The parts of a website people notice

Most small business sites are not held back by their design. They are held back by weight, by markup that screen readers cannot follow, and by hosting nobody has looked at since launch.

Weight is a design decision

A hero image exported straight out of a design tool can be several megabytes. The same image, resized to the width it is actually displayed at and saved as WebP or AVIF, is usually a small fraction of that with no visible difference. Nothing else on a typical brochure site moves the needle as much.

Accessible markup is cheap at the start

Headings in order, labels tied to their inputs, real buttons instead of clickable divs — these cost nothing while a site is being built and are tedious to retrofit afterwards.

Boring hosting is good hosting

For a site whose content changes a few times a year, a static host with a CDN in front is faster, cheaper and less exposed than a database-backed stack that needs patching.

• SpeedImages, fonts and third-party scripts — the three things that make small business sites slow.
• AccessibilityContrast, keyboard navigation, alt text and form labels — the practical checks that catch most problems.
• HostingStatic hosting, managed platforms and self-managed servers compared for sites that rarely change.
• AboutNotes on building and running small websites.