HubSpot Content Hub and other hosted website builders. Small businesses will also have to take on more maintenance tasks with WordPress, so WordPress is not a good option for small businesses that don't want to handle regular maintenance tasks.
Wix
Wix is a hosted website builder that can help small businesses create both brochure websites and ecommerce stores. Because it can do both, it could be an option for small businesses that might want to add ecommerce functionality at some point in the future.
Small businesses can choose from 900+ pre-made templates or create a unique design using Wix's AI website builder tool.
Wix offers built-in functionality for many key features that small businesses need, along with installable apps for additional functionality and integration.
Wix Features
- Hosted website builder tool.
- Create a website using 900+ premade templates or Wix's AI website builder.
- Visual, drag-and-drop design experience.
- 500+ official and third-party apps to extend websites.
- Form builder tool, including integrations with the HubSpot CRM.
- Appointment booking and scheduling functionality.
- Ecommerce and invoicing tools to accept payments.
- Basic SEO tools, with third-party apps for more advanced functionality.
Wix Pricing
While Wix does have a limited free plan and some cheap entry-level plans, most small businesses will want to go with at least the Business plan, which costs $39 per month. The Business plan offers more marketing tools and higher storage limits, along with other benefits over cheaper plans.
For more advanced features, prices can go up to $159 per month for the Business Elite plan.
What I Like About Wix
In my experience, Wix is one of the most flexible hosted website builders, being able to do at least a little bit of everything. I often call it a jack of all trades in the website builder space.
However, I do also find some drawbacks in this broad scope, as I personally find the Wix interface to be a little cluttered and overwhelming. For a small business owner who has never built a website before, this could lead to a slightly higher learning curve and complexity.
Squarespace
Squarespace is another hosted website builder tool that has a similar approach to Wix, offering support for both brochure websites and ecommerce stores. However, it offers a simpler, more minimal approach in many aspects, which can work well for small businesses with simple needs.
Squarespace offers pre-made templates for many small business use cases, along with a custom AI website builder.
It offers built-in support for many key small business features, but very limited third-party extension availability. Squarespace‘s relative lack of third-party extensions can make it difficult for small businesses to expand beyond Squarespace’s built-in functionality.
Squarespace Features
- Hosted website builder tool.
- Create a website using premade templates or Squarespace's AI website builder.
- 100% free-form drag-and-drop design.
- Ecommerce and invoicing tools to accept payments.
- Appointment booking and scheduling functionality.
- Some marketing tools, including the ability to send email marketing campaigns.
- User account system for memberships and restricted content.
- Essential SEO tools for basic on-page optimization.
- Small extension marketplace to integrate with some third-party tools.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace's prices start at $25 per month for the Basic plan. However, most small businesses should purchase the $56 per month Core plan for more storage, marketing tools, integrations, and other useful add-ons.
What I Like About Squarespace
What I like about Squarespace is kind of the opposite of Wix. Whereas Wix tries to pack tons of features and tools into seemingly every interface, Squarespace keeps every backend dashboard area very clean and minimal. I find this minimal approach makes for a very easy website-building process, and I would say Squarespace has a lower learning curve than a tool like Wix.
However, the tradeoff is that Squarespace has more of an Apple-like “walled garden” approach to its ecosystem. For example, Squarespace only recently allowed third-party apps, and even now the selection is quite limited. This gives you a lot less flexibility than more extensible platforms like HubSpot Content Hub, WordPress, and Wix.
Shopify
Shopify can be a good option for small business websites that need robust ecommerce functionality. Whereas all of the previous tools work for any type of website, Shopify is specifically a tool for building an ecommerce store.
For small businesses where ecommerce is the primary function of their websites, Shopify can be a good option. However, if ecommerce is not the main focus of the website (or if the website doesn't need any ecommerce functionality), small business owners should consider one of the previous tools instead.
Shopify Features
- Hosted ecommerce platform.
- Hundreds of customizable themes for various niches.
- Supports physical and digital products, as well as services.
- Limited support for blogging and content pages (but not its main focus).
- Large selection of free and paid third-party apps.
- SEO and marketing tools, available via core features or installable apps.
- Support for local payments and selling, which can be useful for small businesses that want to sell online in addition to in-person.
- Built-in sales reports and analytics.
