A consulting business does not need a website. It can run entirely on word of mouth, referrals, and the people you already know or could meet anywhere, like at events or conferences. Many consulting companies operate every day without a website.
While I’m obviously biased towards you having a website because I sell top tier websites to consultants, I’m writing this guide for consultants who are starting from scratch and deciding whether to put time, effort, maintenance, and money into having one. There are many reasons for a consultant not to have a website, and I will outline a few in this article.
Four Reasons Not to Get a Website
1. You Don’t Have Much Money
A website is an investment. You have to buy the domain name (often cheaper on Porkbun), hosting (unless you have the technical skills to use services like Cloudflare Workers or Fly.io and optimize sites to stay on the free tier), tools for search and answer engine optimization, themes and plugins if you use a site builder, and so on. If you’re just getting started and don’t have any clients yet, it may be better to just get clients directly before worrying about a website (see below for how).
2. You Don’t Have Much Time
You could set up something simple and free like a Linktree, but that’s more of a list of links and contact information than a full on consulting website. If you use a site builder, you run the risks of taking many hours that could have been spent on your business, and doing a bad job in terms of performance and accessibility to rank on search engines, or maintaining security, leading to the possibility of being hacked. I’ve seen many utterly unusable websites on Wix, or insecure and poorly maintained ones made on Wordpress. Making one of these drag and drop sites can take hours and hours of time across days or even weeks to get it to look right on your screen (let alone the screens of everyone else).
3. You Already Know How to Get Clients
If you’re already getting clients through referrals, events, or outreach, a website won’t change much in the short term. Put the time you would have spent on it into the work that is already paying.
4. You Can Efficiently Communicate Your Offerings
If you can explain what you do, who it is for, and what it costs in a short email or a one-page PDF, that may do the job a website would.
What a Website Is For, and How to Get Clients Without One
For most consultants, the point of a website is to get more clients. This could mean using it to get inbound leads, or having a place for a referral to understand and vet you, or even a place for a purchase order to be made. More established consultants may use it as a way to sell ebooks, courses, and other content or merchandise as well.
There are many ways to get clients without one. The three to start with are events and conferences, cold outreach, and warm referrals, and warm referrals are the key one. Here is how to get consulting clients with each method.
How to Make It Work on Purpose
- Write one short description of what you do and who it is for, in words a referrer can forward as is.
- Keep a one-page record of past work you are allowed to talk about, ready to send when asked.
- Ask finished clients for a testimonial in their own words, and use them.
- Stay in touch with past clients and peers before you need them, not when the pipeline is thin.
- Make sure your name returns something sensible when searched, even a single professional profile.
When to Add a Website
If the work is steady and you are happy with how it arrives, there is nothing to fix. A website becomes worth it when you want something referrals cannot give you: reach beyond your network, a public body of thinking, proof that outlasts a conversation, or a place to sell what you have written. Those are covered in what a website can do for a consultant.