Building a business website in Bangladesh: what it actually takes
Most guides on this subject are sales pages with a checklist bolted on. This one is the brief I wish clients arrived with. What "professional" means in concrete terms, which pages you need, what you have to prepare before anyone can start, and the specific mistakes I keep finding on Bangladeshi business sites.
What "professional" actually means
The word gets used to mean "looks expensive", which is the least important part. A buyer deciding whether to trust your company is checking, mostly without realising it, whether these things are true.
- It loads before they give up. On mobile data, not office wifi. Three seconds is roughly the limit of patience.
- It works on a phone. Not "shrinks down to fit" — genuinely works, with tappable buttons and readable text.
- They can tell what you do within five seconds of landing on the homepage.
- They can contact you in one tap. Phone number that dials, WhatsApp that opens, a form that works.
- There is evidence you are real. A physical address, real photos, named people, actual clients.
- Nothing is broken. No missing images, no "Lorem ipsum" left in a corner, no 2019 copyright in the footer.
- The padlock is there. A browser warning about an insecure site ends the visit.
None of that is expensive. Almost all of it is missing from the average Bangladeshi company website, which is why a merely competent site here outperforms so easily.
The pages you need
Five to eight pages covers nearly every business. More than that usually means someone is padding a quote.
| Page | Its job | Needed? |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Say what you do, for whom, and what to do next | Always |
| Services or Products | One page per major service if you want to be found for it | Always |
| About | Prove you are a real company with real people | Always |
| Contact | Phone, WhatsApp, email, address, map, form | Always |
| Work or Clients | Evidence. The page that closes deals | Nearly always |
| Blog | Only if you will actually write. An abandoned blog looks worse than none | Optional |
| Careers | Only when hiring | Rarely |
| Certifications | Genuinely useful for exporters and manufacturers | Sector-dependent |
One page per service, not one page listing services
If you offer six services and they all sit on one page, you can rank for none of them. Six pages, each answering what it is, who it is for, what it costs and what happens next, is the single structural decision that separates a site that gets found from a brochure.
Prepare this before anyone starts
Development takes one to three weeks. Projects that take three months are almost never held up by development. They are waiting for this list.
- Your logo in a proper file. PNG with a transparent background at minimum; the original AI, SVG or EPS if your designer will release it. A logo cropped from a Facebook cover cannot be used well.
- Company description in two lengths. One sentence and one paragraph. Write it as you would explain the business to a stranger, not as a mission statement.
- Each service explained, roughly 100–200 words. In your own words. This is the part people postpone and it is the part that decides whether the site is any good.
- Real photographs. Your premises, your team, your products, your work. A phone camera and decent daylight beats stock photography every time, because buyers can tell the difference immediately.
- Contact details exactly as they should appear. Phone with country code, WhatsApp number, email on your own domain rather than Gmail, full address, opening hours.
- Client list or projects, with permission to name them.
- Trade licence details if you want them shown, plus any certifications that matter in your sector.
- One decision-maker. Nominate the person who approves. Design by committee is the second biggest cause of delay after missing content.
If you take one thing from this page
Write the services text yourself before you hire anyone. Nobody else knows your business, and a developer inventing your service descriptions produces exactly the vague filler that makes visitors leave. An hour of your time here changes the entire outcome.
Build for the phone first
Bangladesh has around 82.8 million internet users and roughly 186 million active mobile connections — more connections than people. Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone, on mobile data, quite possibly on a mid-range Android rather than the device your designer works on.
What that means in practice:
- Design the mobile layout first and treat desktop as the adaptation, not the reverse.
- Test on real mobile data, not office wifi. A site that feels instant on your desk can take eight seconds on 4G in a busy area.
- Make the phone number a
tel:link so one tap dials it. - Put a WhatsApp button where a thumb can reach it. This is how business enquiries actually arrive here.
- Keep the hero image under a few hundred kilobytes. It is the single biggest cause of a slow first impression.
- Buttons at least 44 pixels tall. Anything smaller gets mis-tapped.
