Help & guides

Getting started#

1. Start building at /start — no account needed. Pick a starter layout that matches your business and give your website a name. A complete multi-page site is built straight away.
2. Fill in your details. When the editor opens it asks whether to fill in the rest: what you do, phone, email, suburb and ABN. They go through the headline, contact details, footer and Google descriptions in one go. Skip it if you like, and come back to it from Site → Business.
3. Sign up when you want to save. Your work is kept on your device until then; creating a free account attaches it to you so you can publish, upload photos and get enquiries.
4. Edit. Click any text to change it. Use Add to drag in blocks or whole sections. Pages to add, rename and reorder pages. Design to switch theme, colours, fonts and artwork. Site for business details, logo, social links and your address.
5. Preview at phone, tablet and desktop widths from the top bar.
6. Publish. Your site goes live at yourbusiness.websitebuilder.net.au in seconds.

Launch checklist#

Tick these off — your progress is saved on this device.

• Replace every placeholder sentence with your own words
• Add your phone, email, address and ABN in Site settings
• Upload a logo and at least six photos of real work
• Write a one-line SEO description for each page, with your suburb
• Check the site at phone width
• Set up the contact form fields you actually want
• Publish
• Claim your Google Business Profile and add the site address
• Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console
• Connect your .com.au (Pro)

Using the editor#

• Select a block by clicking it. Click text a second time to edit it in place.
• Move with the ↑ ↓ buttons on the toolbar, or drag the ⠿ handle.
• Sections are the horizontal bands. Click the edge of one to change its background, spacing, width and column layout.
• Columns: in the inspector, choose 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns for a row. Columns stack on phones automatically; tick “Hide on phones” for anything that shouldn’t.
• Theme artwork (the hero backdrops, wave dividers and footer motif) can be switched off under Design if you prefer a plainer look.
• Restore an earlier version of a page from Pages → History if you change your mind.
• Schedule a publish with the arrow beside Publish: pick a date and time (in your business’s time zone) and whatever is in the editor then goes live by itself. We email you when it has. Change or cancel it from the same menu or your dashboard.
• “Waiting for a quick check” after Publish means something looked like it might collect passwords, codes or card details, or uses a bank’s or government agency’s name. Your live site stays as it was while a person looks, usually within a day, and we email you when it’s done.
• Light or dark: the editor is dark to start with. Press ? (or the ? button at the top) and choose Light or Match my device. Only the editor changes, never your site. The same menu replays the quick tour of the editor.

Pages, menus and reusable sections#

• The menu is the list in Pages. Drag a page up or down to move it, or onto the middle of another page to put it in that page’s drop-down. On a phone, use ↑ ↓ and “Sits under”. + Menu link adds a link to a booking site, a phone number or a section.
• New pages can start from a template (About, Services, Contact, Gallery, FAQ, Pricing or Team) with your details filled in. Tick Keep it as a draft to work on it without it appearing on your live site.
• Private pages (Pro): give a page a password in its settings, and visitors type it once to see the page. Handy for client areas and staff notes.
• Link to a section: give it a Link name like “prices” in its settings, then pick it from “Link to…” on any button or menu link. Buttons that go to #contact already find your contact section, even from another page.
• Reuse a section: Make global shares one section across pages, like your opening hours, so one edit changes them all. Save to My sections keeps a copy you can add to any page of any of your sites from Add.
• Announcement bar: a one-line message above your header on every page, under Site settings. Visitors can close it until you change the message.
• Restore points: Site settings → Settings history takes your theme, colours, fonts, business details, header, footer and menu back to an earlier point. Download a whole-site backup from the dashboard any time.

Connecting your own domain#

Custom domains are included in Pro. You keep buying and renewing your domain with your registrar; we just serve your site on it.

1. If you don't have one yet, buy your domain from any Australian registrar. .com.au and .au need an Australian presence — an ABN is the usual way — and are the most trusted by Australian customers.
2. In the editor, open Site → Your own domain, enter it (e.g. www.yourbusiness.com.au) and press Save.
3. At your registrar's DNS settings, add the record below. For the bare domain (no www), ask your registrar for an ALIAS/ANAME record or “CNAME flattening” to the same value, or forward the bare domain to www.
4. Press Publish. HTTPS is set up automatically. Most domains are live within an hour; DNS can occasionally take up to 24 hours.

