How to Create a Website: The Ultimate Guide

In this guide, we'll walk you through each step of planning and designing your website. Along the way, you'll be introduced to some of our favorite website-building programs and resources, and we'll let you know what to pay particularly close attention to.

We've broken down the website creation process (and our guide) into three sections:

In the next few sections, we'll review each of these three phases step-by-step, letting you know how best to plan, create, and manage your website.

Having a good plan for your website won't only lead to a better result, but also optimize the entire process. Broadly speaking, there are three important questions to ask yourself: What do I need a website for? Which type of website is best for me/my project? What sort of budget do I/we have?

An excellent place to start is by identifying what you will use your website for. Everything else, from content to costs, depends on how you answer this simple question. Is the website for a private audience or a professional one? Are you designing it for yourself, your business, or your employer?

On EXPERTE.com, you'll find numerous guides for creating all sorts of websites:

Websites are a must for any business, however, there are differences between a multinational corporation's digital presence and that of a startup.

Whatever the case, a business website must be professional and adhere to certain standards. Our guide to creating a professional website introduces some of the best practices in terms of design, content, technology, and security.

Below, we've included several links to our business website guides:

A business website should feature certain branch-specific content and tools. Restaurant websites, for example, need an interactive menu, while those for medical practices should have a scheduling tool.

If you're a freelancer or self-employed, a website is even more important, since it not only allows potential clients and customers to find you online but also gives you a place to showcase your portfolio or work. Be sure to include testimonials and references from past clients that attest to your qualifications and abilities.

In our branch-specific guides below, you'll find plenty of tips and tricks for creating a range of business websites:

Whether you're applying to a competitive position or organizing your wedding: Some websites are designed for a very specific purpose or an event and have certain requirements.

Because wedding websites and other "purpose-built" sites are needed by those with no knowledge of programming or web design, there exist many beginner-friendly platforms for creating them. Website builders offer practical templates for a variety of event pages.

In case you need a "purpose-built" or event website, be sure to check out our guides for these:

Just as important as knowing what purpose your website should serve is having an idea about what kind of site it should be. Some projects are more complicated, which generally means that they require both more effort and a bigger budget. Broadly speaking, when it comes to website types, you can select from the following:

Practical considerations, such as the size of your budget, also play an important role in determining what sort of website you'll be able to create. While a small investment is necessary for any professional website, how much you actually pay depends largely on the method you select: If funds are unlimited, hire an expert or agency. On the other hand, taking a more hands-on approach will keep costs down.

Luckily, there are solutions for any budget these days. Completely free websites are possible., however, they're only suitable for private projects, and not corporate or business ones.

Should you have a basic idea of what you want your website to look like, it's time to decide how to make it. Broadly speaking, there are four options:

Let's take a closer look at each of these:

Beginners can skip to the next option since our first method is only for pros. To program a professional website on your own, you're going to need advanced HTML, CSS, and coding skills, as well as knowledge of everything else that goes along with a website. This includes technical aspects, design, security, and more.

The advantage of this approach is that you'll have complete freedom in terms of your website's design and features. Your skills (and budget) are the only two limitations since practically anything is possible.

Keep in mind that the amount of expertise needed to create a professional and functional website from the ground up is significant - chances are that if you're reading this guide, your skills aren't up to the task.

In case programming isn't your strong suit and you have the necessary budget, you can pay pros to create it for you. When taking this approach, you'll have a few different options:

Warning: On platforms like Upwork, you'll often find freelancers who are unbelievably affordable, charging just a few dollars per hour. While it's possible to get a good deal, remember that your website is a long-term investment - cutting corners early on can create major problems later when scaling up.

Quality comes at a price. For that reason, chances are greater that you'll be more satisfied with the finished product when hiring freelancers at fair rates.

For a more hands-on approach to website building that doesn't require a site builder, you can try a CMS, like WordPress. Otherwise known as content management systems, these handle most of the coding for you: Their preprogrammed website components only need to be configured to your specifications. They also come with numerous design templates (Themes) and plugins, to help you design and customize your website.

