114: Worried You’re on the Wrong Website Platform for Your Beauty, Health or Wellness Business? Here’s How to Know

In this episode, Jules White breaks down one of the questions she is asked most often: which website platform should you build on if you run a beauty, health or wellness business?

Jules explains why your platform is not what determines the success of your website. Instead, success comes from clarity around your offers, your customer journey, the problems you solve, and having your SEO basics in place so your website can actually show up in search.

She shares why so many business owners feel they’ve chosen the wrong platform, and the key things to look for in a website builder, including ease of use, SEO features, mobile layouts, loading speed, editing confidence and future growth needs such as landing pages, digital products, blogs and booking systems.

Jules also talks about why migrating platforms should be a well considered decision, and why choosing a platform that can grow with your business is usually far more important than choosing the cheapest or most advertised option. 

Key Takeaways

• The Platform Isn’t the Strategy:
  A website platform supports your strategy, but cannot replace clarity, content and SEO foundations.
• SEO Essentials Should Be Simple:
  Your platform should make it easy to edit page titles, descriptions, headings, alt text, URLs and redirects.
• Planning for Growth:
  Consider whether you’ll need landing pages, digital products, workshops, blogs, email marketing or online booking.
• Why FEA Create Works Well:
  It is flexible, covers SEO basics, offers built in tools and comes with additional support through the Female Entrepreneur Association.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 108: Why your website feels so overwhelming and how to make it easier
• Episode 010: Website Migration Mistakes that Can Sabotage Your SEO
• Episode 006: Landing Page Vs Website: Which Do You Need and Why?
• Episode 113: How to tell when it’s time to rebuild your website and when it isn’t

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Website Platform Selection
• 1:48 Understanding What Makes Websites Successful
• 4:36 Key Features to Look for in a Website Builder
• 8:31 Essential SEO and Mobile Optimization
• 12:19 Planning for Future Business Growth
• 16:20 Evaluating Ease of Use and Editing
• 18:17 Technical SEO Requirements
• 20:35 Making a Confident Platform Choice
• 21:57 Why FEA Create Works for Most Businesses

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Introduction to Website Platform Selection

Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, FEA Create—which platform will actually work for your beauty, health and wellness business?

Hi, it's Jules here. Welcome back to the Website Success Show.

Many local businesses have four core problems that I help solve with my content and my programmes.

So, number one is visibility: showing up where people are actually searching for what you do. Number two is conversions, making more sales through your existing website.

Number three is building a website that helps you to escape the constant content creation of social media. And number four is clarity and focus, knowing where to put your attention first.

Today's episode relates to the fourth problem of clarity. I am answering a question today that I get asked all the time.

I can't tell you the number of times that I have been asked even over the last few weeks about this question. What platform should I build my website on, or what platform should I use if I've already picked the platform?

People often feel like they've made the wrong choice with their website platform and feel unsure whether to just keep it there or whether to move. Not really sure what to look for in a platform and not really sure how to make the right decision.

So, today's episode is hopefully gonna help you with that.

Understanding What Makes Websites Successful

And the platform choice isn't what makes a website successful or not successful. The platform helps to support your strategy, but it doesn't create it.

Website success comes from clarity around your offers, around your customer journey, around the problems that you solve for people, and around having your SEO basics in place to help your website actually show up in search.

In episode 108, I talked about why your website feels so overwhelming and how to make it easier. I talked in that episode about the three brain modes that we use that are kind of three separate parts of building a website.

Go and have a listen to that one. It was just a helpful way of you actually helping to divide this up into the right parts that you need to think about as a business owner.

When you're thinking about a website, whether you are deciding to build your website yourself or not, we need to think about these things. This is all part of the strategy part of this.

Deciding which platform to either build on or to stick with or not deciding whether to migrate is an important choice, but as I say, it's not the thing that can make your website successful or not.

Ideally, what we want is a platform that can grow. A platform that you can learn and that one can actually grow with your business as well.

I think having something like that, having something that will actually allow your business to grow and will actually grow with your business, massively beats a platform that is cheap or one that's free. It also beats one that has a big budget for advertising on TV, which is what I often see.

People will go for the platforms that are all over TV because they say how easy it is to build a website with them. Or because you can build your website using AI, or "we have hundreds of templates that you can just build a website in minutes".

I rarely find that actually works for the majority of businesses because they then will just think, "Okay, I can build a template. I can do it really quickly."

They do this not realising that the strategy behind it, the content creation that needs to happen behind actually building a successful website, and all of those other things need to happen. These website builder platforms make it sound very easy, and it's not.

That's often why business owners can feel like they are failing in terms of making the wrong choices. Because the platforms make it sound so easy and then it's not easy.

It's not simple, it's not easy. It's something that does need to be part of your business strategy, and it needs to be something that you need to put some effort into as a business owner really.

