Start with what the site has to do

The decision this area turns on is what to build on, where to host it, and what it costs to keep. That depends first on what the site is for. A site that describes your business, one that takes bookings, one that sells physical products and one that sells digital products or services have different needs, and a platform that is excellent at one can be awkward at another.

What to settle before comparing platforms

• What must the site do in its first year: inform, take bookings, sell products, take payments for services?
• If you sell, how many products, physical or digital, and to which countries?
• Which payment methods do your customers expect?
• Who will update the site week to week, and how comfortable are they with technical tasks?
• Do you own your domain name, registered in your own name?
• What would make you want to move in two years, and how hard should that be?

Hosted platform or self-hosted software

A hosted platform runs everything for you — hosting, security updates, backups — for a monthly fee, within its own rules. A self-hosted system runs open-source software on hosting you rent, which gives you more control and more choice, and makes updates, security and backups your responsibility or that of whoever you pay.

For a small business without technical help, a hosted platform removes a whole category of risk. The price of that is dependence: on its pricing, its rules and its export tools. Neither choice is wrong. What matters is making it knowingly.

Four things that decide the long-run cost

• Performance out of the box, not after heavy tuning. Slow pages lose visitors, and many visitors arrive on a phone. Judge speed on a site built with your own images and content, measured on a phone, not on the platform's showcase examples.
• Total cost once required add-ons are included. The plan price is often not the whole bill. Apps, themes, payment fees and extra staff accounts can each add more than the plan itself.
• How locked in your content and store become. Check before you build whether you can export pages, products, customers and orders, and whether you can redirect your old addresses if you move.
• Support quality when something breaks on a Friday. Find out which support channels exist on your plan and when they are staffed, before you need them.

What a website or store really costs

• The plan, and the billing period it assumes. Check the price both monthly and yearly if both are offered.
• Payment processing on every sale, usually a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction. As an illustration only, at a hypothetical rate of 3% plus 30 cents, a 40-dollar order costs $1.50 to process (3.75% of the sale) and a 10-dollar order costs 60 cents (6%): the fixed part weighs most on small orders.
• Any extra transaction fee for using a payment provider other than the platform's own, where one applies.
• Apps, plugins and themes, many of them billed monthly.
• Your domain name, and email hosting if it is not included.
• Extra staff accounts or seats beyond what your plan includes.
• Tax, and any developer or designer time.

How lock-in happens, and how to limit it

Lock-in does not need a contract. It accumulates: content written in a platform-specific format, products and customer accounts that export without their history, apps that only exist on one platform, and addresses that search engines have indexed and that break when you move.

Three habits keep the door open. Register your domain in your own name with a registrar you control, rather than only through the platform. Export your products, customers and orders now and then, and open the files. And when you do move, redirect every old address to its new one so that search traffic and links follow you.

How to test a platform before you build on it

• Build one real page and, if you sell, one real product, with your own images.
• Test its speed on a phone, for example with a free tool such as PageSpeed Insights, using your page rather than a template demo.
• Go through a test purchase or booking from start to finish as a customer would.
• Export your test content and products and open the files.
• Send the support team one real question and note how long the answer takes and whether it helps.

Warning signs before you build

• Your domain would be registered in the platform's name rather than yours.
• Customers or orders cannot be exported.
• Features you need are only available through paid apps, and the total is not clear until you install them.
• Support on your plan is limited to a help centre.