You will have to handle things like hosting on your own. Still, there are hosting providers that specialize in WordPress websites, offering all-in-one packages that include hosting and a domain, as well as support and maintenance.

Thanks to CMSs like WordPress, even those without programming knowledge can create their own website, and with significantly more flexibility than website builders (which we'll introduce next).

Of course, WordPress isn't the only CMS on the market, and there are alternatives such as Joomla or TYPO3. Still, WordPress is both the undisputed market leader (and easily the most popular platform) and the most beginner-friendly CMS.

The easiest way to create a website is with a website builder. These web-based programs allow anyone to make a professional-looking website without a shred of programming skills in a short amount of time.

Thanks to their ready-made elements and visual interfaces (often with drag and drop), you'll create your professional website in an absolute minimum of time. From straightforward blogs to extensive online stores, just about anything is possible.

Every website builder is slightly different, however, they all share a few basic features:

Of course, when it comes to features, usage concepts, and target audiences, there are significant differences from platform to platform. Still, most services are fairly similar to one another, offering the same advantages and disadvantages.

These days, the market is full of website builders all of which make similar promises, while offering slightly different features and capabilities. In our comprehensive EXPERTE.com website builder comparison we tested 15 of the most popular platforms and have compiled a shortlist of our favorites for you:

Wix took first place in our ranking owing to its excellent combination of quality and quantity in an unbeatable package. Creating a website is kept simple for beginners, while more advanced users can take advantage of the platform's relative flexibility.

With its rulers and guides, Wix's interface might remind you of Photoshop but isn't anywhere near as complicated. Thanks to its toolbar and drag and drop design features, you're given a fairly free hand when building your website. You'll get plenty of ready-made content, ranging from individual elements to entire pages and content blocks.

In case the features that the platform comes with aren't enough, you can browse its impressive app market. There, seemingly endless numbers of extensions (both free and premium) are waiting for you.

For total beginners, Wix even offers a more straightforward, AI-assisted editor that basically automates website creation. If using this, you'll have to make do with significantly less creative freedom than the regular editor offers.

Just like every home needs a plot of land, so too does a website need a domain. Put simply, this is a website's unique name and the address where it can be reached. This website's domain is www.experte.com.

Two components of this domain are particularly important: The so-called second-level domain ("experte") and the top-level domain, or domain ending (".com").

In order for your website to be available on the Internet, you'll need to select a domain ending and register a domain on it. The difficulty emerges in that every domain can only be assigned once, meaning that the "good" names have already been taken.

Not only will you need to find a memorable domain name, but also make sure that it isn't taken, and that its domain ending pertains to your intended use. For US businesses, both .com and .us are attractive options, with each within the Top 5 domain endings on the planet. However, there are lots of other possibilities: Among tech startups, .io domains are very popular, for example.

Registering a domain online is very simple. Once you've selected a domain name, visit the domain provider of your choice and make sure that the domain is still available.

Most domain providers have simple search tools that allow you to check whether a name is available. This is what IONOS's looks like:

Is your desired domain available? Congratulations: You can purchase it from the provider for a fixed price. The domain provider will let you know all of the next steps once your purchase is complete.

Things become a bit trickier if your desired domain is already registered. In that case, you'll either need to select a different domain (such as by slightly modifying your original choice) or, you could try to purchase the domain from its current owner.

In our guide to purchasing a domain, we show you how to do this, as well as how you can sell or migrate domains:

Another aspect that you'll need to take care of is hosting. This online storage space (sometimes called 'web space') provides the digital 'plot' which your website is built upon. Regardless of your website's size, whether it's a blog, a business page, or an online store, it will need to be hosted on a server that's connected to the Internet.

There are different kinds of hosting: You can purchase and operate your own server, or rent web space from a hosting provider. Some hosting companies have even specialized in catering to websites made with specific CMSs, like WordPress.

