Creating a website in Pau: where to start
A website project rarely begins with a technical question. It begins with a hesitation: which format to choose, how long it will take, what has to be prepared, and what the site will cost once it is live. This page answers those questions in that order. If what you want first is a sense of who you would be working with, the page on our web agency in Pau describes the method and the way we are organized. Whether you are a tradesperson in greater Pau, in south west France, a shopkeeper in the city center, a self-employed professional elsewhere in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques or the head of a small firm in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, your presence online has become a lever for growth you cannot do without.
In 2026, 93% of buying journeys begin with a Google search. For a local business in Pau, being invisible online amounts to closing the doors every other day. The good news: it has never been simpler, or cheaper, to set out.
Why businesses in Pau need a professional website
Pau is a lively city of more than 77,000 residents, the administrative capital of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Its wider urban area gathers more than 160,000 people. It is a rich economic basin, carried by aerospace (Safran, Turboméca), Pyrenean tourism, food processing and a dense fabric of small and mid sized firms.
And yet a sizeable share of businesses in Pau still have no website, or run an outdated one that works against their image rather than for it. In a city where competition between shops and service providers is real, a professional website is the difference between the company people call and the company people pass by.
How consumers in Pau behave
When someone living in Pau is looking for a plumber, a restaurant, a personal trainer or an accountant, the first reflex is to type the search into Google. “Plombier Pau” (plumber Pau), “restaurant Pau centre” (restaurant Pau city center), “comptable Pau” (accountant Pau). If your business does not appear in those results, you lose customers every day to the competitors who are visible.
And this is not a habit confined to the young: 78% of people over 50 in France use Google to find local providers.
Website design in Pau: the options open to you
The brochure site for professionals and tradespeople in Pau
The brochure site is the most common option, and the right fit for the majority of businesses in Pau. It presents what you do, your services, your contact details and your past work. Its purpose: to generate phone calls, emails, visits to the shop. It is the digital calling card no professional can do without.
What a very small business actually wants from a brochure site is set out in detail in our article on the small business website in Pau.
In Pau, a brochure site makes particular sense for the building trades, self-employed professionals (lawyers, doctors, physiotherapists), restaurant owners, coaches and consultants, and shopkeepers in the city center and in areas such as Jurançon, Billère, Lescar or Gan.
The ecommerce site, to sell online from Pau
If you sell products (local crafts, regional food and drink, sports equipment), an ecommerce site lets you reach customers well beyond Pau. WordPress with WooCommerce is the most flexible platform for combining a brochure site with an online shop.
The turnkey WordPress site on subscription
The monthly subscription model changes what website design means for the very small businesses of Pau. No more paying out several thousand euros in one go. You pay a monthly fee that covers building the website, cloud hosting, maintenance, security updates and technical support. Everything is included, there is no fixed term, and the site is yours after 12 months.
What a good website for a business in Pau has to contain
Clear, complete local information
Your address in Pau (or the area you cover around Pau), a phone number people can tap, your opening hours, an embedded Google Maps location. These elements matter for local search AND for the people reading the page. A customer searching “coiffeur Pau” (hairdresser Pau) wants to know immediately where you are and how to reach you.
A professional design that works on mobile
65% of web traffic comes from smartphones. Your site has to be perfectly readable and perfectly usable on an iPhone as well as on a desktop computer. A site that displays badly on mobile sends visitors away in under 3 seconds, and Google marks it down in search results.
Content that speaks of your local expertise
Do not settle for a “Our services” page. Explain how you work in Pau and in the neighboring communes, show the jobs you have done locally, share what customers in Pau have said about you. Geolocated content of that kind is gold for your organic ranking.
Good photographs of your work
Before and after shots for the trades, photographs of your premises for shops, portraits of the team for practices and agencies. Genuine images earn trust, far more than a generic stock library does.
Local SEO in Pau: reaching the first page of Google
Having a website is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. For the people of Pau to find you, your site has to rank on the right queries. Local SEO is the key.
Create and optimize your Google Business Profile listing
This is the first action to take. Your Google Business listing (formerly Google My Business) is what puts you in the “Local Pack”: the 3 results with a map that sit at the top of Google for local searches. Fill it in completely: a precise primary category, a description carrying your keywords, recent photographs, opening hours kept current, and above all, gather customer reviews.
