How to build a presentation website with Lovable in minutes — and the 10 things to get right before you publish

You open Lovable, type "a website for my accounting firm in Bucharest", and ten minutes later there's a website. It has a hero section, a services grid, testimonials, a contact form, and a gradient you'd never have picked but secretly quite like. You press Publish. It's live.

That really does happen now. What happens next is less exciting: nothing. No enquiries, no Google traffic, and a contact form that — on closer inspection — sends messages nowhere at all.

A website that's live isn't necessarily working for your business. The gap between the two is about ten decisions, none of them technical enough to need a developer, and most of them the AI can't make for you because they're about your business, not about code. This guide walks through all ten, in the order you'll actually hit them.

Start with what your business does, not with the prompt

The most common mistake happens before the first prompt. Founders describe the website they want — "modern, clean, with a dark hero" — instead of the business the website is for. Lovable will happily build a beautiful site around a vague idea. The result looks professional and says nothing.

Before you open Lovable, write down three things:

• What you do, in one sentence. Not "innovative solutions for modern businesses." Something like "We do bookkeeping and payroll for small restaurants in Bucharest." If you can't say it in one sentence, your visitors won't work it out either.
• Who it's for. The more specific, the better the copy. "Restaurant owners with 5–30 staff who are tired of chasing receipts" gives the AI something to write to.
• The one thing you want a visitor to do. Book a call, request a quote, visit the shop, sign up. Every page should point there.

Then put all of it into your first prompt. Something like:

Build a presentation website for Numera, a bookkeeping and payroll firm for small restaurants in Bucharest. Our customers are restaurant owners with 5–30 staff. The goal of the site is to get them to book a free 20-minute consultation. Pages: Home, About, Services, Pricing, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions. Tone: warm, plain-spoken, no jargon.

That one paragraph will do more for your website than an hour of tweaking colours afterwards.

The pages you actually need

A presentation website doesn't need to be big. It needs the pages a customer, a search engine and a lawyer expect to find. For most small businesses, that's this list:

• Home. In five seconds a visitor should know what you do, who it's for, and what to do next. One headline, one sentence underneath, one button.
• About. Who's behind the business, where you're based, why you started. People buy from people — a real photo beats a stock illustration every time.
• Services or Products. Ideally one page per service or product, not one page listing all of them. Each separate page is a separate chance to show up on Google for what someone searches for ("payroll for restaurants Bucharest" is a different search from "restaurant bookkeeping").
• Contact. A form, plus an email address, phone number and — if you have one — a physical address. More on the form in a moment, because it's the page where most AI-built sites quietly fail.
• Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Not optional. There's a section on these below.

Nice-to-haves, if they apply: Pricing, Case Studies or Portfolio, Testimonials, FAQ, Blog. Add them when you have real content for them. An empty blog with one post from 2024 hurts more than no blog.

Where does your contact form actually go?

Here's the question most founders only ask after their first week of silence: when someone fills in the form on your website, where does that message go?

Lovable will draw you a lovely form. Whether it sends the message anywhere depends on what you asked for. Sometimes it saves submissions to a database table you'll never open. Sometimes the button does nothing at all. Test it: fill in your own form and see if you actually receive the message. If you don't know where to look for it, that's your answer.

There are three sensible places to send a form, and they suit different businesses.

Option	How it works	Good for	Watch out for
A form app — Tally, Typeform, Google Forms	You build the form in the app and link to it (or embed it) from your Contact page	Getting started in five minutes, no code	Visitors leave your site or see someone else's branding. Typeform's free plan stops at 100 responses a month; Tally's free plan is unlimited
Straight to your inbox — an email service like Resend	Your site sends each submission to your email address	Solo founders who live in their inbox	Needs a small bit of server code and a verified domain. The free plan covered 3,000 emails a month (100 a day) in September 2026
Straight into Slack — an incoming webhook	Your site posts each submission as a message into a Slack channel	Teams — the whole team sees a new lead the moment it lands	Also needs a small bit of server code; the webhook address must stay secret

Our preference is Slack, and it's what this very website does. Every message from our contact page lands in a Slack channel as a neatly formatted "New lead" card, and whoever's free picks it up. Nobody has to forward emails, nothing sits unread in a shared inbox, and the reply time drops from "sometime tomorrow" to "within the hour." For a small business, that speed is often what wins the deal.

