15 myths about websites worth knowing before you buy

Many clients believe that it is enough to build a website once and it will serve them unchanged for a long time. Meanwhile, a company operates in a dynamic environment — new products appear, customer needs change, and sometimes the company address or contact details need updating. In addition, seasonal breaks, public holidays or changes to the parameters of your offer call for a quick response.

A website must be a living tool that always reflects the company's current situation. That means being able to change messages quickly, update downloadable materials, highlight different elements of the offer or correct product specifications. Only then will visitors find reliable information and make a decision easily.

To achieve this, you need a solution that lets you make changes freely and quickly — without having to involve developers every time. This way the website stays visually the same, but constantly adapts to the needs of the business and the market, keeping your communication up to date and effective. In a sense, then, it is still the same website, yet it contains different information. Nor should you forget about changes driven by security and changes in the law.

It may seem that choosing a contractor is a matter of comparing a few offers in a table – prices, number of pages, available features. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Websites can be built on different technologies – the popular TYPO3, the universal WordPress, a variety of SaaS platforms, or our proprietary solution, SmartSpot.Cloud™. Each of these solutions has its own characteristics and capabilities, and each is managed differently. This translates into working comfort, flexibility and the speed of making changes.

In addition, in many companies with a diverse team, the website is looked after by people from different departments – not necessarily just IT. It may be marketing, reception, and sometimes even production. If that is the case in your company, the choice of system must take into account the needs of all users – ease of use and an intuitive tool. This is another aspect that no price table can convey.

What is more, hidden costs often appear. For example, on some SaaS platforms setting up a single mailbox can cost as much as 250 PLN a year. And what if you need 10 of them, or more? These additional fees add up quickly and are not always clearly presented in offers.

Finally, in more than 20 years of practice we have very rarely seen offers that clearly distinguish between the costs of maintaining and developing the website – and when they did, they were usually based on hourly rates, which in practice says little about total spending in the longer term.

That is why the choice of contractor and technology should be preceded by a conversation, by testing the tools and by understanding the real needs of the team, rather than basing the decision solely on a table of prices and features. Only then do you have a chance of getting a website that will run smoothly and trouble-free for years.

Unfortunately, optimisation is not a magic button that you press once and forget about. In a world where Google's algorithms are constantly evolving, entire new systems are emerging (such as AI-based summaries of results) and the competition never sleeps – optimisation cannot be done once and for all.

That said, there is no need to "tinker with HTML tags" every month. Our experience shows that a strategic approach brings better results. Instead of constant small changes, it is worth introducing larger batches of improvements once a quarter. They combine hard SEO data with the real customer expectations we have gathered in the meantime. So we have a model in which the key flywheel is not the position in the results, but conversations with customers and the sales department. This approach unfortunately tends to be more expensive in absolute terms, but it is also more effective for the company.

The way Google's search engine evaluates content has changed many times, but the fundamental principle is always the same: content should be the best it can be for the customer. That is why Google consistently eliminates anything that could distort this picture. Keywords stuffed into texts and meta tags became worthless long ago, and recently even the meta description has lost its significance for ranking – it matters mainly for the click-through rate (CTR). This evolution is clearly heading towards quality. The bots are getting smarter and all kinds of "tricks" increasingly do more harm than good. The key is to write valuable, unique content and look after your recognition online. Forcing in external links wherever possible is also losing significance. More and more can be achieved simply with a great, valuable text.

As a result, working on search engine visibility stops being merely a chase after "the vague dream of ranking higher". It starts to bring value to you and your customers, giving them content that truly responds to their needs. Such a holistic approach has a positive effect on the whole company, not just on the search engine position.

The value of SEO traffic can also be measured financially, for instance by comparing it with the cost of buying visits from Google Ads or Facebook ads. That is precisely why it is crucial to establish what we care about and what our strategy is. Sometimes it may turn out that "free" SEO is in practice more expensive than the seemingly costly purchase of traffic from adverts. It is always worth doing the calculation and making decisions based on data.

The new face of SEO. Will SEO companies disappear?

Here we would expect a strong evolution of these companies towards becoming strategic partners. In light of the changes in Google's algorithms and the growing role of content, traditional SEO, based on mechanical "tinkering with HTML tags" or building artificial links, is nonetheless losing significance. It looks as though those days are over, and AI is adding its own contribution to these changes. The search engine is becoming an answer engine, not just a place to ask questions. But will typical SEO companies be able to move from a "pay for position" contract model to competent B2B cooperation? Time will tell. We did it years ago.

Unfortunately not – users scan content in search of specifics. Long blocks of text without breaks and headings are skipped. That is why the structure of the page, legibility, the right visual accents and a logical content layout are important. Clarity counts, not volume. It is important, however, to remember those users who need very detailed information. So it is worth preparing content that sits deeper in the website structure but is easily reachable, e.g. from long-tail searches. This is content for those who already know your product but are looking for the finer points – it is good if they can get to it.

