Your perfect digital set up.

I look at many different websites and see some right disasters.

I cover not only the website front but also hosting, DNS, email, domain registration, and pretty much everything else I can think of related to businesses and their digital setups.

In this post, I thought I would outline what I believe to be the best set-up for most SMEs regarding digital services and assets.

Your domain name.

Arguably, one of the most important as it is your brand online.

The best way to sort your domain out is as follows:

1. Register it for 10 years in one hit – don’t renew it every one or two years; pay the money and secure it for a long time.
2. Don’t let anyone else register this for you: make sure it’s registered on your own account and all the domain contacts are up-to-date.
3. Don’t register with or use a crappy registrar – use someone decent – they all charge the same, so don’t use some tin-pot company – go with one of the bigger registrars.
4. Don’t do it through Nominet if you have a UK domain; they charge a fortune.

Your DNS & Nameservers.

This is essentially the configuration for the domain name.

Your nameservers control who dishes out the DNS, and your DNS settings control who sorts your website and email, etc.

1. Use Cloudflare for your Nameservers and DNS.
2. Use a paid Cloudflare plan if you can stretch to the $200 per year; if not, use a free plan.
3. Proxy your A records; don’t proxy your MX, SPF or TXT records
4. Ensure you have SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records (which helps improve email deliverability).
5. Use an A record for your-domain.com and a CNAME for your WWW.

Your email.

Undoubtedly, the most important of all is comms. Don’t host your email with your website; use a service like Google Workspace or Office 365.

This separates your email from your website and you get the bonus of all the other tools.

Yes, it costs more, but you don’t want to mess about with email.

Your website.

Use WordPress and have your website built professionally on a bespoke theme.

Don’t use cheap themes, don’t use ‘trendy’ or ‘artisan’ CMS and don’t rent your website from places like WIX or Squarespace – it’s not your website, it’s theirs.

This covers an entire blog in its own right, but WordPress is simply the best platform for your website – every other website platform or CMS wants to be WordPress, so why would you use anything else than the best?

Your hosting.

WP Engine, Siteground, Kinsta, Cloudways, etc. are the best hosting companies – NOT the ones you see when you google ‘best hosting’ – these are always the cheapest hosting companies, and if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

These ‘top hosting company’ pages you find in the search are simply clickbait for affiliate links – no web geek worth their salt will ever tell you that Hostgator or Ionos are the best hosting companies. They are not.

Your hosting should cost at least £40 per month—a worthy investment in your most important marketing tool, your website.

Backups.

Ensure you have one-click restorable backups of your website. This is common sense.

Google Analytics and Search Console.

Make sure these are both connected to your site. The super-easy Site Kit plugin from Google does this in 10 minutes.

Page speed scores.

Make sure your site scores more than 90/100 in Google’s Page speed tests – anything lower than this, and you won’t know if your site speed is preventing you from ranking higher in the SERPs.

Do your due diligence.

This is the most important of all; whenever you are talking to an ‘expert’, remember that my cat can have a website claiming to be an expert – don’t believe the words just because they are there.

Talk to people, look at their LinkedIn and other social media accounts, check out company accounts on Companies House, and research people before you get them on the phone.

Most liars are good salespeople, so make sure the person you talk to can do the work and is not just talking to someone who’s all mouth and no trousers.

Spend some money getting your digital stuff sorted.

It only needs to be done once, and when it’s all sorted, you know that everything is in the right place, optimised, won’t break and works as expected.

If you would like some help getting the digital side of your business in the best shape, call me on 0879 420506 or my studio on 01295 266644, and we’ll get you sorted.