Shopify Pricing
Shopify's ecommerce plans start at $39 per month for the Basic plan. However, small businesses that are serious about selling online should go with the $105 per month Grow plan or the $399 per month Advanced plan, as these plans offer lower payment processing fees, shipping discounts, and some other perks.
What I Like About Shopify
In my experience, Shopify is one of the best tools to make a full-featured ecommerce store. It includes all of the features that small business stores need, and the fact that it‘s a hosted tool means that you don’t need to worry about maintenance or security, which I think can be extra beneficial for ecommerce stores.
However, if ecommerce is not important to your small business, I definitely recommend using a different website design tool.
HubSpot's Free Website Builder
Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.
- Build a website without any coding skills.
- Pre-built themes and templates.
- Built-in marketing tools and features.
- And more!
Website Design and Management Mistakes Small Businesses Often Make
Common website design and management mistakes made by small businesses include not optimizing for mobile visitors, missing or weak calls-to-action (CTAs), confusing information architecture and/or navigation, improper website maintenance, and weak local SEO signals.
Not Optimizing for Mobile Visitors
Despite mobile visitors accounting for more than two-thirds of all traffic according to Similarweb's September 2025 data, many small business owners focus on the desktop user experience when designing their websites.
While desktop user experience is certainly important, mobile user experience should be the primary focus when designing and launching a small business website. Failing to optimize for mobile devices could lead to a subpar experience for the majority of a website's visitors.
To avoid this mistake, I recommend focusing on mobile user experience from the very beginning of your website design planning process. It‘s not just about high-level design, either. In my experience, it’s also essential to consider smaller details, such as the location of call-to-action buttons, the navigation menu experience, where the text of the hero section cuts off for mobile visitors, etc.
Once you have a working version of the website, I recommend testing that site from your own smartphone. While Chrome's Developer Tools and cross-platform testing tools like BrowserStack can be useful, I think testing from an actual physical device is still the best way to understand what the mobile user experience will be like.
Many website builders include a mobile preview alongside their desktop preview within their dashboards, so you can check how your website will look before you hit publish.
Missing or Weak Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
Strong CTAs are an essential part of creating a small business website that generates leads and drives customer action. However, many small businesses focus more on creating a website that “looks good” rather than creating a website that achieves business goals.
Without a clear CTA, customers will be less likely to perform key actions, whether that‘s submitting a lead generation form, booking an appointment, calling a business, making a purchase, etc. These problems will lower the website’s conversion rates and increase the chance of customers leaving without performing an action.
In my experience, each page on a small business website should have one key action that you want customers to perform. I think it's fine to include secondary goals as well, but these should always take the backseat to the primary action that you want customers to perform.
Here's an example from a local plumbing service, which includes multiple “Request Service” CTAs:
To make sure each page accomplishes its goal, I recommend doing the following:
- Place clear CTAs above the fold on key pages. I'll show you an example below.
- Use action-oriented language (“Book a Massage,” “Get a Free Quote”). I also think that it's valuable to experiment with different messages to find what works best.
- Track CTA performance using analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you're using HubSpot Content Hub, it can track CTA performance for you.
Confusing Information Architecture and/or Navigation
Small business websites without a clear information architecture and navigation structure make it difficult for customers to find the content that they‘re interested in. If visitors can’t find what they‘re looking for, they’re likely to leave the website. It really is that simple.
If visitors leave before finding what they want, it will negatively impact the website's bounce rate and time on site, as well as negatively impact revenue because of lower conversion rates.
In my experience, the information architecture and navigation structure of a small business website is something that you need to plan out before you ever start actually designing and implementing the website.
Beyond addressing this potential mistake early in the design process, I also recommend the following to ensure that your website is easy to navigate:
- Use clear, descriptive menu labels (“Menu,” “About,” “Contact”) instead of vague terms. Try to keep them as short as possible, too.
- Keep navigation to one or two levels deep. If content is hidden beyond three clicks, it's going to be very difficult for visitors to find.
- If you have a large site with lots of content, include a visible search form to give visitors one last chance to find what they're looking for.
Improper Website Maintenance
Website maintenance is an essential part of managing a website, especially for small businesses that use self-hosted website design software like WordPress. Proper website maintenance can include technical tasks such as updating software and security protections, as well as non-technical tasks such as updating content and testing important functionality.