The other extreme is focusing only on appearance. A beautiful website without good content is like an elegant shop window with no goods. Design attracts, but it is content that builds trust, informs and persuades people to act. Google, too, evaluates content, not colours. Good copy is one of the key elements of an effective website.

Look for the happy medium.

A long time ago, a website served mainly as a digital business card. It simply "existed". Today it is one of the most important pillars of a business and one of the most powerful sales tools. It is the place where traffic from advertising campaigns turns into money.

A modern website can:

• Generate leads – collect contact details of potential customers.
• Support salespeople – provide them with arguments and materials during conversations.
• Automate processes – for example through automatic quotes or a booking system.
• Educate customers – build trust and show why your offer is the best.

The customer's route to your website has changed too. It used to be fairly predictable — visitors were handed a business card with a web address or searched for a phrase in a search engine. Today there are far more ways of getting there: social media, rating systems, forums, reviews or YouTube videos. The website should be tailored to each of these customers, with their differing expectations. Its job is to make as large a share as possible of this varied traffic valuable — put simply, to make it bring revenue to the company.

Remember that a website is a tool like any other. One drill bit drills better, while another takes a great deal of effort. If everyone needed the same thing, there would be only one model of car in the world — the best one. That is exactly why, before making a decision, you should think about what you need, what you expect and, most importantly, what resources you have.

If your website merely "exists", it usually means it is not working for you as well as it could. Remember that every bit of untapped potential is, in practice, lost revenue. That does not mean, however, that you have to build a large, extensive site straight away. Sometimes minor improvements, better optimisation or simply a deliberate use of existing tools can bring surprising results. That is why it is so important to give yourself a moment to reflect and plan how your website is really going to support the business, regardless of the scale of the project. Also make sure you can easily change the plan when real-world operation shows that your assumptions need a slight adjustment.

We include this myth for the sake of completeness, because there is really nothing left to discuss. The matter is clear. More and more users browse websites on smartphones – often these are their only devices. If your website looks bad or does not work on a phone, you may lose more than half of your website traffic.

What is more, it is not only a matter of user convenience, but also a Google requirement. For years the search engine has applied the principle of "mobile-first indexing", which means that it is the mobile version of your website that determines your ranking position. Ignoring this fact may cause you to drop in the search results, even on desktop computers.

Responsiveness and mobile UX are an absolute must today. Users behave differently depending on the industry, their own preferences and the product or service. Sometimes they prefer a computer, sometimes a phone, and most often they gather information through various channels. The form of advertising you use is also extremely important. If, for example, you advertise on Instagram, which is fully mobile-oriented, your website must be too, and that is how you should build it.

Even a small website should use analytics tools. With them you will quickly see which advertising channels actually attract customers, where visitors come from and where it is worth investing your money and time. Instead of relying on your own feelings or intuition, you have access to hard data showing whether the money spent or the effort put in is bringing the expected results. The most popular free tool in the world is Google Analytics (which now requires, in order to work fully, the Google Consent Mode built into the website software)

In addition, analytics tools allow you to monitor changes on the website — e.g. with A/B tests you can check which version of a page performs better. You can also track search engine positions to assess whether your SEO activities are paying off. To sum up: analytics is not only the domain of large projects. Even the smallest website will benefit from informed, data-driven management.

When does analytics really not matter much?

Mainly when you do not have the time or inclination to analyse data and draw conclusions from it. If, for example, you run a one-person business with a large number of jobs coming from referrals, and the website has practically no influence on winning customers, investing in analytics may not be a priority. What is more, even investing in a website may be pointless here. A company profile, e.g. on Google Business Profile, will probably do the job.

In such situations it is worth focusing on what really works, and analytics does not have to come first. In most cases, however, even a small dose of knowledge allows you to make better decisions and increase the effectiveness of your online activities. 

Unfortunately not – nobody visits a website "just in case". Think about it: do you ever check whether the brands you buy have changed anything on their websites? If you want to let people know about new products, updates or promotions, you have to communicate it – through a newsletter, social media, an advertising campaign. No communication = no effect.

Many website owners are worried about the cost of updates, and the prices can indeed be a surprise, in the longer term exceeding even the price of the implementation itself. Sometimes, however, a bigger problem than the price is plugin incompatibility, which makes updates risky and difficult to carry out. Fortunately, there are solutions on the market that simplify this process.

There are, for example, SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, where updates are included in the price of the software and paid for with the monthly subscription. Here things are simple, because the provider looks after the entire infrastructure and automatically rolls out all fixes and new features.

