Most small business owners choose a website platform the way I nearly did - by default, going with whatever's familiar or whatever a mate used last. It's worth slowing down on, because the platform you pick now shapes how fast your site loads in five years' time, not just how it looks on launch day.
Start with what it needs to carry. A site that's mostly text behaves very differently to one carrying video and audio, which mine is. If your site is going to hold showreels, voiceover samples, or heavy imagery, that's the first filter - some platforms handle media cleanly out of the box, others slow to a crawl the moment you add it.
Then check who's actually maintaining it. WordPress puts that job on you - plugins to update, themes to patch, a database to keep secure. Every plugin you add is also a plugin that can break or slow things down. I weighed that against Webflow, which renders pages as clean, largely static code with far fewer moving parts, and chose the latter. The site was built by Prevolution Digital, and speed was the brief from day one.
Test it before you commit, not after. Run a working example through Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix before you sign off on a platform, not once the site's already live and you've discovered it's slow. A site that takes more than two or three seconds to show something meaningful has often lost the visitor before they've seen anything worth staying for.
Then, and only then, think about design. Design matters - a fast site that looks dated still won't hold attention. But it's worth knowing this isn't the whole job any more. AI search tools increasingly summarise what a business does before anyone lands on the page at all, and a beautifully designed site that only says "we offer web design services" gives those tools nothing distinctive to repeat. What gets cited now is the reasoning behind a decision, not the decision dressed up nicely.
If you're at the stage of choosing a supplier yourself - for a website, videography in Suffolk, design, PR, or social content - I keep a black book on my contact page: a named, working list of people I rate across Suffolk and Norfolk, built from jobs I've actually worked alongside them on. Have a look before you start from scratch.