What to get right when you build a website

Pick one hostname and stick to it

Decide between www and no-www, and between http and https, then redirect every other combination to the winner with a permanent redirect.

Four addresses serving the same page splits your credit four ways and confuses anything trying to cite you.

Design your URLs on purpose

Short, lowercase, hyphenated, no session identifiers, no dates you will regret. /products/leather-tote, not /p?id=4471.

URLs outlive redesigns. Changing them later means redirects forever, and every redirect leaks a little.

Decide what happens to removed products

A discontinued item should either stay up marked out of stock, or redirect to the closest replacement — not silently 404, and not bounce everyone to the home page.

Links and recommendations accumulate against product pages. Throwing that away is throwing away the only asset that compounds.

One h1 per page, describing that page

Then h2 and h3 in order, without skipping levels for visual reasons. Style with CSS, not by choosing a smaller heading tag.

Heading order is how anything that cannot see your layout works out what the page is about.

Machine-readable product facts on every product page

Name, description, image, price, currency and stock status, as structured data in the page head. Generate it from the same source as the visible page, never by hand.

Hand-written markup drifts. A price in your data that disagrees with the price on the page produces confident, wrong recommendations.

A canonical address on every page

State which address is the real one, especially where filters, sorts and tracking parameters produce variants.

Without it, one product with five filter combinations becomes five competing pages.

A published list of your pages

A sitemap, generated automatically, pointed to from your robots.txt.

Without one, new products are found only when something happens to follow a link to them.

Server-rendered content for anything that matters

Prices, descriptions and stock status should be in the HTML, not written in by a script after load.

Most things reading your site do not run JavaScript. If your price only exists after hydration, to them it does not exist.

Stop the layout jumping

Give every image and embed explicit width and height, and reserve space for anything that loads late — banners, cookie bars, review widgets.

A page that moves under someone’s thumb as they tap is the single most infuriating thing on mobile.

Serve images at the size they are displayed

Modern formats, responsive sources, lazy loading below the fold — but never lazy-load the main image at the top.

Images are almost always the largest thing on a product page and the easiest win.

Audit your third-party scripts twice a year

Chat widgets, heatmaps, three analytics tools, an abandoned A/B testing script from 2023. Delete what you do not read.

Third-party scripts are usually the slowest part of a site, and nobody owns them.

Returns and refunds, in plain language

How long they have, who pays postage, what condition the item must be in. Linked from every page, not buried in checkout.

"Can I send it back?" is the last question before buying. An unanswered one is an abandoned cart.

Delivery terms with actual numbers

Where you ship, what it costs, how long it takes. Ranges are fine; silence is not.

Unknown delivery cost is the most common reason a full cart is abandoned.

Privacy and terms that match what you do

Including what your analytics and marketing tools collect. Generated boilerplate is better than nothing, but only just.

These are a legal requirement in most places you sell, and a trust signal everywhere else.

A real way to contact a human

An address that reaches someone, answered within a day. A contact form that goes nowhere is worse than no form.

Unreachable stores get treated as risky, by shoppers and by anything ranking them.

Every image has honest alt text

Describe what it shows. Decorative images get empty alt, not a keyword dump.

It is what a screen reader announces, and what anything that cannot see the image has to work with.

Everything works from a keyboard

Tab through your checkout without a mouse. If you get stuck in a modal or cannot see where focus is, that is a bug.

Keyboard traps make a site unusable for some people and are trivially fixable.

Text has enough contrast

Including placeholder text, disabled buttons and anything over a photograph.

Low-contrast grey-on-grey is unreadable in sunlight for everyone, not just people with low vision.

Forms have real labels

Placeholders are not labels — they disappear when someone starts typing, exactly when they are needed.

Unlabelled fields are the most common reason a checkout cannot be completed with assistive technology.

Check your robots.txt the day you go live

Staging sites block everything. That block is the single most common launch mistake, and it is invisible from the front end.

A site nobody is allowed to read ranks nowhere and is recommended by nothing, no matter how good it is.

Set a calendar reminder to re-check quarterly

Theme updates, plugin changes and platform migrations all rewrite these files without telling you.

Everything on this list can be undone by someone else’s update.

Watch for certificate expiry

Automated renewal fails silently more often than anyone expects.

An expired certificate replaces your store with a browser warning.