Setting Up a UK Business: Your Online Admin Checklist
Registering a company in the UK takes about fifteen minutes and costs less than a decent takeaway. That part is genuinely easy, and there are hundreds of guides to it already. What nobody warns you about is the fortnight that follows — the drip-feed of small digital jobs that all turn out to depend on each other, done in the wrong order, at eleven o’clock at night, while you’re also trying to buy a van.
This is a checklist for that fortnight. It deliberately skips the accountancy and legal side — your accountant is better placed than we are on VAT thresholds and what to do about insurance. What follows is the online admin: the handful of things that decide how customers find you, what your email address looks like, and whether you can be booked before you’ve printed a single business card.
The order matters more than you’d think, so treat this as a sequence rather than a menu.
Step one: check the name is actually free — everywhere
Before you fall in love with a business name, spend twenty minutes checking it’s available in all four places you’ll need it. People routinely check one, register the company, and then discover the domain went in 2011.
Check, in this order:
- Companies House. The register is free to search and tells you instantly whether a limited company name is taken or too similar to an existing one. (Sole traders don’t register a name here, but it’s still worth looking to see who else is trading under it.)
- The Intellectual Property Office trade mark register. Also free. Availability at Companies House is not permission — a registered trade mark in your sector can override it, and finding that out later is expensive.
- The domain. A .co.uk that matches your name is close to essential. If it’s gone, you want to know now, while changing the name still costs you nothing.
- The social handles. You don’t need to build the profiles yet. You do need to know whether the handle exists, because discovering that afterwards is how businesses end up with an awkward underscore in their Instagram name for a decade.
If any of the four comes back taken, that’s not a disaster — it’s information, and it’s arriving at the only moment when it’s cheap. Adding your town to the name usually solves it and helps you locally at the same time.
Step two: register the domain
Buy the domain before you order anything with your name printed on it. It’s the foundation stone: your website sits on it, your email address sits on it, and every listing you create from here on will point at it.
Two rules to get right the first time, because both are painful to undo:
- Register it in your own name, on an account you can log into. Not your nephew’s account, not a designer’s, not an agency’s. This is the single most common trap we see, and it means the business can’t move or renew its own web address without someone else’s cooperation.
- Switch on auto-renew. A lapsed domain can be bought by anyone, including people who make a living holding them to ransom.
A .co.uk is generally the cheapest annual bill a business has — typically a single-figure to low-double-figure sum, though registrars vary and introductory prices often jump on renewal, so look at what it renews at rather than the headline. Our full guide to choosing a domain name for your UK business covers the spellability test and the traps in more depth.
Step three: business email on your own domain
Once the domain exists, the email address follows in about ten minutes: hello@yourbusiness.co.uk instead of yourbusiness2026@gmail.com.
This is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy. A quote sent from a free webmail address invites a question the customer can’t quite articulate, and on larger jobs it’s occasionally the reason you don’t get the call back. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both charge a low monthly per-user fee for this and both do the job; the honest answer is that it barely matters which you pick, so choose the one whose apps you already use. We go through the reasoning in does your business really need its own email address.
One practical note: set it up before you print anything. Business cards with the Gmail address on them have a way of outlasting your patience.
Step four: claim your Google Business Profile
For a local business, this is the single highest-return thing on the list — often more immediately valuable than the website itself, because it’s what puts you on the map and in the local results when someone nearby searches for what you do.
Claiming it is free. Expect the verification step to take a little while, which is exactly why it belongs early in the sequence rather than at the end: postcard or video verification can add days, and nothing else waits on it. Fill in every field you’re offered — category, service area, hours, services, photos — because the profiles that win are the complete ones. We’ve written a step-by-step walkthrough on setting up a Google Business Profile.
Once it’s live, start asking happy customers for reviews straight away. Reviews compound, and a profile with a handful of genuine recent ones beats an empty five-star profile every time. Getting more Google reviews is a slower job than it looks, so start it in week one.
Step five: the website
Last on the list, and that’s deliberate — it depends on everything above. But “last” doesn’t mean “eventually”. Your Google Business Profile gets you found; the website is where somebody decides whether to actually ring you, and a profile with no website attached quietly loses jobs to competitors who have one. If you’re still weighing it up, we’ve made the case in do I need a website for my small business.
Keep the first version small. Five pages is plenty: what you do, who you are, where you work, proof that other people were happy, and an obvious way to get hold of you. Typical UK build costs for a small local business site run somewhere in the region of £300 to £1,500 depending on scope, with agency work in bigger cities sitting higher — treat any figure you’re quoted as a starting point for a conversation about what’s included, particularly hosting, updates and who owns the domain afterwards.
Here’s where we declare our interest: we’re a UK web design company, and we build the site free for new businesses using the information already on your Google Business Profile — you can see how the free website offer works.
The order of play, at a glance
| Week | Job | Why it sits here |
|---|---|---|
| Before you commit | Name checks: Companies House, trade marks, domain, social handles | The only point at which changing your mind is free |
| Week 1 | Register the domain (in your own name, auto-renew on) | Email and website both depend on it |
| Week 1 | Set up business email on the domain | Needed before anything gets printed |
| Week 1 | Claim the Google Business Profile | Verification can take days — start it early |
| Week 1–2 | Ask your first customers for reviews | Slow to build, so start immediately |
| Week 2 | Get the website live | Where the enquiry actually happens |
| Ongoing | Keep hours, photos and services current | An out-of-date profile costs real jobs |
The short version
Check the name in all four places before you commit to it. Buy the domain in your own name and turn auto-renew on. Get email onto that domain before you print anything. Claim the Google Business Profile early, because verification is the one step you can’t hurry. Then get a small, honest website live and start asking for reviews.
None of it is difficult. It’s just a sequence — and doing it in the right order in your first fortnight saves the sort of unpicking that eats a whole weekend six months in.