Guide: a website for a micro-entrepreneur

The first screen decides whether the person stays or closes the tab. The working formula is short: what you do, for whom, and where. “Bookkeeping for micro-entrepreneurs in Marseille” works; “Professional solutions for your business” does not, because it fits anyone at all.

Then one line on why you: years in the trade, number of clients, specific experience. And one button leading to a single action, not three at once. Put three equal buttons on the first screen and the visitor picks none of them.

The photo is part of the first screen too. Your own face or your own work says more than a stock image of a handshake — that one is on a thousand other sites and tells nobody anything about you.

The minimum for a micro-entrepreneur is a domain name and hosting. A .fr domain costs 10–15 € a year, simple hosting 3 to 10 € a month. Look at the renewal price, not the first year: almost everywhere the first year is a promotion, sometimes 1 €, and the second one arrives at the normal rate.

Two things are not worth saving on. First, the domain name: register it in your own name and on your own email address, not your contractor’s, or one day you will discover that your own web address is not yours. Second, backups: hosting without them is cheaper right up to the first failure.

The cheapest working route to a decent appearance is to buy a ready-made design. Do not confuse two different products here. A theme installs into WordPress whole and brings a header, a footer and settings with it: on ThemeForest expect 40–70 € including VAT, with a real range of 12 to 300. A Template Kit is cheaper, 18–30 €, but it is only a set of ready sections for the Elementor builder: no header, no footer, and the builder has to be set up already. This site is built on a kit.

And budget time on top of the purchase. A bought design arrives with demo content: somebody else’s numbers in the counters, images hosted on the author’s server, a dozen sections you do not need, and filler text in unexpected places. Cleaning this site took a week. A template gives you the look, not the structure — what to say to the client and in what order, you have read above.

What you can safely save on: paid themes with a hundred features, builders on an all-inclusive subscription, and a 500 € logo. None of those bring clients.

More than half of your visitors open the site on a phone, some of them standing in the street. That changes the requirements: text has to be readable without zooming, buttons tappable with a finger, and the phone number has to start a call in one touch.

Checking is easy: open your own page on your own phone and try to work out in fifteen seconds what you do and how to reach you. If you had to scroll or pinch to read it, a client will not bother.

Common mobile failures: a menu that does not open, a form with fields wider than the screen, a PDF instead of text, and a map that stretches the page sideways. All of it is an hour’s work to fix, but you only notice it by looking at the site on a phone rather than on a laptop.

Publishing is not the finish line. In the first week three things are worth doing.

Fill in your Google Business Profile. For a local business it brings enquiries faster than the site itself: the listing shows up in Maps and in “near me” searches. The minimum: a category, a service area (use it instead of an address if you work from home), a few photos, the link to your site, and the first reviews from real clients. In detail in a separate guide.

Check that the form actually arrives. Send it yourself and make sure the message lands. On cheap hosting, mail sent by WordPress goes to spam almost every time: it leaves from a non-existent address like wordpress@your-domain. An SMTP plugin fixes it — messages then go through your real mailbox and reach the recipient.

Put the link where people already know you: your email signature, your profiles, local directories. The first visitors do not come from search, they come from people.

A month later, look at the site through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time and remove what does not work. A site corrected after the first enquiries beats one polished for six months before launch.

A cookie is a small file a website puts in your browser in order to remember something. Everyone has heard the word; the meaning usually slips past — which is exactly why this section gets skipped.

There are two kinds. Technical ones make the site work: they remember the chosen language, the contents of a basket, the fact that you are logged in. They need no consent — without them nothing runs. All the others, analytics and advertising, remember behaviour: how many people came, from where, what they looked at, whether they came back. Those are the ones you must ask permission for, and those are what a cookie policy is about.

And now the part almost nobody writes about. Third-party cookies do not appear only when you deliberately “switch something on”. Any embed from someone else’s service is someone else’s code running in your visitor’s browser. A YouTube video, a Google map, fonts loaded from Google’s servers, a chat widget, a social feed, a payment button, an advertising pixel — each of them sees the person’s IP address and can write its own identifiers into their browser. Often as the page loads, before the visitor has clicked anything. The service is not yours, but you are answerable for it: it sits on your page.

One more thing people trip over: the law does not talk about cookies as such, but about any writing to and reading from the visitor’s device — that is article 82 of the loi Informatique et Libertés. So “ours isn’t a cookie, it’s localStorage” is not an argument; the requirement is the same.

Without a counter you will not know the main thing: whether people come at all, where from, and on which screen they leave. The minimum is Google Search Console: it shows which queries people find you by and puts no cookies on your visitors at all. Google Analytics shows behaviour on the site — and does set identifiers, which means it needs consent.