Target geolocated keywords
Your site has to carry, naturally, the terms your customers type into Google:
- “[your trade] Pau”, for example “création site internet Pau” (website design Pau)
- “[your trade] + neighboring commune”, for example “agence web Jurançon” (web agency Jurançon)
- “[your trade] Pyrénées-Atlantiques”, for example “site web Pyrénées-Atlantiques” (website Pyrénées-Atlantiques)
- “[your trade] 64”, for example “développeur web 64” (web developer 64, the department number)
These geographic variants cover a wide spread of local searches.
Collect Google reviews as a matter of routine
Reviews are one of the most powerful local ranking factors there is. A business in Pau with 30 reviews at 4.8 stars will almost always outrank a competitor with 5 reviews at 5 stars. Put a systematic process in place: send a review link after every job.
Build pages for the neighboring towns
If you work beyond Pau, build dedicated pages for the communes of greater Pau and the surrounding area: Billère, Jurançon, Lons, Lescar, Gan, Morlaas, Nay, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Orthez. Each page targets the searches specific to that town and strengthens your local web of links.
Mistakes to avoid when building a website in Pau
1. Handing the site to “a friend who knows about that sort of thing”
A professional website does not come down to installing WordPress and picking a theme. Technical structure, search visibility, security, performance, accessibility, GDPR: all of it calls for real expertise. An amateur site sends back an amateur picture of your business.
2. Building a site and never updating it
An unmaintained WordPress site is open to attack (39% of hacked sites were running an outdated CMS). It also grows steadily slower and less capable. Regular maintenance is a necessity, not a luxury.
3. Neglecting mobile
Google indexes the mobile version of your site first (mobile first indexing). If your site is not built for the smartphone, it will be marked down in search results, even on the desktop.
4. Ignoring search from the outset
SEO must not be an afterthought. It belongs in the design of the site from the first sketch: keyword choices, URL structure, title tags and meta descriptions, loading speed, internal linking. A beautiful site that is invisible on Google serves no purpose.
Why choose Aloha Pixel for your website in Pau
How the agency works, the stages of a project and the criteria for comparing several providers are set out on the web agency in Pau page.
A model built for the small and mid sized firms of greater Pau
Aloha Pixel is a web agency that understands the realities of a small company. Our monthly subscription, with no fixed term, removes the financial barrier to having a website built. No €5,000 quote. One monthly all-inclusive fee: WordPress build, high performance cloud hosting (DigitalOcean + Cloudflare), maintenance, security updates, daily backups.
A concrete environmental commitment
Aloha Pixel is an Ocean Friendly web agency. Every subscription funds the adoption of a coral through our partnership with Coral Gardeners, and 1% of our revenue goes to Stripe Climate for CO2 capture. Your website does not only serve your commercial success: every subscription also funds the adoption of a coral with Coral Gardeners, certificate to prove it.
SEO support, so that you are visible in Pau
Building a handsome site is not enough. We offer monthly SEO support to position your business on the local searches that matter in Pau, across greater Pau and in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Technical audit, content optimization, rank tracking and a monthly report are included.
Technical support that answers
Need to change a line of text, add a photograph, fix a bug? Our technical support answers within 48 business hours. You do not need to know how to code to keep your site alive.
The stages of building your website with Aloha Pixel
- Free discovery call: We talk through your project, your goals, what you do in Pau. Together we identify the package that suits your needs.
- Design and mockup: Our team draws the structure and the design of your site, built for local search and for the mobile reader.
- WordPress development: Your site is built on WordPress, the most flexible and most rankable platform on the market (43% of the web worldwide).
- SEO optimization: Title tags and meta descriptions optimized for every page, heading structure, internal linking, loading speed, registration with Google Search Console.
- Delivery and training: Your brochure site goes live in 10 to 15 business days once your content is gathered (allow a few weeks to two months for an ecommerce site or a custom build). We train you to use it and stay available through support.
Pau and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques: your catchment area deserves better
Whether you are set up on the boulevard des Pyrénées, in the Hédas quarter, at the Lescar retail park, or in any commune in the country around Pau, your local customers are looking for you online. A professional website, well ranked and well maintained, is the most profitable investment you can make to grow your business in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
If your business reaches beyond greater Pau, our guide to website design across the Pyrénées-Atlantiques covers the whole department.
Ready to get moving? Book a free call with our team and let us talk through your web project in Pau.
We also work with shopkeepers in Pau, through our guide to launching an online store, step by step.
More from Aloha Pixel
- handing your organic search to an SEO agency in Pau
- keeping a WordPress site looked after once it is live
- where to host a website when you are based in Pau
- how to spot an Ocean Friendly web agency
- 8 essential measures to secure a WordPress site