Setting it up takes about fifteen minutes. Slack's own incoming webhooks guide walks through it: create a Slack app, switch on "Incoming Webhooks", pick the channel, and copy the webhook address it gives you. Then you ask Lovable something like:

When the contact form is submitted, send the name, email, company and message to Slack using an incoming webhook. Do this from a Lovable Cloud edge function, and store the webhook URL as a secret — never in the frontend code.

That last sentence is the important one. The webhook address works like a password: anyone who has it can post messages into your Slack. Anything in your website's page code is readable by every visitor, so the address has to live on the server side — in Lovable Cloud's Secrets, used only by an edge function. Slack takes this seriously enough that it automatically disables webhook addresses it finds exposed publicly. The same rule applies to a Resend API key. If "server side" is new to you, we wrote a whole section about it in our Lovable launch checklist.

Want to go further? Once leads arrive in Slack, it's a small step to also add them to your CRM, send an automatic "thanks, we'll be in touch" email, or ping the right person depending on what they asked about. That's the kind of thing we build under business automation.

Privacy policy and terms — the two pages you can't skip

These are the least exciting pages on your site and the two most likely to get you into trouble if they're missing.

Privacy Policy. The moment your contact form asks for a name and an email address, you're collecting personal data. Add analytics or a chat widget and you're collecting more. In the EU and UK, the GDPR requires you to tell people what you collect, why, how long you keep it, who you share it with (yes, Slack and Resend count), and how they can ask for it to be deleted. Other markets have their own versions of the same rules.

Terms and Conditions. These protect you: what your website promises and what it doesn't, who owns the content, how disputes are handled, and which country's law applies.

Lovable will write drafts of both if you ask, and an AI-written draft that names the tools you actually use is far better than nothing. Treat it as a draft, though. Read it and check it names the right company, address and services, and if you handle anything sensitive — health, finance, children's data — have a lawyer look it over. Then link both pages from the footer of every page, which is where visitors, regulators and Google all expect to find them.

If you use cookies beyond the strictly necessary ones (most analytics tools set them), you'll also need a cookie banner that asks before setting them. Ask Lovable for one that actually blocks the analytics script until the visitor clicks "Accept". A banner that just says "we use cookies, OK?" doesn't count.

Logo and colours that actually match

Here's a small thing that makes a site look cheap straight away: a logo in one blue sitting on a website in a slightly different blue.

It happens constantly. Your logo was made years ago, in colours someone picked back then. Lovable builds your site around a palette of its own. Neither is wrong, but side by side they clash, and visitors notice even if they can't say why.

You have two ways to fix it:

• Make the website match the logo. Give Lovable the exact colour codes from your logo (the six-character codes starting with #) and ask it to build the site palette around them. If you don't know your codes, our free colour palette generator can help you build a full palette from one brand colour.
• Make the logo match the website. If you like what Lovable designed better, recolour the logo instead. The Logo Color Changer on image-color-changer.com does this in the browser: upload your logo, swap its colours for your site's, and download it as a clean file. There's also a quick version of it in our tools section.

Either way, check that your text is readable against its background — pale grey text on white looks elegant and is unreadable on a phone in sunlight. Our contrast checker gives you a pass or fail in seconds. And if you're going to build more than one thing with AI tools, it's worth writing these decisions down once instead of re-explaining them in every prompt — we wrote about that in how to give your coding agent taste.

The domain — your address on the internet

When you publish, Lovable gives your site a free address like numera.lovable.app. Fine for showing a friend. Not fine for a business. You want numera.ro or numera.com — and you want it registered in your name.

You can get one in two ways:

• Directly inside Lovable. Lovable lets you search for and buy a domain from within the project settings, through registrar partners such as IONOS, and it connects everything automatically. It's the fewest clicks. The domain belongs to your Lovable workspace.
• From a registrar like Namecheap. You buy it separately and then connect it to Lovable. It takes a few more minutes, and it keeps your domain completely separate from the tool you built the site with — useful if you ever move the site elsewhere. Namecheap is one of the registrars Lovable can connect to automatically: you log in when prompted and it adds the right settings for you.

