5 decisions that affect your website more than design
Hosting, a domain email, analytics, the contact form, SSL. The things a designer won't solve, but that cause 80% of future problems.
1. Hosting
Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, or classic shared hosting? For a static business card, Cloudflare Pages is enough — free, fast, SSL included. For an e-shop or an app with a database: Vercel Pro or your own VPS.
2. Domain email
Use your own email (info@company.com), not Gmail. Google Workspace costs about €5.40/month. Clients, banks and suppliers will trust you more. Even with an otherwise great site, gmail.com in your signature looks amateurish.
3. Analytics
GA4 is free but it triggers a cookie banner. Plausible or Umami are GDPR-friendly without a banner. Pick what you'll actually look at — not the most feature-rich one.
4. Contact form
An email to Gmail gets lost. Send the lead to a database / Notion / Slack too — so you can filter contacts and track their status. Bonus: reply within an hour. Conversion drops steeply after 24h.
5. SSL + security headers
SSL is a given. HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options — few developers set these; Google doesn't mind, but the crawler will be happier. Check via securityheaders.com.
These are boring decisions. Nobody gives you a medal for them. But getting them wrong costs you 200+ hours a year of "why doesn't this work."