How to Create a Website 2025: The Ultimate Guide

We'll walk you through the steps of planning and designing your website. We'll also introduce you to some helpful tools and resources for website creation, and share important tips for beginners.

We split website creation - and this guide - into three main phases:

In the following chapters, we'll guide you through all these steps and show you how to plan, create, and manage your website.

Good planning leads to better results and makes the whole process easier and faster. Three questions are especially important:

First, you need to decide the purpose of your website. This affects everything else - from the content you'll need to the costs you'll face. Do you need the website for personal or business use? For self-employment or your company?

On EXPERTE.com, you'll find many guides for different use cases:

For businesses, websites are now essential, but the rules for a multinational corporation's website are different from those for a small or medium-sized business.

Compared to personal online projects, it's crucial that your company's website looks professional, and you should follow certain rules to achieve this. We'll show you the best practices for design, content, technology, and security.

Here's a selection of helpful guides for business websites:

Different industries have different needs: Depending on your industry, you should include specific content and features on your website. For example, a restaurant website needs an interactive menu, while a medical practice website must have an appointment booking tool.

A website is especially important for freelancers and self-employed professionals. It not only helps potential customers find you online but also serves as your portfolio. You can showcase your work and share references or testimonials to win over new customers.

Check out our guides for tips and tricks on creating websites for different industries:

From job applications to weddings: Some websites serve a specific purpose and need to meet certain requirements.

Since wedding websites and similar single-purpose websites appeal to people who don't know much about programming or web design, many beginner-friendly platforms now focus on these niches. Website builders also offer handy templates for special occasions.

If you need a website for a specific occasion, check out our guides for inspiration:

It's also important to know what kind of website you want to create. Some projects are more complex – and usually take more time and money – than others. Here are some basic website types with different levels of complexity:

Your budget is also key in deciding how to create your website. It affects which method works best for you: if money is no issue, you should hire the best pros, but if you need a lot of website for little money, you'll probably need to do it yourself.

Luckily, there are good options for every budget today. You can even create free websites – though these only work for personal projects, not for professional or business websites. Free options usually don't include a custom domain, which is essential for a professional look.

Once you have a rough idea of the website you need, you'll have to decide how to create it. You have four main options:

Let's take a closer look at each option:

Beginners can skip to the next section since this method is only for experts. If you want to code a professional website yourself, you need more than just advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and programming languages. You'll also need to handle all other aspects of a website, including technical setup, design, security, and more.

The main benefit: Since you control everything, you have complete freedom over your website's design and features. Your skills (and budget) are the only limits - anything is possible.

However, having enough knowledge to build a truly professional website - not just an experimental one - is rare among people who want to create a website.

If you can't code but have a decent budget, you should put your website creation in the hands of professionals. There are several options:

Note: On platforms like Upwork, you'll find many very cheap freelancers - we're talking about just a few dollars per hour. But don't just look at the price - think of your website as a long-term investment.

Quality comes at a price. You're much more likely to be happy with the result if you pay your freelancers fairly.

If you're looking for a good middle ground between coding from scratch and using a website builder, you might want to try a CMS like WordPress.

These "content management systems" handle most of the coding work by pre-programming and setting up the main parts of your website. You'll also find lots of design templates (called "WordPress themes") and plugins" to help you design and customize your website.

While you need to handle hosting yourself, many WordPress-focused web hosts now offer complete packages with hosting and domain names. Many even include support and maintenance.

This means that even beginners with no coding skills can now create their own website using CMS like WordPress, with more flexibility than website builders (which we'll cover next).

WordPress isn't the only CMS out there - you can also try alternatives like Joomla or TYPO3. But WordPress is not just the market leader (and by far the most popular and widely used system globally), it's also the most beginner-friendly CMS.

The easiest way to create your own website is using a website builder. This is a web-based tool that lets you build websites without any coding skills using a building block approach.

With ready-made templates and simple, mostly visual controls (usually with drag-and-drop), even beginners can create a professional website in a short time. You can build anything from simple blogs to full online stores.

While each website builder is a bit different, they usually share some basic features:

Of course, website builders differ in their features, how they work, and who they're made for. We've grouped the builders we tested into four categories:

There are countless website builders on the market today. While they all make similar promises, they differ in many ways. In our big EXPERTE.com website builder comparison, we tested 15 of the most popular providers and put together our favorites:

Wix takes first place in our ranking because it combines quality and quantity into a well-rounded package. Creating a website is super easy for beginners, while advanced users get more flexibility than with other website builders.

Wix's interface with its grid lines looks a bit like Photoshop, but it's much simpler to use: With the toolbar and drag-and-drop controls, you can edit your website pretty freely. You'll find lots of ready-made content, from single elements to complete pages and content blocks.

If the built-in features aren't enough, you can check out the App Market, which offers countless add-ons (both free and paid).