At the other end stands WordPress. It is one of the more complicated solutions to update, the reason being the multitude of plugins from different authors and their mutual incompatibility. WordPress also has no fixed development schedule, so plugins can lose and regain compatibility, which generates additional problems. According to publicly available data, it is also the most frequently attacked CMS. This is due to its huge popularity and known vulnerabilities. As a result, regular updates are critically important if we care about high availability of the website for customers. Virus warnings can scare users away, and an infected website lowers its ranking in the search results. It is estimated that 4 - 5 million WordPress websites are successfully attacked every year. We are talking only about attacks that ended in a security breach. There are many more automated attack attempts, because in practice every website in the world is subject to them. Your website will be attacked, 100%, probably every day, regardless of the technology you use. Whether the attack succeeds, however, depends on the technology you choose. That is why you need to keep both WordPress itself and the plugins up to date. These are two separate matters, and there may be as many as several dozen plugins installed. What is more, using additional plugins quite often also means paying an annual or monthly subscription. Of course, there are also WordPress sites based on so-called "clean code", where updates are more like working with typical bespoke software and a team of dedicated developers. 

All the same, it must be honestly admitted that over our many years of work we have also seen WordPress sites that were launched with practically no additional plugins and ran largely trouble-free.

We take a different approach in SmartSpot.Cloud™, where updates are optional and covered by a fixed annual fee. This model gives both flexibility and control over costs. In this solution there is a central file repository supervised by our developers, who regularly send fixes to our Clients' servers. Without involving them in anything and while maintaining backward compatibility – in short, nothing breaks.

That is exactly why, even before you buy, it is worth checking how many modules on your website are subject to updates, for what period and under what licence. We have seen websites built on tools that stopped working once the paid licence expired. Always pay particular attention to this.

Over the years WordPress has gained enormous popularity, and today for many people it has become practically synonymous with a CMS. When someone says "let's build the website on a CMS", they are most often thinking of WordPress — and only WordPress. That, however, is a simplification that can lead to poor decisions. WordPress is just one of many available tools – very good in certain scenarios, but definitely not universal. Alongside it there are other systems, such as Joomla, Drupal, Webflow, Statamic, Kirby, as well as SaaS solutions (like Wix, Squarespace) or headless CMSs (e.g. Strapi, Sanity, Contentful), which will work well in completely different contexts. And of course there is our own SmartSpot.Cloud™ with a strong service package.

Each of these tools has its strengths and weaknesses. WordPress offers flexibility, a large community and plenty of ready-made plugins, but on the other hand it can be prone to errors, requires regular updates, and in more complex projects can be difficult to maintain and optimise.

That is why it is worth getting to know at least a few different options and understanding their purpose, operating model and potential limitations. Choosing a CMS is a strategic decision – it should follow from the real needs of the project, not just from habit or a friend's opinion. An informed choice of tool is the first step towards creating a website that really works and does its job.

The subscription model (SaaS) often raises concerns – especially among people who prefer to "pay once and be done with it". Yet a regular fee is not only a cost, but also value. In return you get constant access to updates, technical support, security, backups and infrastructure maintenance. You do not have to worry about servers, PHP versions or SSL certificates – all of that is the provider's responsibility.

For many small and medium-sized companies this is a very convenient and economical solution. SaaS lets you get started quickly, without a large upfront investment. You do not need an IT team or extensive technical facilities.

You do, however, need to be aware of certain limitations. As the company grows, it may turn out that:

• maintaining a large number of mailboxes becomes costly,
• every new website requires a separate subscription (1 SaaS = 1 project),
• there is a lack of flexibility when it comes to non-standard functionality,
• you do not have full control over the server and the database,
• data export or migration may be difficult.

So SaaS is neither a "bad" nor an "ideal" solution – it is simply one of the options worth considering with open eyes. It works very well in simple and moderately advanced projects, but for extensive systems it is better to opt for greater independence and your own infrastructure.

For many companies, employing "their own IT person" is synonymous with security: someone watches over the systems, knows the company inside out and reacts quickly to problems. And indeed — this is often a key employee. Only... not for everything.

The fact that someone knows about networks, servers, backups and security does not mean they will manage a website implementation well or give good advice on marketing tools. In-house IT staff, even very experienced ones, generally deal with maintenance and infrastructure — not with website development, UX, SEO or CRM integrations. What is more, they usually have neither the time nor the inclination for it. And that is hardly surprising — it is a completely different field.

In practice, when the need arises to implement a new website or integrate it with marketing tools, e-commerce systems or a CRM, the in-house IT person may not be able to give reliable advice, because this is an area where IT, marketing and business meet. And specialisation works both ways — the better someone is in their own field, the less time they devote to others.

It is also worth remembering that people's lives take different turns. Even the best IT person may change jobs at some point — and it need not involve ill will or a conflict. It is simply life. The problem is that when they leave, key information often "evaporates" with them: logins, passwords, access to servers and admin accounts, or even ownership of the domain. And suddenly it turns out that nobody in the company knows who has access to the website, who pays for the hosting, or where the Google Analytics account actually is.

What is more — you can hardly blame someone who left the company six months ago for no longer wanting to sort out their former employer's old affairs.

That is why, regardless of whether IT is handled by an in-house person or an external partner, what is crucial from the company's point of view is maintaining independence and control: over domains, servers, tools, accounts and documentation. In this context, a well-chosen external operator is often more predictable and less dependent on individual people.