Either way, you'll need a paid Lovable plan to use a custom domain. If you connect it manually, Lovable's custom domain guide lists the two DNS records to add at your registrar — an A record pointing to Lovable's server address and a TXT record that proves the domain is yours. The padlock (SSL certificate) is added automatically. One gotcha: if your domain's DNS is managed by Cloudflare, set those records to "DNS only" (the grey cloud), not "Proxied", or the site won't load.

Two last tips. Add both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, and make one redirect to the other so Google doesn't see two copies of your site. And turn on auto-renew. A lapsed domain is the most embarrassing way to take your own business offline.

SEO, page by page

SEO — search engine optimisation — is how Google (and, increasingly, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI search tools) decides whether to show your website to someone searching for what you do. For a presentation website it comes down to one habit: every page gets treated as its own search result.

For each page, make sure you have:

• A unique title. The blue link in Google. Around 60 characters, with the main phrase your customer would search for near the start: "Restaurant payroll & bookkeeping in Bucharest | Numera", not "Home".
• A unique meta description. The grey text under the link, around 155 characters. It won't move you up the rankings, but it decides whether people click. Our meta description generator will draft one from your page text.
• A share image. The picture that appears when someone shares your page on LinkedIn, WhatsApp or Slack (often called the "OG image"). Without one, your link shows up as a sad grey box.
• One main heading that matches what the page is about, with sub-headings underneath.
• The words your customers use, in the body text. If people search for "payroll for restaurants", those words should appear naturally on your services page. Not stuffed into every sentence — just present, where a human would expect them. Our readability test helps keep the result readable.
• Real descriptions on images (called "alt text"), so search engines and screen readers know what they show. Our alt text generator writes them for you.
• A sitemap. A file at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml that lists every page, so search engines don't have to guess what exists. Check that every page is on it, including the privacy and terms pages.

The good news: Lovable has become much better at this. New projects since May 2026 send finished pages to search engines instead of an empty shell that only fills in once JavaScript runs — the long-standing weakness of AI-built sites. There's also a built-in SEO review that flags missing titles, sitemaps and share images. If your project is older than that, Lovable offers an upgrade path, and it's worth doing.

What the tool can't do is know what your customers search for. That part is still you. Once you're live, add your site to Google Search Console (it's free), submit your sitemap, and within a few weeks you'll see exactly which searches are bringing people to you.

PageSpeed — aim for 100 across the board

Open PageSpeed Insights, paste in your address, and you'll get four scores out of 100: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. For a simple presentation website, 100 on all four is achievable, and worth aiming for.

It matters for two reasons. Visitors leave slow sites — especially on phones, which is where most of your visitors will be. And Google measures real-world loading speed through what it calls Core Web Vitals and uses it as one of its ranking signals.

When a Lovable site scores badly, it's almost always one of these:

• Huge images. A 5 MB photo straight off your phone, shown at postcard size. Ask Lovable to compress images and serve them in a modern format (WebP or AVIF).
• Too many fonts. Every font family and weight is another download. Two families is plenty.
• Heavy animation. Things that fade and slide in on scroll look nice in a demo and delay everything in a speed test.
• Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, several analytics tools, embedded videos, social feeds. Each one adds weight you don't control. Keep only the ones you'd miss.

The Accessibility and Best Practices scores are usually quick wins: the contrast and alt-text fixes from earlier, buttons with proper labels, and no errors in the browser console. Paste the list PageSpeed gives you straight into Lovable and ask it to fix each item, then re-test. Run it on the mobile score, not the desktop one — mobile is the stricter test and the one that counts.

Hosting — where does your site actually live?

When you press Publish in Lovable, your website has to be stored and served from somewhere. That somewhere is its hosting, and it's worth understanding what Lovable does by default.

What happens when you publish. Lovable builds your project and puts it on its own hosting at your lovable.app address (and your custom domain, once connected). According to Lovable's own engineering blog, new projects run on Cloudflare's global network — hundreds of data centres around the world. When someone in Bucharest opens your site, it's served from a data centre near Bucharest. When someone in Chicago opens it, from one near Chicago. You don't choose a location, and for a presentation website you don't need to: it's already close to almost everyone. Changes only go live when you press Publish again, so you can edit in peace without visitors seeing work in progress.