Eight mistakes I keep finding
1. The whole page is one image
Someone designs the page in Photoshop, exports it as a single JPEG and the "site" is that picture. It is heavy, it is unreadable on a phone, the text cannot be selected, and Google sees an empty page. This is the worst thing you can do to a business website and it is still common.
2. Contact details as an image
Usually done to stop scrapers harvesting the address. It also stops your customer tapping to call, stops them copying the email, and stops Google associating the details with your business. Use real text.
3. Bangla text set as images
Same problem, usually done to avoid font trouble. Modern web fonts render Bangla properly. Set it as text.
4. Hosting and domain in the developer's name
The most expensive mistake on this list. When you want to change developer, you find you own nothing. Register both yourself, with your own email and card, and give the developer access. Any developer who resists this is telling you something.
5. Nothing updated after launch
Twelve months on: outdated WordPress core, fourteen outdated plugins, one with a public vulnerability, no backups. The cleanup after a hack costs more than the original build. I wrote about what upkeep should actually cost and include.
6. A slider with five rotating banners
They are slow, nobody reads past the first slide, and they mostly exist because the business could not decide which message mattered. Pick one message.
7. The 2019 copyright
A footer year three years out of date tells every visitor nobody has touched this site since. It takes one line of code to make it update itself.
8. No Google Business Profile
Free, takes twenty minutes, and it is the difference between appearing on Google Maps when someone searches your category near them, and not existing.
Domain and hosting
Domain. Take the .com if you can get it. It costs less, transfers easily, and carries no search disadvantage. .com.bd is worth adding when the local signal genuinely matters to your customers — some buyers do read it as a sign of an established local company. Register it in your own name.
Hosting. For a normal business site, a decent shared plan at ৳3,000–6,000 a year is plenty. Spend more only if you are running a store, where the checkout cannot be cached and the server does real work on every load.
Server location. A server closer to your visitors helps, but hosting quality matters far more than geography. A well-run overseas host with a CDN usually beats a cheap local one.
Email. Use an address on your own domain. A quotation sent from a Gmail address costs you credibility with exactly the corporate and export buyers you want.
What it costs and how long it takes
A five-to-eight page business site runs roughly ৳8,000–18,000 from a freelancer and ৳20,000–45,000 from an agency. I have broken down what drives those numbers separately, and what changes when you are selling online.
Timeline: one to three weeks of actual work. Add however long it takes you to produce the content, which is the honest variable.
After it launches
The site going live is the middle of the job, not the end.
- Google Search Console. Free. Verify the site, submit the sitemap, and you can see what people search before they find you.
- Google Business Profile. Twenty minutes, and the strongest local signal available.
- Test every form. Send yourself one from a phone. A contact form that silently fails is a fault I find constantly, and the business never knows how many enquiries it lost.
- Check backups exist, stored somewhere other than the hosting account.
- Diarise the domain renewal. Expired domains take businesses offline more often than hacks do.
Questions people ask
Is a Facebook page enough?
For a small shop taking orders in the comments, sometimes. Not once you want to be found on Google, take online payments, or be taken seriously by a corporate buyer or an overseas importer. A page you do not own also disappears the day the platform decides it should.
WordPress or a custom build?
WordPress for almost every business site. You can edit it yourself, any developer can pick it up if we part ways, and it does everything a company website needs. Custom development is for applications, not brochures.
Should the site be in Bangla?
Depends entirely on who buys from you. Selling to local consumers, Bangla helps. Selling to corporate buyers, exporters or overseas clients, English is usually the working language. Bilingual doubles your content work, so decide before the build rather than after.
Do I need a blog?
Only if someone will actually write it. A blog with three posts from two years ago actively damages the impression of the company. Better to have no blog than an abandoned one.
How do I know if my current site is any good?
Open it on your phone, on mobile data, and time it. Then try to call the business from the site in one tap. Then look for the padlock. Three tests, two minutes, and they will tell you most of what you need to know.
Bangladesh internet and mobile connection figures from DataReportal's Digital 2026 Bangladesh report, referring to October 2025. Price ranges checked September 2026.
Planning a website for your business?
Tell me what the company does and who you need it to reach. You'll get a straight answer on scope, cost and timeline — including whether you need less than you think.