Despite the importance of website maintenance, many small businesses neglect (or even completely ignore) many maintenance tasks. Without proper maintenance, websites can have security issues, broken functionality, broken links, and out-of-date content.
At best, these problems can create a poor user experience for customers. In worst-case situations, such as a security incident, improper website maintenance can severely damage a small business's reputation and lower trust with customers.
I‘ve seen far too many websites that have dozens of software update notifications, no recent backups, and out-of-date content. These issues not only open up your site to being hacked by malicious actors, but they can also cause compatibility problems or just generally create a poor experience for your website’s visitors.
If you don't want to deal with website maintenance, I recommend choosing a hosted website builder tool such as HubSpot Content Hub. I like these tools for “hands off” website owners because they maintain the underlying software for you, including important tasks such as software updates, backups, security rules, and more.
Weak Local SEO Signals
For small businesses operating in specific geographic areas, it's essential to include local SEO signals on the website. Local SEO signals include local schema markup/structured data, Google Business Profile (GBP) integration, consistency in NAP information (name, address, phone number), and service-area pages.
Small business websites that are missing these signals could fail to rank for valuable local search queries, which is how consumers often find businesses. Ninety-nine percent of shoppers surveyed by BrightLocal had used the internet in the past year to get information about a local business.
If you want to maximize the return on investment of your small business website, I think it's essential to avoid this mistake and make sure that your website includes all the important local SEO signals. In my experience, these are some of the most valuable keywords that you can rank for, even if the individual search volume of each keyword is small.
Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business Website Design and Management
How long does it take to launch a small business website?
How long it takes to launch a small business website depends on key factors such as feature complexity, content readiness, and project scope. If using pre-made templates from HubSpot Content Hub and prepared content, launching a small business website could take less than a week.
For more complex projects or projects lacking existing content or design styles, a more realistic launch timeline would be 3-6 weeks.
What ongoing website management tasks should I do monthly?
Small business website owners should make sure to update software and plugins, create a full site backup, check for broken links, monitor page load times and uptime, and review web analytics to track key metrics.
Can I switch from a website builder to a CRM-integrated stack later?
A small business can switch from a website builder to a CRM-integrated stack after launching a website, but it's much easier to plan for the right option from the beginning. Migrating a small business website to a CRM-integrated stack can include rebuilding key pages, moving content, and setting up URL redirects.
While the migration process might take some time for large and/or complex sites, this time is usually a one-time investment. Once the migration process is finished, there will be no extra ongoing work.
Do I need ecommerce for quotes and invoices?
Small businesses do not need a full ecommerce solution for quotes and invoices, especially because many website builders include built-in invoicing tools. For example, HubSpot Content Hub includes a built-in invoicing tool that small businesses can use for quotes and invoices without needing to set up more advanced ecommerce functionality. There are also many dedicated invoicing tools that small businesses can integrate into their website builders.
Small businesses can also add ecommerce features or booking features at a later time, without needing to rebuild the entire website.
How do I reduce website maintenance time if I’m a team of one?
Small businesses with limited resources should reduce website maintenance time by choosing a hosted website builder such as HubSpot Content Hub instead of using a self-hosted tool such as WordPress. HubSpot Content Hub reduces time spent on maintenance by automatically handling essential tasks such as software updates, security, performance optimization, backups, and other routine website maintenance tasks.
Small business owners can further reduce website maintenance time by automating as many processes as possible, such as backups, security scans, performance monitoring, etc.
Getting Started
Website design and management for small businesses is a lifecycle that includes planning, implementation, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
While small businesses can hire an outside agency to handle all of these tasks, this approach often leads to high upfront launch costs, along with expensive ongoing retainer fees for maintenance work.
Instead of hiring an outside agency, small business owners can use website builders like HubSpot Content Hub to reduce launch costs and minimize maintenance work going forward.
HubSpot Content Hub offers a drag-and-drop builder, comes with a built-in CRM and other marketing tools, and eliminates most monthly website maintenance tasks.
If you're interested in getting started with HubSpot Content Hub for your small business, you can create a website for free.
HubSpot's Free Website Builder
Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.
- Build a website without any coding skills.
- Pre-built themes and templates.
- Built-in marketing tools and features.
- And more!
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