For complete beginners, Wix also offers an even simpler, AI-powered editor that almost completely automates website creation - though you'll have to accept more limitations with this option.

Every website needs a domain. Simply put, this is your website's name and unique address on the internet. The domain of this website is www.experte.de.

To make your website accessible on the internet, you need to choose a domain extension and register a domain. Here's the tricky part: each domain name can only exist once with each extension, which is why many "good" names are already taken.

You need to find a memorable domain that's still available and pick the most suitable extension. For German companies, a .de domain makes sense, while international businesses should consider using .com. These days, there are many other popular options - like .io domains, which are popular among tech startups.

You can easily register a domain online. Once you've picked a domain name, visit your chosen domain provider and first check if the domain is still available.

Most providers have a simple search function for this. Here's how it looks at IONOS:

Is your desired domain still available? Great news: You can now buy it from the domain provider at the listed price. The domain provider will then notify the responsible registry.

Things get more complicated when your chosen domain name is already taken. In this case, you'll need to either pick a different domain (or modify your existing one), or you can try to buy the domain from its current owner.

Check out our guides about domain buying to learn how to do this, and how to sell or transfer domains:

Another important aspect to consider is web hosting. This involves getting storage space (= web space) on the internet - think of it as your website's online property. Whether you're running a blog, business website, or online store: web hosting is a basic technical requirement for any online project.

There are different ways to get web space: You can run your own server or rent web space from a provider. Some web space providers even specialize in specific CMS installations, like WordPress.

Here's a quick overview of your options:

An own server makes sense for larger web projects that need top performance, scalability, and custom configuration options. While server owners are responsible for their own security, they also have more control.

Here are the different server types you can use:

For small website projects and regular business websites, having your own server might be overkill. Web hosting is a good alternative: you rent some storage space for your project on a server that you share with many other customers (that's why it's called "shared hosting").

The web host manages the server, so you don't have to worry about anything - but this also means you have less flexibility when it comes to installing specific software or making advanced configurations.

Since you share the hardware with many other customers, there are some limits on performance. This option isn't ideal for websites with heavy traffic or sites where you can't risk any performance drops or downtime.

But for most regular online projects, from personal websites to small and medium-sized business websites, shared hosting should work just fine.

If you use WordPress as your website's CMS, you can choose WordPress web hosts that are specially optimized for WordPress. These hosts focus on providing WordPress environments, which comes with several benefits:

We've put together some important resources about WordPress hosting and reviews of some of the most popular providers:

You've launched your website? Congratulations, you've completed the biggest step! However, this doesn't mean your work is done: A website is never really finished. There's always something to do, improve, or update – whether it's content, design, or features.

At EXPERTE.com, you'll find guides and tutorials to help improve your website, as well as some handy website tools for technical and content optimization.

Sure, everyone has different tastes. But there are some clear standards we can use to measure user experience on a website. Once you know what needs work, you can make improvements. EXPERTE.com offers some useful tools for this:

With the Page Experience Check, you can evaluate your visitors' user experience based on solid metrics. This includes factors like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability of your website.

Our readability check helps you analyze how easy your website articles are to read using specific metrics combined in a readability index. This shows you if your content matches your target audience's reading level.

How well can people with disabilities or specific limitations use your website content? You can check this with our accessibility test.

Using 41 criteria across eight categories, you can find out how to improve your website for people with visual or hearing impairments. This helps ensure that as many people as possible can access your website content without limitations.

Color contrast is especially important for people with visual impairments. With our color contrast test, you can check if your website's color choices make content hard to read.

Many people now mainly use their smartphones to browse the internet. You should expect that people will often visit your website on their phones and optimize it accordingly. Our mobile friendly test can help with this.

Our tool scans your website (up to 500 subpages) and shows how well it's optimized for mobile devices.

Nothing puts your credibility at risk more than security issues. Your website visitors trust that your site isn't spreading malware or being used for spam and phishing.

It's especially important that your website has an SSL certificate, which makes sure all content between visitors' browsers and your web server is encrypted. Luckily, there are many free SSL certificates available today, with Let's Encrypt leading the way.

If you want to check how secure your website is and test it for specific security issues, you can use our Security Check and/or our SSL Check.

Website visitors are picky these days: If a page loads too slowly or performs poorly in other ways, potential customers will quickly look elsewhere. That's why you need to make sure your website performs well technically.

Luckily, there are specific metrics you can use to measure your website's performance. Based on the results, you can then improve certain aspects of your site. Our guides about performance and PageSpeed can help you with this:

Having a website is essential today - not just for businesses and freelancers, but also for many other personal and professional purposes. The good news is that there are many ways to create your own website, and it's never been easier than it is today.

Whether you code your website yourself, hire professionals to build it, or use tools like content management systems or website builders: On EXPERTE.com, you'll find tutorials, guides, software reviews, and practical tools to help you create your website.