Moving your Australian business online: a WordPress checklist

Start with the domain and hosting

Before any website decisions, sort your domain and hosting. For an Australian business:

Domain. A .com.au domain requires an Australian Business Number (ABN) or ACN and a nexus to Australia — which your business has. It signals clearly to Australian customers that you're a legitimate local business. Register with an Australian registrar to simplify ongoing management.
Hosting location. Use Australian servers. Not because overseas hosting won't work, but because your Australian visitors will experience measurably faster load times, and Google's search results are localised — Australian-hosted sites have an advantage in Australian search results.
SSL. Make sure your hosting provider includes SSL. In 2020, there's no legitimate reason to launch a site without HTTPS. Browsers actively flag non-HTTPS sites as "Not Secure."

Choose WordPress, not a website builder

Website builders — Squarespace, Wix, Weebly — are attractive for their simplicity. The tradeoff is significant loss of control: you're locked into their platform, their pricing, their feature set, and their terms of service. When they change something, you have no choice.

Self-hosted WordPress gives you a site you own completely. The full ecosystem of plugins covers virtually any functionality a business site needs. Your data is yours. If you want to move hosts, you move the files and database. For a business that expects to grow and evolve its web presence, this ownership matters.

Get a good theme — but don't spend months on it

WordPress has thousands of themes. Pick one that works for your business type and looks professional, and move on. A business site that's live and working with a decent theme is worth infinitely more than a perfect site that's still being designed.

Avoid themes that bundle dozens of plugins and demos — they're heavy and slow. Look for a theme from an established developer with recent updates and active support. Astra, GeneratePress, and Kadence are well-regarded options with active development communities.

Essential plugins only

Every plugin you install is maintenance overhead and a potential security liability. Start with what you actually need:

An SEO plugin (Yoast SEO or Rank Math) for page titles, meta descriptions, and sitemap
A caching plugin if your host doesn't handle caching at the server level
An SMTP plugin to make sure your contact form emails actually arrive
A contact form plugin (Contact Form 7 or WPForms Lite)
WooCommerce if you're selling products or services online

Don't install a security plugin, a backup plugin, a CDN plugin, and a performance plugin before you've even published a page. Add functionality when you have a specific, identified need.

Set up Google Search Console from day one

Google Search Console is free and tells you how Google sees your site — what keywords it ranks for, whether there are crawl errors, whether there are any manual actions against the site. Set it up when you launch. The data it collects from the beginning is more valuable than setting it up later.

Content before perfection

A common trap is spending months refining a website without publishing anything. Search engines rank pages, not websites — a site with helpful, relevant content about your business and its services starts building search visibility from the day it goes live. A site in perpetual revision mode builds nothing.

Launch with core pages (Home, About, Services, Contact), a clear way for people to get in touch with you, and accurate information. You can improve everything after it's live.

DownUnder WP is built for Australian small businesses: Australian servers, Australian support, straightforward pricing. From $5/month to get your WordPress site running on infrastructure that actually performs for your Australian visitors.