Getting found on Google#

Your site already publishes clean titles, descriptions, a sitemap and LocalBusiness data with your suburb and ABN. These three things make the biggest difference on top of that:

1. Google Business Profile. Free, and the single biggest driver of local enquiries. Create or claim your listing at business.google.com, add your website address, and ask happy customers for reviews.
2. Google Search Console. Add your site at search.google.com/search-console, choose the HTML tag method and paste the tag into Site settings → Search & sharing, publish, then submit https://yourdomain/sitemap.xml. Google starts indexing within days.
3. Write for your suburb. Put the areas you serve in your headline and page descriptions (“Plumber in Newcastle and Lake Macquarie”). Edit each page's SEO title and description under Pages — there's a live Google preview.

Changing a page's address is safe: the old address sends visitors and Google to the new one. If you're replacing an older website, add its old addresses under Pages → Redirects so links people saved still work. Your dashboard's Visitors tab shows how many people visit, where they came from, and any addresses they tried that don't exist.

Contact forms and enquiries#

Every enquiry is saved under Dashboard → Enquiries and emailed to the business email in your Site settings. Spam is filtered automatically. Reply straight from your inbox — the customer's email is set as the reply-to. Export enquiries as a spreadsheet from the dashboard any time.

Images#

Upload JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF up to 8 MB. Photos are resized in your browser before upload, with smaller copies for phones, so pages stay fast on mobile data. Add a short description (alt text) to each image — it helps accessibility and Google, and the editor will nudge you when one is missing. You can also paste an image straight from your clipboard into the editor.

• Several at once: drop photos onto the page in the editor (onto a photo to replace it, onto a gallery to add to it), or choose as many as you like in the picker. Each shows its own progress and can be cancelled.
• Your image library is under Dashboard → your site → Images & files. Search by name or description, see which pages use each image, rename it, and delete many at once. Not used finds images you can safely delete; No description finds the ones Google can't read.
• Describe an image once in the library and that description is filled in wherever you place it. You can still write a different one for a particular spot.

Your account and security#

• Confirm your email by pressing the link we send when you sign up, so enquiries and password resets reach you. Not there? Check spam, or use Send it again on your dashboard.
• Change your name or login email under Dashboard → Account. A new email takes effect when you press the link we send to it, and we let your old address know.
• Where you're logged in lists each device with its rough location. Log out any you don't recognise, then change your password (which logs out every other device too).
• Two-step sign-in asks for a 6-digit code from an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, 1Password, Authy and others) after your password. Turn it on under Account, scan the QR code, and keep the ten recovery codes somewhere safe: each one logs you in once if you don't have your phone.
• Recent security activity on the Account page lists logins and changes to your account for the last year: password and email changes, two-step sign-in, domains, transfers and deleted sites. Anything our support team did is marked. If something there wasn’t you, change your password and log out your other devices.
• Giving a site to someone else (selling the business, or handing it to a client): open the site, choose Transfer or delete, and enter their email. They accept from their own dashboard within 14 days; until then nothing changes. Their plan needs room for it, and a custom domain only moves to a Pro account.

Billing#

Pro is $19/month or $190/year, in AUD with GST included ($17.27 + $1.73 GST monthly). Manage or cancel from Dashboard → Account. Tax invoices are emailed after each payment. Cancel within 14 days of your first Pro payment for a full refund.

Keyboard shortcuts#

Glossary#

ABN

Australian Business Number — 11 digits, free from the ABR. Needed for a .com.au and shown on your site’s footer and structured data.

CNAME

A DNS record that points one name (www.yourbusiness.com.au) at another (sites.websitebuilder.net.au).

DNS

The system that turns your domain name into the place your site is served from. Managed at your registrar.

HTTPS / SSL

The padlock. Encrypts traffic to your site. Set up automatically for every site here.

Registrar

Where you buy and renew your domain — VentraIP, Crazy Domains, GoDaddy and so on.

Sitemap

A list of your pages for search engines, generated for you at /sitemap.xml.

Structured data

Machine-readable facts about your business (LocalBusiness) that Google reads to understand where you are and what you do.

Still stuck?#

Email hello@websitebuilder.net.au with a link to your site and what you're trying to do. We answer in Australian business hours, usually the same day.