Almost 850,000 companies were registered in the UK in 2024, according to data from Companies House analysed by NatWest and Beauhurst. Most founders spend that first stretch on the legal and financial groundwork: registration, a bank account, insurance. The online side gets pushed back, and pushing it back is usually where the problems start. Getting it right isn’t really about technical skill. It’s about order. What you do in week one shapes everything that follows.
1. Register your domain name
Everything else depends on this. Your domain is your address online, and if you wait too long, someone else might register it first: a squatter, a rival, or just another business that got there sooner. For UK businesses, a co.uk or .uk domain signals local credibility to customers and search engines alike. You can buy co.uk domain registrations from providers who bundle in email and hosting too. Do this on day one, before you’ve printed anything with the name on it. If your business name is taken, try a variation. Adding “uk”, your town, or a short descriptor (mybakery.co.uk rather than mybakery.com) usually solves it. Registering both the co.uk and the .uk version costs very little and saves confusion later.
2. Set up a proper business email address
Customers notice when an email address doesn’t match the business name, and a Gmail or Outlook address undercuts a first impression. A quote received from hello@yourbusiness.co.uk is received differently than one from yourbusiness2024@gmail.com, and it can affect whether someone follows up.
The good news is that most hosting providers include business email as part of the package. This should be set up before your first client email goes out. If you’re planning to bring on a team eventually, create a shared inbox (info@ or hello@) at the outset rather than later. Adding one further down the line, once contacts are saved and habits are set, causes both added work and aggravation.
3. Go live with your website
A simple site explaining what you do, who you serve, and how to get in touch is enough to start taking enquiries. Four or five pages, home, about, services, contact and perhaps a blog, will cover most small UK businesses. Waiting until everything is perfect is a trap many new founders fall into and can be costly. A basic page with your contact details is better than no page at all. WordPress remains the most common choice for small business sites, and most hosting plans include a one-click install. This piece on how the search landscape has shifted for UK businesses is worth a read before you brief a developer or pick a builder tool. Launch over HTTPS. An SSL certificate usually comes bundled with hosting, and it protects your visitors’ data as well as helping your search ranking.
4. Lock in your social media handles
You don’t need to post daily but you should own your business name on the platforms that matter. LinkedIn is close to essential; beyond that, look at which platforms best suit your business or the services you offer best. You need to lock in your social media handles at the beginning so that no one else can take them. That said, a claimed profile shouldn’t be an abandoned one. A profile set up in a rush and then left with outdated details does more harm than good once a prospective customer finds it. If you’re unsure whether your website is actually working for the business, alongside your social presence, there are simple ways to check before investing more time in content.
5. Create a Google business profile
For any business with a shopfront or a service area, this is the free tool that decides whether you turn up in local search and on Google Maps, and often the single most useful thing you can do for discoverability in your first year. Fill in every field including category, hours, address or service area, website, and a description of what you offer. Google’s guidance on how customers find businesses through Search and Maps confirms that a complete profile drives the calls, direction requests and website clicks that show up in your results. Remember to add photos once you have them, and reply to reviews as they come in.
Sort these five before you start trading, or as close to launch as you can manage. A squatted domain costs far more to fix than it would have cost to register earlier. Get the email wrong at the start and you’ll end up paying for a migration later. Leave the Google profile untouched for a year and rebuilding it takes longer than maintaining it ever would have. None of this is complicated and it rewards those new business owners who get it done in the correct order.