Key Features to Look for in a Website Builder

And people often will blame the platform. They'll say they hate their website because of the platform that they're on.

But often the issue is with the content that they have on their website or the content that's not there. The content that is actually missing from their website that would massively help just to make it more successful for them.

So they need the content, they need structure for their website as well, and they need the confidence to actually be able to use it. I think that's one of the most important things that business owners need really.

So if the platform isn't the magic fix, then what should you actually look for instead in a website builder to make sure that you have one that actually works for your business? The first thing I would say to think about is ease of use.

If you get anxiety logging into your website platform that you've chosen already, there are two things. Firstly, it doesn't necessarily mean that you've chosen the wrong platform.

Sometimes it can be that you're just not familiar with it, so you've just not spent enough time or had the right sort of guidance learning how to actually use the tech. So I would definitely think about that first.

So whether you just need to learn more about your website platform or whether you know enough. You know that you hate it, you will avoid logging in at all costs because you just hate the platform.

I would say definitely don't rebuild out of that avoidance feeling. So a lot of time people will feel like, "Okay, I need to get a new website because I hate my website. I don't want to log in and make changes."

And then they'll think, "Okay, I'll just get a new website, or I'll just move platforms because of that." But this needs to be a very thought-about decision.

This needs to be something that you actually consider as a business owner and consider whether moving is gonna be long term the right choice for your business. So making sure that you choose a platform that you can learn and one that you want to learn, and not one that you just feel like you're trapped by because you've made that decision.

Whereas moving might be something that takes some time and some effort in the long run if it's gonna help your business. If it's going to allow you to have a website that you love and a website that you feel good about going in and editing.

Or you feel good about looking at and making changes and getting somebody else to go in and do the editing for you, as long as you feel good about your website. That's the first place to start really.

Think about what you need right now. So as a local business, if you are a beauty, health and wellness business and you've got a local location or a very strong local presence as well as online offerings, then you need clear service pages.

Whether that is for your online offers or for your in-person offers, you need service pages that are very clear. You need sales pages.

If you've got online courses or if you sell in-person courses or anything like that, you'll need sales pages for those. They need to be something that you can create quickly and easily.

Quickly doesn't mean five minutes, but it means that it's not too difficult for you to be able to go in, move things around in your website builder and actually understand how to make those pages. You need things like easy pricing layouts.

A booking system, ideally, either one that's built-in or one that will allow you to integrate your existing booking system. And a simple way for people to contact you through your website as well.

So whether that's forms or whether that's a link that then takes them through to book a call with you or to send you a text message or something, that should also be part of it. You should make sure that that is there within your website builder.

If you can add in things like trust-building elements, so things like being able to add in reviews, before and after photos, being able to add in a gallery of your work, those kind of things. Also, if you can add those in a website builder, that's really important.

Essential SEO and Mobile Optimisation

Having your SEO fields easy to find. This is something that obviously I am really keen for people to be able to edit their SEO settings easily themselves.

I often talk to people, especially when during power hours, we'll start talking about their SEO and they have no idea where to make the changes to their SEO in their website builder. They've got no idea where to change the bits.

If you're looking at a Google search page, even things like your page title and description are very simple to change in most website builders. But if it's something that's really front and centre and something that is almost a reminder to you that you need to edit this information, that makes a big difference really.

Ideally, a website builder that has automatic mobile layouts as well is really helpful. Something where you haven't got to go in and design a whole different website for the mobile version like we often used to have to do.

It just automatically adjusts the majority of things for mobile. You might have to go in and tweak some of the padding and that kind of stuff, but it should then give you a mobile-friendly version of your website straight away.

That helps to save you time, and the reason that it's so important is because nowadays the majority of people are probably looking at your website on their mobile. So the majority of business owners, especially those who are local businesses who are selling to B2C—so they're selling to the general public—then most people are gonna be looking on their phones.

So having a mobile-friendly layout is gonna make the most difference, both to the conversions and also to Google's mobile-first policy. So Google prefers websites that are mobile-friendly and will always recommend websites that are mobile optimised above other ones.

Ideally, you want a website that's fast loading. There are some big website builders, like Squarespace, that are a little bit slow loading.

That is something that you can't change; if the software behind it, if the code behind it doesn't load quickly, there's nothing you can do about that. There are things that you can do to make the most of your website builder.

So making sure that you are uploading images that aren't massive file sizes. Making sure that you aren't adding big videos and those kind of things into your website that can then slow it down.

Or embedding things like social media embeds and those kind of things that can sometimes slow your website down. But some of it is out of your control.

So I would say try and look for a platform that is already quick to load, and you can check this. If you go to Google's PageSpeed Insights, you can check this yourself.

