Want a WordPress site that works? Just do this.

You would be amazed at the disconnect between what a website visitor wants and what a website owner thinks they want.

Throw Google into the equation, too, in terms of search and rankings, and if you’re not careful, you’re heading for a clusterfu*k, or what I call a webshite.

Firstly, let’s get the important stuff out of the way.

Your logo and branding.

Got a logo? Does it look ok? Job done. If it looks like a 12-year-old knocked it up in Paint, then it’s going to need some work, but if it looks professional and appropriate, it can stay.

Same with the rest of your branding:

• Are your fonts legible?
• Are your colours accessible?
• Are your images professionally shot?

The trouble with branding is that to designers, everything needs a redesign, because that’s what they do.

Personally, having worked in Branding for over 20 years, most of what comes out of designers’ mouths is bollocks – to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so of course they are going to suggest a redesign.

Obviously, there are such things as shit logo designs and shit branding, but there is also professional and appropriate – which is far less subjective than ‘does it look shit?’.

Your website design.

If there is one thing true of most websites, it is that they are overdesigned.

Everyone gets way too excited about their ‘brand’ and the end user, you know, the customer you need to keep trading, is long forgotten.

If you are selling something with little substance, like a can of Coke (they have to spend billions to get people to drink that stuff), then you need to design it to perfection, as no one really needs it; you have to convince them they need it.

If you are selling a service that you deliver professionally and for a fair price, you don’t need to convince your visitor with design (other than one that is professional and appropriate); you need to convince them with what you have to say.

Do not overdesign your website.

Design it so your gran can use it and you won’t go far wrong.

On top of this, keeping things simple will make Google love your site (from a speed point of view).

Your copy.

Don’t be boring, but don’t be like that extraverted twerp at the party either, keep it, you guessed, professional and appropriate.

If you are the expert, write your copy yourself, don’t get ‘someone in marketing’ to write it for you.

You’re the expert, so you know better than anyone else how to connect with your potential customers and sell what you do.

Don’t waffle or sound like an encyclopedia, either – be straight and to the point.

You don’t need hundreds of 2000-word waffle blogs to rank; you need laser-focussed content that’s all on-point and free of padding and marketing-speak.

Google has stated it’s not about length, it’s about whether you are the best result for the query.

What’s more, if you get some soul into your content – some of you, the real person in there, you can outrank the big sites that spend thousands on backlinks to bolster their paper-thin corporate drone.

And what about AI?

More and more people are turning to AI to get recommendations for products and services, so you also need to consider your content for AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation).

Generally, it is agreed that if you don’t rank in the SERPs, you are not going to get found in apps like ChatGPT, etc (which apparently uses Bing, which would make sense as Microsoft is involved in that).

Don’t sound like marketing.

There’s a reason most business blogs feel like walking into a sales pitch.

They’re written by people who aren’t close to the work. So they fill the gaps with waffle. You don’t need that.

Google doesn’t care how many adjectives you can cram into a sentence — it wants to know whether your content is the best result for the query. That means clear, direct answers and actual expertise, not fluffy paragraphs about ‘unlocking solutions’ or ‘driving value’.

You can say something helpful in 300 words. Or 50. Google’s already told us that length is irrelevant if the content does the job.

Stop writing to impress and start writing to explain. Cut the filler. Avoid abstract phrases. Speak like a real person who knows what they’re talking about, because that’s exactly what your visitors want to hear.

Write for Google. And ChatGPT.

AI is changing the way people search. More and more of your potential customers are getting answers from ChatGPT, Bard, and other tools, not just Google.

That means you need to think about AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — not just traditional SEO.

These tools scrape their answers from content that ranks well. If you’re not in the search results, you’re probably not going to get mentioned by ChatGPT either. If you want to be the answer, your content needs to be the best answer on the internet.

That means all the same stuff still applies: clear, honest writing that answers a specific question well. But now it also means structuring your content so it’s easy for AI tools to lift. Keep it focused. Keep it factual. Make your headers count. And make sure the page actually answers the question in the first place.

AI engines want facts, clarity and structure. They don’t care how clever your brand voice is or how quirky your intro paragraph sounds. So say what the user needs to know, and say it properly.

Get yourself cited.

You want ChatGPT and others to namecheck you? Make it easy for them.

That starts with putting your name on your content. Make sure it’s obvious who wrote the page, and why you’re qualified to talk about the topic.

