How to Build a Business Website in 2022 (Step-by-Step)

Create exposure and increase business revenue. That’s the main reason you need to build a business website.

There are lots of platforms to promote your business but for me, using a website is one of the best ever methods to achieve sales.

I tell you why.

Because people who visit your business website normally came from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, you name it.

They look for answers and then ask questions on the search engine. Next, the search engine suggests the related answer for them.

The customer finds the website and then goes to the specific article, content or video on the website. Read through the articles and found a solution that can solve their issue. End up, they purchase something on that website after being recommended.

This type of customer is very targeted traffic. They have a problem, they need a solution, and they make a purchase. Easy to convert to a sale.

The only thing to achieve these sales funnel is by using a website or a blog.

Let’s say you are using Facebook, people don’t search for a solution on Facebook. It’s the nature of media social, for fun and entertainment.

Even if you’re using Facebook Ads, the solution you provide is not 100% laser beam targeted to the ‘hungry solution’ customers. The ads might appear to the target customers but only after they scroll the Facebook wall.

I’m not against Facebook. It has its own ‘game’ to attract potential customers but for me in terms of conversion rate, the website wins miles ahead.

If you solely depend on social media, there are limitations and restrictions on the terms and conditions you have to obey.

You can get more likes and followers but once you abuse (intended or not), your account and thousand of fans on it will be gone.

Building a business website is actually a great marketing platform. You can use other marketing platforms to tell people about your business.

You may use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. You freely choose either to go for free or paid advertising.

But did you know that there are other things very special about having a business website?

It’s your own property.

With that, you can:

• Create a relationship with potential customers and make friends
• Get more exposure. The sky is the limit.
• Collect more subscribers and more visitor

Clearly, you know why successful businesses have their own business website. Business needs customers that come from those targeted traffics. So you also need those kinds of tools.

Next, how to build a business website?

This is a very comprehensive and in-depth step-by-step in 2022 for you to create a website.

Take your time to learn. A website is like a business. It’s a marathon not 100 meters sprints. Along the journey, you will learn more and more to manage a successful website.

Let’s find out!

Note: This step-by-step contains affiliate links to products that I recommend. If you purchase something from this page, I may receive a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

Step 1: Define Business Goal

Actually, it’s easy to start a business website. The one thing that really matters and is important to success is passion.

P. A.S.S.I.O.N

As for me, the business goal only divides into two:

1. Mission – Your core business. It’s what your company does, who your customers or how your business works.

2. Vision – A long-term goal. Your business hope and dreams. In most cases, you want to be the number one, top priority, or authority in the market. It’s the ultimate goal of the business.

Step 2: Choose a Reliable Web Hosting

To start a business website,  you need web hosting and a domain name.

• Web hosting – to host your web, blog, data, articles, images, videos, etc.
• Domain Name – the address of your website.

The web hosting I recommend is Exabytes since it’s very reliable, faster, cost-effective, feature-rich, and secured.

To register for Web Hosting, please follow the steps below:

1. Go to Exabytes and click Hosting.

2. There are 3 packages to choose between Business Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting and cPanel Hosting. For cost-effectiveness, choose Business WebHosting EBiz 12 Plus which costs you only $4.99/month (if your sign-up for 36 months). Very cost-saving.

4. Click Order Now. Continue to the next step.

Step 3: Register a Domain Name

1. Select register a new domain name.

2. Enter your desired domain name. Make it short and easy to remember. Prefer to have the domain name the same as your business name. Then click Continue.

3. It’s recommended to get a .com domain name because more popular, worldwide, and authoritative. When someone asks for your website name, it’s easy to describe the .com name rather than other extensions.

4. If you click ‘Search’ but the domain name you have chosen is not available, try using another domain name. This is because the domain name has been purchased by someone else.

5. Upon success choose the domain name, scroll down and click Continue

6. On domain configuration, I recommend choosing ID Protection to protect your personal information from being available to the public. This is to reduce your information being used by spammers or scammers by sending unwanted emails later.

7. After adding the ID Protection, click Continue.

8. Finally, review your domain name and web hosting to ensure it’s correct. Then, click Checkout to make the payment, and you have completed purchasing the domain and hosting.

Upon the successful purchase of the Web Hosting and Domain Name, you will receive an email from Exabytes for all the information about cPanel, domain and web hosting information.

You also can log on to the Exabytes web portal to manage your hosting, domain, personal information and payment.

• Exabytes User Area
  The user area is the portal area where you can edit your personal information, view your subscription (domain or hosting), request technical support, view billing information, and upgrade your current subscription (to the higher package). In short, it’s your single dashboard to manage your account with them.

• cPanel
  The cPanel is the hosting control panel loaded with useful features and tools. In the cPanel, you will find the features and specifications on the package such as disk size, email account, add-on domain hosted, and more.

• SSL certificate
  Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and the browser.

