Website tools — five situations and the one text that fits yours

Website tools are usually chosen in the wrong order: the product first, then the question of what it is for. This section is arranged the other way round and is not a guide to read end to end. It is a switchboard: five situations in which companies end up in a conversation about tools, and one text for each.

Tools are chosen badly not because somebody picked the weaker product, but because they were answering a different question from the one they had. Someone compares builders when the real question is "who is supposed to change this". Someone buys a plugin when the problem is that nobody has checked whether the contact form arrives.

So start with the stage your site is at — everything else follows from that single answer.

Content management system — when you need to settle who edits the site, and how often

This question comes before all the others and is skipped most often, because it sounds less concrete than "which product should we pick". It settles more: the answer rules out most of the options before anyone opens a feature comparison.

Content management systems fall into three families differing in one thing — where the content lives and who holds the key to it. The classic kind sits on your server and is yours, database and all. The closed kind sits with a vendor, on a subscription, with no access to the code. The decoupled kind keeps content separate from appearance and needs somebody on the team who can code.

The choice turns on two axes: how often the content changes, and what a mistake costs in whatever gets published. Most companies sit in the low-risk quadrants and buy for the one where such a system pays for itself — for an editorial team they do not have.

It is also worth checking whether you need a CMS at all. Close to a third of the sites on the internet do without one, often deliberately. One criterion, unrelated to company size: in the last year, did anyone here want to change something on the site and not do it because it was too much trouble?

→ Content management system — who in the company gets to change what

Website builder — when you want to build the site yourself on a subscription

A builder is bought in order not to pay a supplier, and that is often correct — more often than an industry that lives off building sites is willing to admit. The sums, though, are usually done on one figure, and that figure is a promotional first-year price rather than the price of the product.

Price lists here run on four repeating mechanisms, worth learning instead of the amounts, because the amounts change every quarter and the mechanisms do not: a discount only on the higher plans (which can make the cheapest plan dearer than a better one), a price quoted for the first year, a charge per person alongside the charge for the site, and the features a company needs hidden higher up the ladder than the description suggests.

The second thing no ranking covers: what you can take with you. The answers differ far more sharply between vendors than the features do — from no export at all, where the documentation says the site has to run on the vendor's servers, to an export file with a longer list of exceptions than of contents. This is the one line of the bill you cannot buy later: it is settled when you choose the vendor, and you learn its price three years on.

→ Website builder — what it costs after year one and what you can take with you

WordPress page builder — when you already have WordPress and are choosing an editor

WordPress itself is free — the only line in this bill everybody agrees on. The cost forms one floor up, in the layer you assemble pages with, and one floor down, in the plugins.

The first question is whether you need an editor layer at all. The built-in editor now does what a builder is usually bought for — header, footer, templates and global styles — with one catch that decides it: it works only on a block theme.

If a builder is needed anyway, the difference between vendors is not features but billing: some renew annually with an increase, others sell a one-time licence. Over three years the licence line alone can differ by several hundred euros on an identical site — one widely used editor charges €180 to buy and €228 to renew.

And the line that appears in no quote: paid plugins. That single item can be bigger than hosting, the domain and the editor licence combined.

→ WordPress page builder — what a visual editor costs and when it stops paying

Website testing — when the site is ready and you want to verify it works

Testing usually ends the same way: somebody pastes the address into a free tool, gets a number, and is either pleased or on the phone complaining. That number mostly means nothing — a single measurement, on a simulated device, measuring something other than what the search engine judges you on.

Two things change that. A single measurement has a spread of about ten points, so one screenshot is evidence neither for nor against. And a tool's score is diagnostic, while the reckoning happens on data from real users — which a small site may not have collected at all.

There is also one test no tool will run, and it fails most quietly: whether an enquiry from the form actually arrives. Along with two questions almost nobody remembers — whether the customer gets a confirmation, and whether the anti-spam protection is rejecting real people. That last failure is invisible by definition: everything works for you, because you test from your own office, and a blocked enquiry leaves no trace.

→ Website testing — how to check a site so the result means something

Consent Mode and analytics — when you collect data and want to know whether it is reliable

A consent banner gets treated as a legal formality. In practice it decides how many of your visitors appear in the reports at all — and therefore whether any decision made on those reports means anything.

The commonest and most expensive misunderstanding is "Google will model the rest". Modelling exists, but its thresholds are counted in thousands of events and users a day, and a typical small-business site is two orders of magnitude away. Which means one thing: data lost to a refused consent is lost permanently.

So what matters is not losing it without reason — and it is mostly lost to one configuration error: treating consent as a single switch, so that refusing advertising also switches off ordinary visit counting.

→ Website analytics — what your numbers do when people refuse cookies

In what order, if you were doing all of it

If you were to go through this section in sequence, the order follows from each step being guesswork without the one before it:

1. The system, because who is allowed to change content decides the rest of the choice.
2. The tool — a builder, or an editor layer over WordPress, depending on whether you rent the site or own it.
3. The test, before anything launches. The most expensive mistakes are visible half an hour before publication.
4. The measurement, set up so the numbers mean something. Otherwise in three months you will be deciding on data nobody can vouch for.

If what you are looking for is how to read the numbers you already have, that is not a question about tools — we settle it separately.

What this section does not cover

Three questions arrive here regularly and all three have better owners — worth redirecting straight away rather than looking in the wrong place.

"Which platform should we choose", meaning a comparison of specific products — that is the product level, and it has its own text in the technology section. Here we settle the level above: which family of systems you need.

"How do we build a website" step by step — a process rather than a choice of tool, and it lives in the process section.

"What does all of this cost" across a whole project — tools are one line in that bill, not the bill. The full breakdown, including what quotes stay silent about, is in the cost section.