Below, we've briefly summarized the various options:

Using your own server is an appealing option for larger web projects that need top performance, a high degree of scalability, and the ability to customize server configuration. Keep in mind that having more control also means that you'll be responsible for your server's security.

Several different types of servers exist:

For smaller web projects and regular business websites, having your own server is probably overkill. Hosting offers a useful and practical alternative: You'll rent storage space for your project on a server that's shared with many other clients (for this reason, the process is sometimes referred to as "shared hosting").

Server management is handled entirely by the hosting provider which means that you don't need to worry about anything. The downside is that hosting providers can be less flexible when it comes to installing certain software or advanced configurations.

Since the server's hardware is shared with so many others, there are limitations when it comes to performance. This method isn't ideal for websites with large numbers of visitors or many pages that don't want to risk occasional performance issues or unavailability.

For most regular online projects, whether a private website or a small- to medium-sized business, shared hosting is more than adequate.

If you're using WordPress to build your website, you can try WordPress hosting. This specializes in supporting websites that use the CMS, and since they're optimized for WordPress environments, offers several advantages:

Did your website go live? Congratulations, you've gotten yourself online! However, this isn't the time to sit back and relax: Websites are never-ending projects and there will always be something to do, improve, or update, whether it's content, design, or features.

In addition to a variety of guides of tutorials to help you along the way and to improve your website, EXPERTE.com also offers a number of practical website tools for optimizing technical aspects and content.

Everyone's tastes and preferences are different, however, there are some objective criteria that distinguish a good user experience on a website from a bad one. As soon as you know in which areas your website isn't performing, you can improve them. EXPERTE.com offers several tools to help you find out what these are:

With our Page Experience Checker, you'll evaluate what sort of experience visitors to your website have according to a number of fixed metrics and criteria. These include factors such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Our Readability Checker determines the readability of articles and text content on your website using an index and several pre-configured metrics. With it, you can see how easy, or difficult, your texts are to read and gauge whether they are suitable for your target group.

Can those with disabilities or handicaps view and use your website as well as others? Find out with our Accessibility Checker.

Using 41 factors grouped into 8 categories, you'll be able to determine how you can optimize your website for the visually disabled or those who are hard of hearing. With this tool, you can make sure that as many of your website's visitors can access its content and features as possible.

For the visually disabled, color contrast is particularly important. Use our Color Contrast Checker to see whether your website's color scheme makes its content too difficult to read.

Most people surf the Internet on their smartphones. A significant number of visitors to your website will access it through a mobile device of some sort, and you should make sure that it's optimized for them. Our Mobile Friendly Checker helps you to do this.

With our tool, you can check up to 500 pages to see how mobile-friendly they are.

There are few things more damaging to a website's reputation than security gaps. Your website's visitors will want to know that it's not going to infect them with malware or misuse their data for spam and phishing.

A valid SSL certificate is particularly important since this guarantees that information sent between a visitor's browser and your website's server is encrypted. Thankfully, there are plenty of free SSL certificates, these days, foremost among them, those from Let’s Encrypt.

If you'd like to find out how secure your website is and probe it for gaps and weaknesses, you can use our Security Check and SSL Checker.

Visitors are picky these days: If a site takes too long to load or performs poorly in another area, potential customers will quickly take their business elsewhere. For that reason, you should ensure that your website's technical aspects aren't driving away clients.

Thankfully, there are a number of metrics that you can use to measure your website's performance. Based on the results, you can focus on optimizing those areas. To find out how your site is doing, and learn how to improve it be sure to run our PageSpeed Test and check out our performance guides:

Websites are no longer just a luxury for businesses and the self-employed, but an absolute must. Luckily, there are lots of ways to establish your digital presence, and it's never been easier to do so.

Regardless of whether you want to program your website yourself, hire pros to do it for you, or take a hands-on approach with a content management system or website builder, we're here to help. On EXPERTE.com, you'll find tutorials, guides, software reviews, and practical tools to help you make your website as professionally, easily, and efficiently as possible.