On Exabytes, they provide it for free and the installation is very easy. You can use cPanel to install the SSL certificate.

With the SSL, your customer’s data are protected. For example, if you’re running an eCommerce on the website, during the transactions, the credit card information and customer personal information are encrypted from being misused by hackers.

A website with an SSL certificate is represented by ‘https’ or Secure at the beginning of the URL.

Step 4: Install Website using WordPress

Now, it’s time to build your very first business website. Let’s see how it goes!

1. Launch cPanel by logging in to web hosting at. For the information for the link, username and password you may refer to the purchase information email.

2. On cPanel, find WordPress Tools (or Softaculous) then click WordPress Installer.

3. On the WordPress dashboard, click on Install.

4. On Software Setup, fill up the information needed.

Choose Protocol: http://

Choose Domain: your domain name.

In Directory: Leave blank if you install the website on the main directory. If you want to install the website in a specific directory, you may define the directory name on the field.

If you are using Exabytes, it provides free SSL (https) but what I do at the first stage is install using HTTP.

Once completed the installation on HTTP, you can use Let’s Encrypt (provided in cPanel) to configure the https.

The Exabytes customer service is happy to assist you if you don’t know how to set up the SSL. Just contact them.

5. On the Site Setting, fill up your website information such as site name and site description. I left untick on Enable Multisite (WPMU). For your information, you can still edit this information on your website dashboard later.

6. On the Admin Account, fill in the admin username, admin password, and admin email.

For security reasons, you should choose a strong password and always remember the username and password. It’s advisable to set the password with a scoring up to 100/100.

7. On the Choose Language, I choose English since this website is in English. Even for the website in other languages, for me, I prefer to choose English because most of the plugins, business themes, and the setting is easy to configure in English.

8. I leave blank on Select Plugins and Choose Theme because I want to configure it later.

9. On Advanced Options, you can edit the database name, prefix, and backup location. I leave as-is. The cPanel is automatically assigned the detail to your website.

10. Click Install and you are now completed to build a business website.

Step 5: Log in to the Website Dashboard

1. Go to http://yourdomain/wp-login.php. This is the login page for the WordPress website.

2. Use the username and password you provide during the installation process.

3. Now you are at the WordPress dashboard. The general info (left side) as follows:

• Post – to create, edit and publish your website or blog post
• Pages – to create, edit and publish your pages
• Appearance – to install and configure your desired theme
• Plugins – to install and configure new and existing plugins
• Setting – to configure the way your website should be represented
• Users – to create a new user for blog administration and many more features you can discover. Just take your time to learn it.

Step 6: General Website Setting

1. Let’s continue with the General website setting. No matter what plugins or themes you are using in the future, the setting remains as-is.

It is vital to configure the comprehensive setting for your business website because it benefits search engine optimization (SEO) and traffics.

2. Click on Settings. Under the Settings, there are six (6) subsections.

• General
• Writing
• Reading
• Discussion
• Media
• Permalinks

3. Click General. On the Site Title, use your website name. On the tagline, choose the objective of the website that benefits your visitors.

For this tutorial, I want to share about blogging, then I can use “Start a Blog for Small Business” or “Start Successful Business Blog”.

Then for other configurations, you may define them accordingly.

 4. Click on Writing Settings. The default post category I choose is Blogging. You can create your own Categories in the Posts section (Posts -> Categories).

The post via email I left as-is. The important part of this section is Update Services. Ensure you define with reputable Update Services.

How does Update Services work?

After you published a new website or blog post, WordPress automatically notify (via ping service) of this Update Services. With that, Update Services will get notified about your new post. The search engine also will quickly index your post.

By default, WordPress is using http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ but you can use additional to spread out the indexing process. Thanks to ShoutMeLoud for the useful listing.

You may copy and paste the Update Services below and add them to your website. Separate multiple service URLs with line breaks.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.modpubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

Since every time you publish a new post, it will send the ping to all services concurrently, the search engine might detect your new post as a ping spammer. It will affect the search engine results.

To avoid that, you can use free plugins called WordPress Ping Optimizer. With that, you set the limit ping on each service within a certain period of time, for example, every 15 minutes.

5. On Reading, your homepage should be your latest post. If you want your homepage to be dedicated to a static page, you also can define it individually.

You can define how many posts to show on the homepage. For me, I stick with 10 posts.

The important part of this section is to ensure Search Engine Visibility is unticked.

If you tick the Search Engine Visibility, the search engine will not index your website.

Then what are the benefits of having a business website if you don’t want the search engine to know about it?

6. On Discussion, mostly focuses on how you handle comments by the visitors. To avoid spam or bad comment, you should tick on “Comment must be manually approved”.

When you receive a comment, you can do filtering before deciding to approve it or not.

7. The Media is how you measure the size of the image based on type. For example the image for the size of a thumbnail, medium, and large.

