How To Plan a Website: 8 Steps for Effective Website Planning

When it comes to ecommerce website planning, you can’t just wing it. Your site needs to be functional, easy to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing so customers stay engaged and complete their purchases. If you can’t provide this experience, you’ll lose sales. Small businesses must go through deliberate planning stages to achieve success online. 

Below are the core steps of website planning and guidance on how to implement them in your business. 

What is included in an ecommerce website?

Properly designed ecommerce websites make it easy for customers to browse, select, and purchase items—and get help when they need it. The essential elements that go into website creation include:

• Logos. Company logos are recognizable markers of brand identity. They give a professional look to a website. 
• Navigation menu. A website navigation menu links to different web pages from key landing pages and lets customers access and navigate important areas of a website.
• Search bar. The search bar quickly brings up specific products and sections on a website, averting the hunt for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
• Product images. High-quality images are the ultimate means for showcasing products in a catalog. Effective product photography helps customers see exactly what they’re getting. 
• Product descriptions. Detailed descriptions flesh out each product’s features, benefits, and specifications, making it possible for customers to compare products. 
• Customer reviews. Ratings, reviews, and testimonials from customers assist with product research, and they build trust and social proof among shoppers. 
• Shopping cart. An ecommerce shopping cart lets customers set aside the items they wish to purchase.
• Checkout process. A smooth ecommerce checkout process steers customers through the steps of entering shipping and payment information and confirming their order.
• Shipping options. Provides information on shipping options and costs. This might include free and expedited delivery options.
• Payment gateway. To complete ecommerce transactions, you’ll need a secure payment gateway for processing online payments.
• Customer service. Customers often need help with inquiries about products, orders, and returns. You can provide a Contact page (with an email address or customer service phone number) and a live chat support option.
• Return policy. Customers expect transparency about the return policy and any associated fees. 
• Privacy policy. A privacy policy posted on a dedicated website page builds customer trust and confidence by clearly stating how a website collects, uses, and protects customer data. 
• Frequently asked questions. FAQ pages anticipate and answer the most common customer questions about products, shipping, or the ordering process. 

How to plan an ecommerce website

1. Define your unique selling proposition
2. Identify your target audience
3. Define clear website goals
4. Choose the right ecommerce platform
5. Choose a domain name and hosting provider
6. Plan site design and user experience
7. Make compelling product descriptions and images
8. Tie marketing strategy to website content

When developing an ecommerce website, start with figuring out your unique selling proposition and target audience, then choose the right website goals and hosting options to match the vision. 

1. Define your unique selling proposition (USP)

Before venturing into the planning process, clarify what differentiates your brand from competitors. Maybe it’s your product range, your pricing, or your brand values. Your USP holds your business objectives and website plan together. 

2. Identify your target audience

You’ll need to plan a website that understands your target audience’s needs and expectations. Customers are the key stakeholders for an ecommerce website, and you can apply user research about your target audience’s demographics and preferences. This will inform design choices, content style, and marketing strategies. 

To illustrate how this works, let’s look at the legacy UK clothing brand Belstaff, which started making outerwear for motorcyclists in 1924. When planning for growth, the company’s leaders decided it was time to unify the content strategy. Chief brand officer Jodie Harrison thought deeply about Belstaff’s target audience. “They feel like they belong to something,” she says in a case study. “It feels like a bit of a club—people that live a certain way kind of band together in the spirit of what Belstaff represents, which is adventure and a pioneering ’get it done’ way of looking at the world.”

Jodie realized Belstaff had a rich history that wasn’t integrated into its branding. “It has all these really compelling and beautiful stories,” she says. “And I was quite keen to unearth those stories for the first time and bring back that lens of Britishness that I think had been lost.”

By refocusing on the target audience and storytelling around key branding elements, Belstaff could set goals for a new website. It published its stories in Our First 100 Years, a book about discovering the company’s roots, with never-before-seen photographs, curated pieces, and interviews with legends like motorcyclist Sammy Miller MBE and mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington. The company also uses product descriptions that allude to archival items historically popular in the biker community. 

3. Define clear website goals

What do you want your website to achieve? More brand awareness, leads, or sales? Clarifying goals early makes it easier to implement design and web development decisions later on. Make sure goals align with brand guidelines so your website presents a unified front to customers. 

4. Choose the right ecommerce platform

With a clear vision in mind, you’re ready to select a website platform that best fits your project’s budget and your technology comfort level. Consider factors like features, ease of use, scalability, and cost. Platforms like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace are among the most popular choices. 

As Belstaff director of technology Navid Jiloh explains, the brand replatformed the website and selected Shopify because Belstaff’s outsourcing model was too costly and inefficient, and the information architecture was a black box for managers. When the brand decided to overhaul the site, its project scope included the point-of-sale proposition, websites, and enterprise resource planning systems—all with a focus on data centralization.

Belstaff’s project management team unified the systems on Shopify. “What I found quite interesting was a lot of the tasks you can do in Shopify are quite intuitive,” Navid says. “The user interface sticks out to me quite a lot. When I looked at it, I was like, OK, I can actually pick this up really quickly.” 

5. Choose a domain name and hosting provider

Your domain name and domain extension, which together make up your website address, should be memorable and relevant to your brand. When choosing a hosting provider, consider service reliability, uptime, fast loading speeds, handy site creation tools, an industry-standard content management system, and security provisions. 

A reliable website host should maintain reliable access for website visitors and search engines to keep the business humming. If you’ve already opted for an ecommerce platform like Shopify for a website project, the web hosting functionality is included. It handles server infrastructure, security, and uptime. This is one of the key advantages of using a hosted ecommerce platform.

6. Plan site design and user experience

A clean, modern, user-friendly web design is easier to navigate and more likely to convert visitors into customers. Consider the following key web design process elements when accounting for user experience: 

• Brand style guide
• Theme 
• Color schemes 
• Typography 
• Images 
• Page layout
• Menus and site structure

Use your ecommerce platform or hosting provider’s website builder to rough out the layout. If design isn’t your strong suit, you can always hire a professional web designer. 

Additionally, mobile responsiveness is a high priority, and browsing must function smoothly across all device types. With more than half of global website traffic now coming from mobile, planning for mobile devices is essential. 

7. Make compelling product descriptions and images 

The heart of content creation on an ecommerce website is the product descriptions. Make them appealing and informative. This starts with high-quality product images. Also include concise and accurate product descriptions that both inform and nudge customers to add products to their carts. 

8. Tie marketing strategy to website content

Create content that adds value to products and fosters a brand-loyal community. Think of content that features how to use products to solve problems or serve needs. This can take many forms: blog posts, videos, how-to articles, newsletters, and infographics. 

At Belstaff, Jodie Harrison wanted to make sure that when the business introduced products, the items and descriptions would refer to iconic and archival goods that evoked Belstaff’s heritage. “We have thousands of pieces at our headquarters, some dating back to the early 1930s, like the original motorcycle jackets, and we’re using those as jumping-off points for anything new that we introduce,” she says. “It wasn’t just brought about for trend’s sake. We’re not a fashion brand, we’re a functional menswear brand. And that’s a really clear and very important distinction.”

When content on the entire site—from product descriptions to blog posts and videos—consistently tells your brand story, your website’s stickiness factor is going to increase, and customers will feel much more part of the club. 

The enriched content will make your website more visible to search engines, too. The relevant keywords you want to rank for should show up frequently on website content. Tools like Ahrefs and Google Trends can help you find the best search engine optimization path.