What goes into a modern website, and who does it for you
When Smarter Business Tech rebuilt its own site as a static site, the pages were the quick part. The time went on everything around them, the things nobody notices until they are missing. The whole list is written up for the people who build websites in How to create a modern website in 2026 with Astro. This is the same list from the owner’s side, what each one is, why it matters to your business and what Stillsite does about it.
The icon in the browser tab
Most people have a row of tabs open, and the little icon in each one is how they find your site again, it is also what shows when someone saves your site to the home screen on their phone. Without one you get a blank square or a grey letter, which makes the site look unfinished.
A favicon used to be one file, now browsers, iPhones and Android phones each want their own size and format. We make the whole set from your logo when your site is rebuilt, and every page points to it.
The card a shared link shows
When someone shares a page of your site on LinkedIn, Facebook or in a WhatsApp message, the platform shows a card with a title, a line of text and a picture. For a small business a lot of new work comes from one person passing a link to another, and a proper card looks like a real business where a bare link looks like something you would think twice about clicking.
The card comes from a handful of tags hidden in the page, and the picture has to be a particular size, without them the platform picks whatever it likes (or nothing at all). Every page of a Stillsite site carries the tags, with its own title and line and the picture you choose for it, or the site’s own if there is not one.
Getting found
Search engines want a unique title and description for every page, because that is what they show in the results, and if a page does not have them Google makes one up from whatever it finds. They also want headings in the right order, a sitemap that lists every page and a small file that points them to it.
Stillsite writes all of it, and a page without a description is not published until it has one. If you are moving an existing site over, every page keeps its address, so links people have saved still work and you keep your place in search. Your dashboard also shows how many pages are in the sitemap and Google’s own scores for how ready the site is for search, on a phone and on a computer.
Fast on every device
People do not wait long for a slow site, especially on a phone with a poor signal, and Google takes speed into account too. A static site is basically fast to start with, every page is built in advance and served from servers close to whoever is visiting, so there is nothing to work out when someone arrives. What slows a site down over time is pictures.
A four megabyte photo straight off a phone should never reach a visitor at that size. When you email Stevie (Stillsite’s AI web developer) a picture, it is shrunk to a size a page can carry before it goes on the site. The hidden details a phone adds to a photo (where and when it was taken, and on what phone) are taken out on the way too, they have no business being on your website. The dashboard shows Google’s speed score on a phone, so you can see it stays fast.
Phones and iPads
This is the part that takes a lot of work. A site gets looked at on a phone held upright, an iPad either way round, a laptop and a big screen, and things go wrong on each of them, a picture that does not shrink, a button too small for a thumb, a line of text that makes the whole page scroll sideways. Most people will see your site on a phone first, so that is where the first impression is made.
A Stillsite site is built to arrange itself for each of them, and every change you ask for comes with pictures of the page before and after, at a computer’s width and a phone’s, plus a preview of the whole site so you can check it on your own phone before you say yes.
Dark mode
A lot of people run their phone or laptop in dark mode now, at least in the evening, and a site that stays bright white at night stands out for the wrong reasons. A site should follow the setting, with colours that still read and a logo that does not disappear into the background.
This site does, in each of its colour themes, and visitors can choose for themselves from the menu as well. Whether yours should is part of the rebuild, so just say when you send us the address.
Everyone can use it
Accessibility is probably the part most sites get wrong without anyone noticing. People who use a screen reader or a keyboard instead of a mouse simply leave a site that does not work for them, and nobody hears about it. The same things help search engines too, they cannot see a picture either.
Proper headings and a label on every form field are built into every Stillsite page. When you send Stevie a picture he looks at it and writes a description of what it shows, and if a change ever has a picture without one, the approval page points it out before you approve it. Accessibility is also one of the checks on every change.
The cookie banner
If a site uses Google Analytics or advertising cookies, the law (PECR, enforced by the ICO) says it has to ask before any of them are set, and rejecting has to be as easy as accepting. It has to be done properly, but a banner on a site that does not need one just gets in the way.
On a Stillsite site nothing from Google loads until someone accepts. With no analytics there is no banner at all. If you want to count your visitors you turn Google Analytics on from your dashboard, the site then shows the banner with Accept and Decline side by side and remembers each visitor’s answer. The help centre covers how to add Google Analytics and what your privacy notice needs to say.
The contact form
The contact form is where a visitor turns into a customer, so it really has to work. A static site has no server of its own to receive a form, so a small piece of code has to send the email to you, and keep out the bots that fill in every form they can find.
Stillsite’s form does that, with a bot check in front, and lands in your inbox at the address you choose on your dashboard (the help centre covers how to choose and test that address). The site and its forms are watched too, so you do not have to.
The hosting
On a traditional website, WordPress, Concrete5 or similar, hosting means a server to keep patched, a certificate to renew and plugins to keep updated, and plugins are one of the most common ways in for attackers (more on that in another post).
A Stillsite site has no admin login, no database and no plugins. It is built and published automatically whenever it changes and served from a network of servers around the world, and the certificate for the padlock is looked after and renewed for you. Every change gets a private preview before it goes live, and that preview is what you approve. Every version is kept as well, so any change can be undone.
That is a lot of parts for what looks like a simple website, and none of them stay done, every change to a site can break one of them. Stillsite does all of it for you and keeps doing it, with links, images, forms, accessibility and search checked on every change. How it works shows what happens when you ask for a change and Pricing shows what is included. If you would like to know what your own site would involve, send us the address.