8. On Permalinks is to structure the post and page link. For SEO-friendly, it’s good to have the post name on the link.

With the post name and the target keyword on it, the potential for your website to be ranked by the search engine is much higher rather than the post number (Plain).

Use post name on Custom Structure permalinks instead of numeric.

Step 7: Installing Website WordPress Themes

1. Click Appearance -> Themes -> Add New

2. Search theme on the text box, for example, if you run a travel agency, then you can type ‘travel’ on the box. WordPress will suggest related website themes for travel.

3. Apart from using the search box, you also can get a more specific theme appearance by clicking on Feature Filter. Select multiple options available and click Apply Filter.

4. WordPress will suggest related themes based on your requirements.

5. Click on Preview to view the themes 

6. Click Install to download and install

7. Click Activate to use the theme.

The themes you found most free to use with basic features. If you want to have comprehensive features, you need to purchase the paid theme.

For a small business, you have to show professionalism on the website by using the paid version.

The best place to look for stunning business WordPress themes at ThemeForest. Take your time to survey and read the reviews. They provide lots of choices from different business categories.

Step 8: Create and Publish a New Website or Blog Post

1. Click on Posts – Add New

2. Fill up the post details such as title and body content. Other features are as below. For example, the title on How to Build a Business Website.

Start a website for your business by telling about your business.  On the very first post, announce your company business.

Along the way, create another new website post again and again. Always remember that the objective of having a business website is to provide high-quality and valuable content to your customers.

3. On the Post sidebar, you can add and edit the options as below:

4. A good feature on the WordPress website is the save draft. Whenever you type or create content, please ensure to save the draft periodically.

It’s to back up your post from being missing due to unnecessary incidents.

Refer to the below screenshot, you can retrieve the older version that was saved earlier. It saves time by quickly clicking on the previous version if needed.

Can you imagine, writing 3,000 words without saving it? It’s a nightmare!

5. On top of the post, there is a Screen Option that you can show or hide the boxes.

Step 9: Create and Publish a New Page

1. Go to Pages – Add New

2. Fill up the information for the page title and content.

Step 10: Installing The Best Plugins

Building a website using WordPress without plugins seems awkward. The plugins are used to accelerate and smooth your business website performance by integrating the function into the main website.

For WordPress, there are more than fifty-six thousand plugins that categorize various functions to suit your website.

For a better website, the plugins should not focus only on interfaces such as layout and theme.

The great WordPress plugins for a new business website should be extremely focused to increase website traffic and able to provide info that customer needs.

Then, what are the WordPress plugins for the new business website that you should use? I’ve shared some of it that I’m currently using on most websites I’ve created.

So far, the plugins help me a lot and I believe it should provide the same to you.

Let’s find out.

Best Plugins for WordPress Business Website or Blog

1. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)

This plugin displays Google Analytics visitor reports.  You can see the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly visitors base on user sessions, page views, and more.

The one you need is Google Account to authenticate with this plugin.

It’s a must-have plugin for you to analyze your website performance for continuous improvement.

2. AddToAny Share Buttons

It’s a great plugin that lets your visitors easily share your posts. Visitors can share to their social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and more.

The more peoples share, the more peoples recognize your business.

Make sure to share a valuable thing. Credit image thebudguru.com

3. Yoast SEO

Most expert bloggers say you need to write for your customers, not for Google. But for me, in order for your customer to know what you are posting, you need help from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bings) to bring those customers.

So, it’s actually you write for the search engine. Here the Yoast SEO comes into the picture. It assists you in writing based on Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) technique.

4. Classic Editor

The latest WordPress version uses the block editor; for me, it’s a little bit complicated for post writing. I prefer the old style of layout which is the Classic Editor.

By default, any new installation of WordPress is built-in with Block Editor. You need to install the Classic Editor to use the older version.

My suggestion, try both and choose the editor that suits you.

5. Forminator

You can create any type of form you want like contact forms. Instead of providing an email address on the Contact Us page, you only need a form to handle the request. Publishing the email address on pages will attract spammers to your inbox.

6. Easy Table of Contents

It’s good to have a table of content, especially for the long blog post. This is for ease of visitors to view the outline of your content and jump to the specific subject if needed.

How to Installed Plugins

1. On the website Dashboard, click on Plugins

2. Click Add New

3. On the search bar, search by Keyword, for example, Share Post

4. The results will show the related plugins

5. For the tips, look for the rating and active installation. You can read the details, rating, and compatibility with your WordPress version by clicking on More Details.

6. If you satisfy with the review, click Install Now.

7. Click Activate to start using the plugins.

Conclusion

That’s the way how to build a business website. Your business looks amazing, trusted and confident on the internet if you have a website and blog.

By using reliable Exabytes web hosting and WordPress as the platform, you can develop a stable and useful business website. I really hope you got the idea for the website.

Take your time to explore the WordPress dashboard. The more you explore, the more you can gain knowledge.