A website that updates itself from your Google profile

Ask the owner of any small business what's wrong with their website and you'll usually hear the same answer: it's out of date. The hours are last winter's, the photos are three menus ago, and fixing it means logging into something nobody remembers the password for. Meanwhile one place does get kept current — because customers ring at the wrong times otherwise — and that's your Google Business Profile.

So that's what this website is built from. Connect your profile and the site assembles itself: hours, photos, services, map and reviews, all drawn from what Google already knows about you, and checked again every hour for as long as the site is up. Change your Christmas hours on Google and the site follows within the hour. You keep one thing up to date, the way you already do, and the website simply agrees with it.

What you actually get

One long page, deliberately. Everything a customer wants to know — what you do, where you are, when you're open, what other people made of you — in one scroll, with no menu to get lost in. The photos come across as Google holds them, the map points where your profile says you are, and the reviews are your real ones, current as of the last hourly check, not a hand-picked row pasted in two years ago.

Alongside the page sits a journal: articles written from your reviews, quoting your customers as they wrote it. Each one lands as a draft for you to read first. It's how the site keeps growing without you ever facing a blank page.

Two switches, both yours

Nothing is live until you press publish. Build the site, tinker with it, sit on it for a month — the public sees nothing until you say so.

There's a second switch, separate from the first: nothing is shown to Google until you turn indexing on. Plenty of owners want a link to send customers long before they want strangers finding the site in a search, so those are two decisions rather than one, and you make both, in whichever order suits. Most website worries are really publishing worries — what if it goes live before it's ready, what if Google sees the mess. The two switches exist to remove exactly that.

The honest edges

• The site is only as good as your profile. Three photos on Google means three photos here. The happy flip side: every improvement to your profile now improves two things at once.
• It's one long page on purpose. If what you want is a ten-page brochure site with a careers section, this isn't that, and we'll say so rather than bend it out of shape.
• The site follows your profile — that's the whole idea — so corrections belong on Google, not on the page. One source, no drift, no wondering which version is right.
• It needs the Google Business Profile connection to work. No profile, no self-updating site — though if you haven't got one yet, that's the first thing to put right.
• The journal never publishes itself. Drafts wait for you, however long you take.

A website used to be something you bought, admired, and watched go stale. This one is closer to a mirror held up to the profile you already look after — and nobody has to remember to update a mirror.