Include an About page that backs this up, link to relevant case studies or projects, and keep the quality consistent across the whole site. If you’re writing in-depth stuff that proves you know your onions, you’ll start getting picked up.

AI tools are trained on high-quality, well-attributed content. If your blog doesn’t look credible, or you sound like every other anonymous contributor on the web, you’re unlikely to get cited. These tools prioritise content that looks like it’s been written by a human who knows what they’re talking about.

So do that. Be visible. Be helpful. Be quotable.

Your site structure.

A well-curated site is a search-friendly site, so ensure your URL structure is logical and doesn’t rely on the end of your domain for everything.

your-domain.com/services/service-name

is better than

your-domain.com/service-name

as there are clues for the search engines in the domain structure.

Sweat the small stuff.

Make sure all the little, seemingly insignificant aspects of your site are also correct:

• Name image files with the title of the post or page, and use variations if you have more than one image on a page
• Always add ALT text, and maybe squeeze some keywords in there too
• Always have an SEO title and metadescription
• Always link to an authoritative external site (I like to use a link to highlight to show Google I have bothered to link to something on the page, rather than just the page itself)
• Make sure you link internally, and the anchor texts contain the appropriate text
• Optimise your images
• Don’t scrimp on hosting
• Use a caching plugin
• Use a CRM like HubSpot
• And so on…

That’s pretty much all you need for a great site, so why does it go so wrong?

It goes wrong because people overthink and overdesign it.

You want simple – as simple as possible – for your website:

• It makes it faster
• It makes it easier for people to use
• It converts better

Your website is there to hold what you have to say and deliver it to the visitor in the simplest way possible.

• Magazines exist to sell advertising, hence all the design and shit all over the place.
• Books are there to give you the story, hence black text on a white page.

This is what you want to give your visitors: the story.

But this is not fiction, this is fact – your visitors should:

• Consider you (and your business) for what they need, as you are the best
• Understand from your copy that you are a real person who knows what they are doing
• Relate to you as a human – websites are sterile at best if the content is boring

Remember this: if you are selling shite, or you can’t deliver what you promise, no website in the world will deliver new business that you can keep selling to – it has to be authentic and it has to be true.

Do the above, and you’ve got a great starting point. So, what’s next?

There’s no set-and-forget when it comes to a website, and why would there be?

Get this right and you will have new leads daily, free of charge (your website should pay for itself).

There is no other marketing medium that can deliver like a well-built, well-written, and optimised website can.

Like all things in life, success comes through consistency.

This means loving your website and attending to it regularly by:

• Writing new, meaningful articles (and internally linking them)
• Keeping on top of optimisation
• Watching your data (Google Analytics and, more importantly, Google Search Console)
• Employing the Kaizen technique
• Believing it will work if you keep doing it properly, rather than in three months, starting over

This sounds like it costs a lot of money.

Name something cheap and exceptional?

It’s not cheap, but it’s not expensive either, as a great website will pay for itself.

The simple question is, how much do you expect your website to make for you?

If you think that investing £500 a year (less than your mobile bill) in your website and it’s going to return £100,000 in new business, that’s a bit of a wild expectation.

It’s horses for courses.

I work with clients who have a couple of thousand pounds all the way up to those who invest £25K in their websites (the main deciding factor here is whether they are spending their own money or their marketing budget), but the basis is the same.

Build your website correctly and invest the time in doing everything properly, and you will get business from it.

• If you have £500 today, but can pay a smaller amount each month for the next 12 months, let’s dance.
• If you’ve £10K and need it in three months, we can chat.

Don’t rush it.

One of the other key things to avoid a webshite is not to do too much too quickly.

You are much better off building solid foundations and then adding to them over time than trying to build a house on sand.

This, too, lends itself to the pay-monthly model and can ultimately make a professionally built site affordable to even the smallest businesses.

Don’t DIY.

Websites are time thieves if you don’t know what you are doing.

Endless evenings trying to work out how to do what looks like it should be straightforward, and then fixing that, but breaking something else.

If you run a business, focus on your core business rather than trying to build a third-rate website – bring in the pros and get it done properly.

Don’t use Fiverr, etc.

I swear there are cats on Fiverr that will offer to build you a website for £200 quid.

Waste of money. Sure, you will get a website, but it’s virtually guaranteed to be a webshite, so it’s a waste of money.

There are so many frogs on these types of sites that you will never find a prince – and some of the horror stories I read on Reddit are truly alarming, including hijacked domains, ransoms, and generally shoddy work, which are reason enough to avoid these sweatshops like the plague.