The short version
A website tells people things. A web app lets people do things. If your visitors mostly read, look and get in touch, you need a website. If they log in, book, pay, track, manage or come back to finish a job, you are running an app, whether or not you built one.
Plenty of businesses are in the second group without realising it. Their "website" is a front page bolted onto a booking plugin, a payment form, a spreadsheet and an inbox, with a person in the middle copying things from one to another.
Six signs you have outgrown a website
- Someone copies data between systems every day. Orders from the site into a spreadsheet, bookings from email into a diary, payments from one dashboard into another. That copying is the app you have not built yet.
- Customers need an account. To see their bookings, change their plan, download something or check when you are next coming. Once there is a login, there is an app.
- Money is recurring. Subscriptions, memberships and repeat bookings need rules: renewals, failed payments, pauses, reminders. Website plugins handle the simple version and struggle with yours.
- Your staff work in it, not just your customers. A back office, a driver's round, a stock count. Staff tools are almost always apps.
- The rules are specific to you. Who can book what, when, at what capacity, with which exceptions. If you keep explaining the rules to a plugin, the plugin is the wrong tool.
- It depends on live data. Fixtures, events, timetables, stock, prices. Pulling data in, checking it and keeping it fresh is application work.
Three signs you do not need an app (yet)
- The process is not settled. If you are still working out how the service runs, a spreadsheet and a good website are cheaper places to learn. Build the app when the process stops changing every week.
- An existing product does the job. Booking, invoicing and e-commerce products are good and getting better. If one fits your rules with small compromises, use it. Our guide to choosing a platform stack goes into this.
- It is really about being found. If the problem is that not enough people know you exist, you need a better website and better search visibility, not software. Our sister studio Web Design Dundee does exactly that.
What changes when you build an app
You need to look after it. An app has a database, scheduled jobs, integrations and users. It needs monitoring, backups, security patches and someone who understands it. Budget for running it, not just building it.
Design becomes about tasks. A website is designed to persuade. An app is designed so people finish what they came to do with the fewest steps. That is a different discipline: see UX and UI design.
Your data gets better. Once everything happens in one place, you can see it. Doorstep Glass Recycling's platform saves every out-of-area postcode check by district, so the business can see where demand is before deciding where to expand. That information did not exist when the checker was a text box on a website.
A real example
Doorstep Glass Recycling started on WordPress and WooCommerce, with rounds planned in a separate service. Customers signed up on the website; the business ran everywhere else. The new platform does both: the postcode checker, Stripe subscriptions, the customer account, nightly route planning, a driver app and the reminders. The website did not get bigger. It became the front door of an app.
Can you start with a website and add the app later?
Yes, and often you should. A good website built on a sensible foundation can grow an app behind it once the process is clear. What makes that hard is a site built on a pile of plugins that each own part of your data. If you think an app is coming, tell whoever builds the website.
If you would like a second opinion on which side of the line you are on, tell us what you do now, spreadsheets and all.