Here is the moment almost everyone misses. The day you connect analytics, install a chatbot or embed a video, someone else’s code appears on your site. From that day the consent banner is mandatory, the cookie policy has to be updated, and those scripts must not run until the person has agreed. The rule is simple: added an external service — go back and review the policy.

There is also a way round it that few people know: you can have statistics without a banner. The CNIL exempts audience-measurement tools from consent provided they are strictly configured — identifiers kept no longer than 13 months, data no longer than 25, the IP address truncated, statistics for you alone and for one site only, nothing passed to third parties. Google Analytics does not meet those conditions; Matomo does, and the CNIL has published a dedicated configuration guide for it. For a one-person site this is often the best option: you get the numbers and no banner.

As for the youtube-nocookie.com address everyone recommends: it genuinely reduces tracking, but it does not remove the need for consent. Even in that mode the embed contacts Google’s servers as the page loads and writes technical identifiers into the browser — before anyone presses play. If you want to avoid the banner, it is safer to show a clickable preview image and load the video only on click.

A site behind which stands an activity registered in France must have mentions légales. That is a requirement of the loi pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique, not a suggestion.

What has to be on the page: your first and last name with the words “entrepreneur individuel” or “EI” — mandatory since 15 May 2022; your address; your SIREN and SIRET; phone and email; who is responsible for publication; the name, address and phone number of your host; and the VAT line — for a micro-entrepreneur usually “TVA non applicable, article 293 B du CGI”.

Two items are most often wrong. RCS applies to traders only. If your activity is libérale — consultant, developer, designer, coach — you have no RCS number at all, and the page states your SIREN, your SIRET and “Dispensé d’immatriculation au RCS”. The APE code is not required by law: people add it out of habit, it does no harm, but it is not an obligation.

If you work with private individuals, one more thing joins the list — and it is usually the last one people learn about: the médiateur de la consommation. Every professional selling services to consumers must belong to a mediation scheme, and the mediator’s name, address and website must appear on the site. Missing that information carries an administrative fine of up to 3 000 € for an individual.

If you do not have your numbers to hand, look them up by name at annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr. Your host’s details are in its own mentions légales.

The second page is needed as soon as there is a form, analytics or any collection of data — the privacy policy: what data you collect, why, on what legal basis, how long you keep it, who you pass it to, and how a person can demand its deletion. Along with a mention of the CNIL as the authority to complain to.

The third, the cookie policy, is needed if the site sets anything beyond the strictly necessary: a counter, a pixel, an embedded video, a map, a chat.

For cookies there is a free route that works: the Complianz plugin. The free version walks you through a questionnaire, scans the site for the cookies actually present, builds the cookie policy, and can hold external scripts back until consent; it works with Polylang if the site is multilingual. The paid version adds privacy-policy generation, multiple jurisdictions, Google Consent Mode and a consent log — that is, proof that the person clicked “agree”. Providing that proof is your obligation, so for a site with counters and advertising it is not a detail; for a site without them it is not needed yet.

The privacy policy the free version will not write for you. It is written by hand: you list the forms, counters and services you actually have, and the retention periods. The requirements and the wording are on the CNIL website — better taken from there than from the first template you find, which lists somebody else’s services. A borrowed template is more dangerous than an empty page: it describes a different site.

An important caveat: no generator will write your mentions légales. Those are your company’s French registration details, taken from your own documents and from the national register, not from a boilerplate. Half an hour of work if your SIREN, SIRET and hosting details are already to hand.

And a pleasant discovery for many: if there is no analytics, no advertising pixels, no embedded third-party services, and the only cookies are technical ones, the law does not require a consent banner at all. That is no longer the case on this site: analytics is connected, so the banner shows on every page. The counter only starts once you have clicked “Accept” — exactly the Google Consent Mode described above.

Honestly: the law and everyday practice diverge here, and both are worth knowing.

In law, missing mentions légales carries up to a year’s imprisonment and a 75 000 € fine for an individual, up to 375 000 € for a company. These are articles 1-1 and 1-2 of the LCEN; the rules used to sit in article 6, but the SREN law of 21 May 2024 rewrote and renumbered them — so the references to “article 6 LCEN” still all over the internet are no longer accurate. Micro-entrepreneurs are covered too. That is the ceiling, and a small site’s case never reaches it.

The usual sequence is different: a complaint from a client or a competitor, then an order to put things right. On cookies the CNIL as a rule starts by requiring compliance, not with a fine.

Far more likely are the mundane problems. A payment provider or a marketplace can refuse to take you on, a partner can decline to link to you, and a client who could not find who you are or where you are will simply go to someone who says so. A legal-details page takes half an hour — cheaper than working out whether some exception covers you.