But making sure that you actually choose a platform that's not gonna put you at that disadvantage because you've got a slow-loading website. That's definitely something that can affect both traffic and conversions because people won't hang around.

If your website takes four seconds, five seconds, eight seconds, 10 seconds to load, people will be back to Google or back to wherever they were and looking for an alternative, unfortunately. Making sure that your website builder is simple to edit without you being worried about breaking everything.

This is one of the reasons that I moved away from building websites on WordPress because people were so terrified about breaking their websites that it just stopped them from actually logging in and doing anything. So making sure that actually you are not scared of your website.

Making sure that you've got a simple builder. Ideally, a drag-and-drop builder is gonna make it a lot, lot easier for you to actually feel confident about logging in and making edits to your website.

Planning for Future Business Growth

Think about what you're likely gonna need, not just right now, but also what you're gonna need 12 months from now and going forward. You know, what are you gonna need five years from now if you wanna be adding in digital products or adding in a mini course or something like that into your business?

If you've got other ideas that you want to evolve your business over time, then think about whether you can, and whether you should have that built-in with your platform choice right now. Because the last thing we want is to be migrating a website.

This is something I talked about back in episode 10, which was website migration mistakes that can sabotage your SEO. Ideally, we want to choose a platform for our website that will, as I say, grow with our business.

Ideally, you don't wanna be thinking, "Oh, well I'll just go with this one for now so I can get something up," and then start working on that website, start building up SEO on there, and then decide, "Oh, actually I need to migrate." It's far easier to just start where you are and then build from there.

It's much better if your business hasn't completely changed. It's much, much easier to optimise what's already there rather than starting from scratch and then trying to just claw back all that SEO that you've got there.

So when you're thinking about that, when you're thinking about what you need moving forward as well, think about whether you need landing pages. If you are planning on introducing mini courses or digital offers, online downloads, those kind of things.

Then you're gonna need the function to be able to add in landing pages. Landing pages are just really where you have a page that is bringing people in; normally they don't have a navigation at the top.

I'll link in the show notes to another episode where I talk about the difference between websites, web pages, and landing pages. And realistically, they're all just web pages.

They're all just single pages on the internet that happen to be linked together because they're on your website. But if you are designing landing pages, then think about that.

Think about whether your website builder has the structure to be able to create checkout pages and all of those kind of things as well, which you maybe haven't thought about at this point. But this is the time to do this research and actually work out whether you need that kind of functionality in three to five years' time as well.

Does it allow you to do email marketing through the platform itself? If it does, that's a real bonus.

Ideally, if you can do something where you've not got to then try and duct tape everything together, then that can help. Like, it can definitely help avoid tech overwhelm.

If you're gonna be thinking about how you want to increase your SEO and you want to improve your authority on the topic that you talk about, having a blog builder built-in can help. I just build my blog pages as website pages.

But having a blog builder that works well can be good because then you can just literally upload the text and it will automatically then publish it onto the category pages that relate to that particular topic. Anyway, that's something that's a little bit of a digression, but if you are wanting to blog, making sure that your website platform has the function to be able to add in a blog as well.

If you are wanting to sell things like events and workshops and gift vouchers, those kind of things that we maybe don't think about. Even adding an online store, adding a shop in.

If you want to be selling products through your website, does it have a robust function that will allow you to sell directly through your website? This is what we want; ideally, we wanna be making sales directly through our website.

Does the platform allow you to track conversions? And to see where your traffic is coming from to see which parts of your marketing are actually working for your business.

That's really important as well. And then if you want to add in any new pages, you wanna add new services pages, you want to make edits to change your prices and those kind of things, are those edits simple and easy for you to be able to do in your website builder?

Evaluating Ease of Use and Editing

And you might not, as I say, know how to do it right now, but can you learn how to do that quite easily really? So think about how quickly and easily can you make edits?

Does the website builder fight you when you are actually trying to make edits? Does it make everything more complicated than it needs to be?

Do you need plugins? Do you need coding to actually achieve what you want to achieve with your website builder?

And does it feel learnable? Even if you don't know everything right now, does it feel like there's a supportive community that there are plenty of online videos that could help you to learn more about your website platform?

I think that has been one of the biggest things that I've realised is that actually having that support there is vital. Having the place where you can go and you can ask questions and learn from other business owners who are also using the same platform is really, really important to website success.

Do you think you'll avoid logging in because it all just feels too complicated? If that's the case, then maybe consider whether it's the right platform for you or whether you just need to learn more about it or actually, "Yeah, no, I need to choose something else really."

SEO basics to look for that your platform should have is the ability for you to change these things, like page titles, page descriptions or meta descriptions. Heading tags: can you change those?

Normally you do that within your website builder. So you will often see things that people use for styling their website, so they will use that to make the text look bigger.

But actually, is it simple and easy for you to be able to change those and to be able to see what headings you've used on your page? Do your images allow you to put in alt text?

