A company website is where someone who does not yet know your business forms their first impression. Before a buyer asks for a quote, a customer books an appointment or a candidate applies, they look at your site. In this guide we cover the building blocks of a good company website and the planning decisions that save time later.
Start with the goal and the audience
Before design, be clear about what the site is for. For a manufacturer, the main goal might be quote requests from distributors and wholesale buyers; for a beauty centre, appointments; for a restaurant, reservations. Once the goal is clear, the home page structure, the menu order and the calls to action on each page fall into place.
Define your audience as concretely as you can. Who will visit, what are they curious about, and what do they need to decide? Writing the answers on a single page also shortens internal debates throughout the project.
Pages a company website should have
Every business is different, but most sites include these pages:
- Home page: Says what you do in one short, clear sentence on the first screen and guides visitors to the right page.
- About us: The company's story, team and way of working.
- Services or products: A separate page for each service or product group is clearer for visitors and search engines alike.
- References: Trust is built by real work, not bold claims.
- Blog: The most natural way to answer your customers' common questions and be visible in search.
- Contact: Address, phone, map, opening hours and a contact form.
- Legal pages: A privacy notice and a cookie policy.
Speed, mobile-friendliness and accessibility
Many of your visitors will arrive on a phone. So rather than approving the desktop design and thinking about mobile afterwards, plan both views together. On mobile, the menu should open easily, buttons should be easy to tap and the phone number should be callable with one tap.
Speed can affect both user experience and search visibility. On a slow page, visitors leave before they see the content. The steps that usually help most when speeding up a company website are:
- Serving images at their display size and in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF.
- Removing unused scripts and heavy plugins.
- Loading only the font weights you use.
- Configuring caching and compression correctly on the server.
Measure regularly with Google's PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. If you are unsure whether you need a mobile-friendly site or a separate app, our article mobile app or mobile-friendly website? can help.
Accessibility means everyone can use the site, including people with visual, hearing or motor impairments. Sufficient colour contrast, descriptive alt text on images, keyboard-friendly menus and labelled form fields are the basics. The international WCAG guidelines are a good reference.
The content management panel
A company website is not finished on launch day. You should not need a developer every time you add a product, change a phone number, announce a trade fair or add a reference. A good content panel lets you do this without technical knowledge.
When choosing a panel, look for answers to these questions:
- Is adding text, images and pages simple and easy to understand?
- Can you edit the SEO title, description and URL of each piece of content?
- Can you set user permissions, and is there a record of who changed what?
- Are uploaded images resized automatically?
A multilingual structure
For companies that sell abroad or welcome international visitors, a second language is often essential. On a multilingual company website, each language needs its own address; for example, your main language at the root and English pages under /en/. Hreflang tags tell search engines which pages are language versions of each other.
Do not leave translation to automatic tools. The English text should be an adaptation written for English readers, not a word-for-word translation. Prepare the SEO title and description separately for each language, based on what people actually search for in it.
Build the SEO foundations from the start
Search engine optimisation is not decoration added after launch; it is built with the site's structure. Changing URLs or merging pages later can cost you visibility you have already earned. Ask for these foundations from the start of your company website project:
- A unique title and description for every page.
- Short, readable URLs that describe the page's topic.
- An auto-updated sitemap (sitemap.xml) and a correctly configured robots.txt file.
- One main heading per page and a logical order of subheadings.
- Structured data that tells search engines about your organisation.
- If you are replacing an old site, permanent (301) redirects from old addresses to their new equivalents.
After launch, add your site to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap. We cover content and measurement in our article what is SEO and how does it work.
Security and legal obligations
SSL, updates and backups
Browsers show a "Not secure" warning on sites without HTTPS, which can easily put off a visitor about to fill in a form. Every page of a company website should open over HTTPS with an SSL certificate that renews automatically before it expires.
Security is not a one-off setting. Updates are released regularly for your software, libraries and server components, and they need applying on time. Use strong passwords and two-step verification for panel logins, and back up the site and database regularly. More on post-launch work in our website maintenance article.
Privacy notices and cookie consent
If your contact form collects names, email addresses or phone numbers, you are processing personal data. Under data protection law (such as GDPR in the EU or KVKK in Turkey), you will usually need a privacy notice explaining why the data is processed, linked next to the form.
You are also generally expected to ask for consent before using analytics and advertising cookies. A good cookie banner makes rejecting as easy as accepting and runs no such cookies until consent is given. If you want to send marketing emails or text messages, add a separate, optional consent box to the form. The rules depend on your market, so check the wording of these texts with a legal adviser.
A final check before launch
Before announcing the site, go through this list with your team:
- Have all forms been tested, and do messages reach the right address?
- Has the site been tried on phones, tablets and different browsers?
- Are any broken links or missing images left?
- Are Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console set up?
- Are the legal pages live, and do their links work?
- Are the domain, hosting and panel access in your company's name?
A good company website is like an office that speaks for you and is open every day. With the right planning, design and development run far more smoothly. If you would like to plan your own project, take a look at our corporate website service and send us your questions through our contact page.