Websites for Independent Shops & Boutiques
If you already sell online, nothing about that changes. Your Shopify, Etsy or Square checkout keeps running exactly as it is — what gets built is the fast, findable front door around it, because the usual problem isn't the checkout, it's that nobody arrives at it in the first place.
Audit back within 24 hours · Working demo within 2 days · No deposit, ever
The four problems I find most in this trade.
Not generic web-design advice. These are the specific failures that turn up over and over when running real Google audits on businesses like yours — each one with what it's actually costing you and how it gets fixed.
A heavy theme is throttling the whole shop
The physical shop is invisible in local search
No reason to come back
Product photos are enormous
Want to know which of these apply to you? Test your site free on the home page for the speed number in thirty seconds, or ask for the written audit and get all four checked properly by hand, back within 24 hours.
Designed around your business, not a template.
A physical shop and an online-first boutique need opposite things. A high-street independent is being searched for by people who want to know if it's worth the trip — so hours, parking, what's in stock and what the place feels like carry everything. An online-first boutique lives on lookbooks, drops and a mailing list, and the site's job is to make browsing feel good enough to justify a full-price purchase. A shop doing both needs the two journeys kept clearly separate rather than mashed together. That's the first decision in the build, before any design happens.
- Home built around what you actually sell
- Lookbook or collection pages
- New in and sale, given real weight
- About the shop and its story
- Find us — hours, parking, what it's like inside
- Contact and enquiries
- Your existing checkout kept completely untouched
- Lookbook-style collection pages
- Galleries with click-to-enlarge
- Mailing list signup on a free tier
- Instagram feed embedded live
- Stock or new-in updated by you (Platform tier)
- Store and Product schema where it applies
- Local search setup for the physical shop
- Google Business Profile with photos and hours
- Fast product imagery — a direct conversion factor
- Neighbourhood and town in the real copy
- Review schema for stars in results
What it would cost you.
Guide prices based on the typical scope for this trade, one-off, with £0 a month on every tier. The free audit turns this into a real number — often a lower tier than people expect. And don't feel boxed in by the recommendation: pick by what you need the site to do.
- Home, About, Find Us, Contact and one more
- Opening hours, location and parking
- Links straight into your existing shop
- Google indexing and local search setup
- Enquiry form landing in your inbox
- Everything in Starter, up to 8 pages
- Lookbook-style collection pages
- Photo galleries with click-to-enlarge
- New-in and sale sections given real weight
- Your existing cart and checkout untouched
- Everything in Business, up to 12 pages
- Update lookbooks and new-in yourself
- Instagram feed embedded live
- Mailing list signup for drops and sales
- Analytics showing which collections pull traffic
- Free audit with real Google data first
- A working demo before you pay anything
- £0 per month — hosting is genuinely free, forever
- Your existing booking or payment system kept exactly as is
- Built mobile-first and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA
- You own the code, the domain and every login
- 14-day fix guarantee from launch
- No deposit at any point before you've seen the work
Want to edit it yourself? You don't need the top tier for that. Add the £150 self-edit content panel to any build and change prices, photos and text yourself with no monthly fee — it's on the add-ons list with everything else.
Worth adding for shops & boutiques
Fixed one-off prices, addable to any tier, and addable later rather than up front. These four are the ones that actually earn their money in this trade — the full list of fifteen is on the pricing page.
Don't buy any of these speculatively. After the free audit you'll be told which one or two would genuinely move your numbers, and which of the rest would just be me taking your money.
The searches that actually bring you work.
Getting found isn't one thing called “SEO” — it's whether your pages answer the exact questions being typed. Here are the ones that matter in this trade, and what your site has to say to win them.
| What they type | What your site has to answer |
|---|---|
| “[type of shop] [town]” | That you exist, where you are and whether you're open |
| “independent boutique near me” | Photos of the actual shop, not stock interiors |
| “[brand you stock] [town]” | Which brands you carry, as text Google can read |
| “[town] gift shop open sunday” | Accurate hours in schema, including Sundays |
| “[your shop name]” | A site that looks like the shop, not a marketplace profile |
Every one of these is winnable locally, because most of your competitors have never written a page that answers them. That's the whole job: one properly written page per real question, marked up so Google can read it, on a site fast enough to keep the person who clicked.
The ones that come up every time.
Will you touch my Shopify or Etsy?
No. Anything that already takes money is left completely alone — that's a firm rule, not a preference. The build is the fast front end around it, plus the local search presence that gets people to the checkout you already have.
I've got a physical shop and sell online. Which matters more?
Usually the physical one, and it's usually the neglected one. Local search for an independent shop is the highest-intent traffic there is — someone typing "[your kind of shop] [your town]" is minutes from walking through the door. Most shop websites send Google almost no local signals at all.
Is a mailing list worth bothering with?
For an independent, more than almost anything else. It's the only channel you own outright — no algorithm between you and your customers, no ad spend, and it costs nothing on a free tier. It gets set up as standard on the £795 build.
Two ways to start, both free.
Already have a site? Take the audit — real Google data plus the checks an automated tool can't run, back within 24 hours. Haven't got one? Take the demo — a real working site for your business on a live link within 2 days. Neither costs you anything and neither needs a deposit.