Can you control the URLs that you put into your website? Do you have complete control over that, and can you easily add redirects?

Because sometimes you will want to make changes to your website and actually making sure that you've got the ability to do those kind of things as well is really helpful.

Technical SEO Requirements

As I've mentioned, the site speed: does it load quickly? Do the pages on the website load quickly as well, and does it make it easy for you to link your pages together?

This is one of the big things that can really help people to binge your content and to stay on your website for longer. If it's easy for you actually to link your website pages together, think about the design and the images.

Are there templates there that you could use? I tend to not recommend using templates on a website.

I would recommend starting with a blueprint, so something like my homepage blueprint, to guide you on what sections you need to create. That will actually help you to know what to add to your website, to know what you need on your website.

Whereas templates, I think can sometimes make your website more of a hindrance than a help. You try and then make your copy and your content fit into the templates and then you get frustrated when your website at the end doesn't actually then look as good as the template did.

So I tend to recommend people don't use templates. Just start with a clean slate and just add some sections into it yourself that are easier and actually then work and look nice and look good, but still also will then perform from an SEO point of view as well.

Is it easy to swap the images around and things like that? Does it have a good image gallery or a media library that you can then easily add your images in there and keep them organised as well?

There's nothing worse than a big media library that is just a mess and you can't find any of your images. Does it have those mobile layouts that don't break when you move something around?

So does the design support mobile-friendliness as well? So with all of this, I think that it's just a bit of a shift in belief of thinking about that your platform isn't necessarily the one that has all the bells and whistles.

It could be. It's also not the one that just happens to be the cheapest; definitely not.

It's the one that helps you to stay consistent with your messaging, with your website. Helps you to stay consistent in actually keeping it up to date.

So, how do you then make a confident choice without spending weeks actually comparing platforms?

Making a Confident Platform Choice

So I would start with making a list of what you actually need right now. Make a list of what you want to add in the next three to five years to your business as well.

Because that simplicity of just knowing what you actually need and then being consistent with it is what's gonna help you to grow your SEO. Help you to get more bookings, help you to make more sales through your website, whether that is from a migration to a different platform or making the most of what you've got already.

But consistency is the thing that's gonna help you to really turn your website into a good marketing asset for your business so that you can then escape the social media overwhelm really. So all of that, that I've said.

What platform tends to be best for the people that I work with most? And there are real nuances with this.

I would always caveat it when I'm talking to people about their website platform choice. Your business is an individual; your business has its own needs and it's a unique business.

Nobody does things and nobody has the exact same requirements as you in your business. I've been using FEA Create for over three years, and I tend to recommend that more often than not.

After I've had a conversation with people about what website builder to build on, it tends to be that I would recommend that as an amazing platform.

Why FEA Create Works for Most Businesses

It's flexible, it's learnable. There's plenty of support there to actually learn how to use the platform.

It's really good for whether you are an online business or a local business. It covers all the SEO basics as well.

It definitely can feel a lot when you first dive in, but you don't have to do it all at once. And once you get to grips with it, then it makes it really easy to make changes to your website yourself.

Whether you in the end decide that you want to be doing that or you wanna get someone else to do it for you, you can easily know how to use the platform. And from actually just focusing on one part of FEA Create at a time, one part of the system, then it helps to keep people out of overwhelm.

It's an all-in-one system, so it does things like your email marketing. You can use it for social media scheduling.

You can use it for a client relationship manager, so a CRM. You can use it for a calendar booking, so scheduling appointments as well.

And as I say, you may not necessarily use it all for all of those things, but I really love it for website building because it helps to support you in the other ways as well. So it's a good website builder that can grow with your business as well.

And as I say, you don't have to use all of it. Just use the bits that you need first and foremost really.

The other thing I love about FEA Create is that you get access to the Female Entrepreneur Association. To Carrie Green's Female Entrepreneur Association.

You get access to the Members' Club, and in there there's training. You'll find an SEO masterclass from me in there as well.

And there's support, there's community, there's networking opportunities in there and there's lots and lots in there. Helping you actually to grow a business that supports your online goals really; I suppose it supports your ability to make money through your website.

So if you're unsure about all of this, if you want some help deciding what platform to move to or whether to move platforms or not, then book a website potential discovery call. We can chat about where you are with your website.

What you're trying to achieve, what your hopes are for your business moving forward, as well as right now. And if there's any of my offers, my products or services that can help you get there faster, then I'll suggest those for you and we can explore working together.

And if you're deciding whether to stick with your platform, switch, or move your website entirely. Go back and listen to last week's episode, so episode 113: How to Tell When it's Time to Rebuild Your Website and When it Isn't.

That's the next best one for you to watch. Thanks for listening and don't forget, social media is optional.