Why being close to your audience matters. Every visit is a round trip: the visitor's phone asks for your page, the server sends it back. The further away the server, the longer every trip takes. That shows up in your PageSpeed score, in how many visitors give up before the page loads, and — through Core Web Vitals — in your Google ranking. The general rule is simple: host your site as close as possible to your customers.

Where it still matters with Lovable. The global network covers the pages. Anything with a database behind it — form submissions, customer accounts, bookings — lives in Lovable Cloud, which runs in one location. If your customers are all in Romania and that database is in the US, every form submission crosses the Atlantic and back. For a contact form, you won't notice. For a site that loads data on every page, you will. If your site grows into that kind of thing, check where your data lives and, ideally, keep it near your customers. For European businesses, having customer data stored in the EU also makes your privacy policy much simpler.

If you outgrow Lovable's hosting. Lovable can sync your project's code to GitHub, and from there it can be hosted somewhere else — Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, or a cloud provider — with full control over regions, caching and security settings. You don't need that on day one. It's good to know the door exists.

Where Lovable stops — and vibecoding starts needing an engineer

Lovable is a great tool for getting off the ground. For a presentation website — a few pages that explain your business and a form that reaches you — it's genuinely all most small businesses need, and the checklist in this post covers what's left.

The trouble starts when the website stops presenting the business and starts running part of it: customer logins, payments, bookings, a client portal, files people upload, connections to your accounting or CRM. Everyone is saying that anyone can build this with AI now. They can build it. Whether it's safe to put in front of customers is a different question, and answering it takes engineering skills — reading what the AI wrote and knowing what's missing.

This isn't a theoretical risk. In 2025, a researcher found that many Lovable-built apps were exposing their databases to anyone who knew where to look — logged as CVE-2025-48757. In one scan, roughly one in ten of the apps checked leaked data such as names, emails, API keys and payment details. Their founders had no idea. The apps worked perfectly; they just also worked for strangers.

Lovable has improved a lot since then. It now runs an automatic security scan when you publish, and it catches the most common mistakes. But a scan checks for known patterns. It can't tell you whether your refund logic can be abused, whether a customer can see another customer's invoices, or what happens to your data if the AI "fixes" a bug by rewriting half the app next week.

The honest summary: vibecoding still needs engineering judgement once real customers and real data are involved. Without it, the risk isn't that your app looks bad. The risk is that it looks perfect while leaking data, losing orders or breaking quietly — and you find out from a customer, or a regulator, rather than from a warning. If you're heading that way, our 8-point checklist for launching a Lovable app is the next thing to read.

The pre-publish checklist

Before you point your domain at it and tell the world, run through this:

• Clear: Can a stranger tell what you do, who it's for, and what to do next within five seconds of landing on the home page?
• Complete: Do you have Home, About, Services/Products, Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms — and are Privacy and Terms linked from every page's footer?
• Reachable: Did you submit your own contact form and actually receive the message where your team will see it?
• Secret: Is your Slack webhook or email API key stored on the server, not in the page code?
• On-brand: Does your logo use the same colours as the rest of the site, and is every bit of text readable?
• Owned: Is your site on your own domain, registered in your name, with auto-renew on?
• Findable: Does every page have its own title, description and share image, and is every page in your sitemap? Is the site added to Google Search Console?
• Fast: Does PageSpeed Insights show 100 — or close — in all four categories, on mobile?
• Close: Is your site, and any data behind it, served from near your customers?
• Honest: Is this still a presentation website — or has it quietly become an app that handles logins, payments or personal data?

Nine "yes" answers and one "presentation website" means you're ready to publish. If the last one has become "it's an app now", that's the point to bring in an engineer.

How we help

We build and review websites and apps for founders who started with Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Cursor and got further than they expected. Sometimes that's an afternoon: connecting the form to Slack properly, getting PageSpeed to 100, cleaning up SEO. Sometimes it's turning a vibecoded prototype into a product that can safely handle customers, payments and data. Either way, we keep what you've built rather than starting over.

If your website has turned into something bigger than a website, book a free discovery call and we'll tell you honestly what it needs — and what it doesn't.

Ten minutes gets you a website. The rest of this list gets you a business that people can find, trust and reach.