The Ten Commandments for Building Business Websites

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

Trends come and go, platforms rise and fall, but a surprising amount of good website advice from a decade ago still holds up. The trick is knowing which rules are timeless and which ones need retiring. Here's the original ten commandments for business websites, updated for how people actually build and judge sites in 2026.

The rules that still stand

1. Less is more. Empty pages look unfinished, but cluttered ones lose visitors faster. Put the essential content in a logical order with the most important messages first, and cut everything else.
2. Clever site names are anything but. Unusual spellings, numbers instead of letters, and awkward domain extensions still cause the same problem they always did: people mistype them or forget them. Keep your domain short, obvious and easy to say out loud.
3. Keep content fresh. A site that never adds anything new gives visitors no reason to return. A blog, regularly updated product pages or genuine news content still work, and Google's own guidance on demonstrating experience and expertise makes fresh, well-maintained content more important, not less.
4. Give people the right to reply. Contact forms, live chat, review sections and comments all serve the same purpose: showing that communication runs both ways. Sites that only broadcast, and never listen, still struggle to build trust.
5. Solid contact details matter more than ever. A full office address, a landline and mobile, and a domain-specific email address still outperform a PO box, a personal Gmail account and a single mobile number. With online scams far more common than in 2014, visible, verifiable contact details are now a bigger trust signal, not a smaller one.

What's changed since 2014

Two of the original commandments are now obsolete rather than just outdated, and worth naming so nobody wastes time on them.

• Flash isn't just "not flashy" any more, it's gone. Adobe stopped supporting Flash at the end of 2020 and every major browser removed it. If any part of your site still depends on it, it simply won't load. The 2014 advice to use it sparingly has been replaced entirely by modern web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript), and the underlying principle carries over: don't sacrifice speed or compatibility for decoration. Page speed and Core Web Vitals are now a measurable part of how Google assesses page experience.
• Bandwidth-hungry content used to shut out visitors on slow connections. Most UK visitors now have decent broadband or 4G/5G, but the underlying warning still applies in a different form: heavy, unoptimised images and bloated scripts slow sites down on mobile, which is now most of your traffic and a ranking factor in its own right.

The rules worth reframing

A few commandments haven't disappeared, but the reasoning behind them has moved on.

• Limit popups. Still good advice, but now with a legal dimension: UK sites need clear cookie consent under GDPR and PECR, and an intrusive popup stacked on top of a consent banner is a fast way to lose a visitor before they've read a word. Use exit-intent or delayed popups sparingly, and make sure your consent banner itself is simple and quick to dismiss.
• Social matters, but differently. Embedding share buttons on every page was standard practice in 2014. Sharing behaviour has moved largely onto the platforms themselves, so buttons matter less than they did. What matters more now is social proof: visible reviews, ratings and genuine customer feedback, which do far more to build trust than a row of share icons ever did.
• Content above all else. This one hasn't just held up, it's become more important. With so much AI-generated content now online, genuinely useful, accurate, well-written content stands out more than it did in 2014, not less. Google's guidance on demonstrating experience, expertise, authority and trust rewards content that's clearly written by someone who knows the subject, not content that's simply abundant.

Strip away the specific technologies and the core message from 2014 hasn't moved: build for the visitor, not for yourself, keep things simple and fast, make it easy to get in touch, and never let content take second place to design. The tools have changed considerably; the fundamentals haven't.