The two things that will actually hold up your website (and neither of them is the website)

I’ve written before about getting a site live in days rather than months. That’s true, and I stand by it.

But I’d be doing you a disservice if I stopped there, because there are two things that reliably blow that timeline apart. In fifteen years of hearing “why isn’t my site live yet,” it’s almost always one of these two.

Neither of them is the website.

They’re your photos, and your domain. Let’s deal with both honestly, because if you sort these before you start, everything else moves fast.

Problem one: the photos

This is the single most common hold-up, and it catches almost everyone.

The build is done. The site’s ready. And it’s sat there waiting, because there are no decent pictures of the actual business, and the client keeps meaning to sort it and never quite does. A week goes by. Then three.

Why stock photos won’t save you

The temptation is obvious. Just grab something off a stock site and be done with it.

Please don’t. A photo of a smiling man in a hard hat who has never set foot in Lancashire tells a customer precisely nothing, and they can smell it instantly. Everyone has seen that photo. It’s on your competitor’s site too.

Real photos of real work do something stock cannot: they prove you exist and you’re good. That’s the entire job of a website for a service business.

There’s a search angle too. Original images are exactly what search engines and AI reward, because they can’t be generated from thin air. Generic content, images included, is invisible for the same reason it’s forgettable.

What to do about it, in order of effort

Start with your phone. Today.

Modern phone cameras are genuinely good. Better than most professional kit was fifteen years ago. And you’re probably already taking photos of your work for your own records.

A few things make an enormous difference:

Shoot in daylight. Outdoors, or near a window. Never the overhead lights.
Before and after. The single most persuasive image any trade can produce. Take the before shot before you start, because you can’t go back.
Get the whole thing in. Step back further than feels natural.
Wipe the lens. It’s in your pocket all day. This one thing will improve half your photos.
Take more than you need. Twenty shots, keep three.

That’s enough. Genuinely. A slightly imperfect photo of your actual work beats a flawless photo of somebody else’s, every single time.

Check your Instagram first. You’ve probably already done the work.

Before you go out shooting anything, scroll back through your own phone and your own social accounts. Most trades have been quietly posting photos of their jobs for years without thinking of it as a photo library.

That’s exactly what it is. Go back through your Instagram, your Facebook, your camera roll. Pull out every decent shot of finished work. You’ll usually find far more than you expected, and it costs you an afternoon on the sofa rather than a day on site.

Then let AI clean them up.

This is where things have changed. I can take the photos you send me and improve them properly: fix the lighting, straighten things up, clear out the clutter, make them consistent across the site.

Not fake them. Improve them. It’s still your work, your van, your finished job. It just looks like someone competent took the picture.

That means the bar for “good enough to send me” is now much lower than it used to be. Send me the slightly wonky photo. I’ll sort it.

Then, when you’re ready, get a photographer.

A half-day with a good local photographer is one of the better investments a service business can make, and the results will outlast three website redesigns.

I’m honest about this: I’d rather point you at someone local who does it properly than pretend I’m a photographer. If that’s the stage you’re at, ask me and I’ll help you find one.

The one that could cost you thousands

Now a warning, and I want you to take this one seriously, because I’ve watched it go wrong.

If you sell products, or you’re a dealer, or a supplier sends you a folder of lovely images to use, make sure they actually own the rights to them. Ask the question explicitly. Get it in writing.

We once had a large travel company hand over a set of images for use on a site. Perfectly professional, no reason to doubt them. Except they didn’t own the licence to them either. They’d been given them by someone else, who’d got them from somewhere else again.

Here’s the sting. The bill for that doesn’t land on the person who gave you the photo. It lands on you, because you’re the one who published it. “My supplier sent it to me” is not a defence, and it will not save you.

And the stock libraries have got noticeably more aggressive about chasing this, because AI-generated images have hammered their business and they’re hunting for revenue wherever they can find it. They run automated reverse-image searches across the whole web, find your site, and send a demand letter. It’s not a small number, either.

So, plainly:

Never lift an image from Google Images. Ever. It’s not a stock library, it’s just a search engine showing you other people’s property.
If a supplier or manufacturer gives you images, ask them directly whether they own the rights and whether you’re licensed to use them on your website. Keep the reply.
If you can’t get a straight answer, don’t use it.
When in doubt, take your own. It’s the only image nobody can ever bill you for.

That last point is worth sitting with. Your own photos aren’t just better for customers and better for search. They’re the only ones that carry zero legal risk.

The point

Don’t let this stop you. Phone photos, cleaned up, are absolutely enough to launch with. Get the site live and earning, and upgrade the pictures later.

Waiting six weeks for perfect photos costs you six weeks of enquiries. That’s a terrible trade.

Problem two: the domain (and the email hiding behind it)

Right. This is the one I actually dread, and I’m going to be unusually blunt about why.

Moving a website is easy. Moving a domain is where things go wrong, and it’s the part that has taken me longer than building the entire site more times than I care to admit.

Why it’s such a mess

If you’ve had a website before, your domain is tangled up in things you’ve probably forgotten about.

It was registered by a bloke who did your site in 2016 and isn’t answering emails. Or it’s in an account nobody has the password for. Or it’s under a personal email address of someone who left the company. Or the previous developer is being awkward about handing it over, because it’s the last bit of leverage they’ve got.

And behind all of it sits the thing that really matters: your email.

The bit that keeps me up at night

Your domain doesn’t just point at your website. It also routes your email.

Get that wrong and you don’t just have a broken site. You have a service business that silently stops receiving enquiries. No bounce, no warning, just a quiet nothing where your leads used to be. You might not notice for days.

I have never been willing to take that risk casually, and you shouldn’t let anyone else take it either.

So here’s how I do it

If you already have email that works, I leave it alone.

That’s the default, and it’s deliberate. I’ll point your website where it needs to go and I do not touch the settings that carry your mail. It stays exactly where it is, working exactly as it does now.

Not because it’s difficult. Because there is no good reason to put your enquiries at risk for the sake of tidiness. If it’s working, it stays.

If your email is a genuine mess, we sort it properly.

Sometimes it is. Old addresses, half-broken forwarding, nobody sure what’s connected to what. In that case I’ll usually recommend moving to Hostinger, for one honest reason: it’s straightforward, and you can add me to your account so I can do the fiddly bits without you handing over passwords or losing control of anything.

You still own it. You can remove me the moment you like. That’s the way it should be.

If you haven’t got a domain yet, register it yourself.

I’ll walk you through it, and I’ll insist you register it through your own account rather than mine. You own the domain, on day one, in your name.

That way, if you and I ever part company, you take it with you. No hostage situation. No awkward emails in 2031.

I mention this because it’s exactly what a lot of agencies won’t do, and it’s the reason so many businesses end up trapped. Your domain is the one thing you should never let anyone else hold.

What this means for your timeline

Both of these are on your side of the fence, and I’d rather say so plainly than blame you for it in six weeks.

So before we start:

Photos: scroll back through your Instagram and your camera roll first, you’ve probably already got them. Fill the gaps with your phone this week. Don’t wait for perfect, I’ll improve them. And if anyone hands you images, check they actually own them.
Domain: find out who actually controls it, and whether you can log in. If you can’t, start that conversation now, because it’s always slower than you think.

Sort those two, and there’s genuinely nothing left to hold your site up. That’s when days-not-months stops being a claim and starts being what happens.

Not sure who controls your domain, or what to do about photos? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself, and I’ll tell you straight.