Website integrations: connecting your site to the tools you run on

Most small business websites are islands. A lead fills in a form, the message lands in an inbox, and then someone has to read it, copy the details into a spreadsheet or a CRM, send a reply, maybe book a time, maybe chase an invoice. Every one of those steps is manual, and every manual step is somewhere a lead can go cold or a job can slip.

A connected website does that work for you. When your site talks to the tools you already run, an enquiry can land in your CRM, trigger a follow-up email, offer the customer a time in your calendar, take a deposit, and raise an invoice in your accounting software, without you touching any of it. That's the difference between a brochure and a piece of business infrastructure.

We've built integrations into all of the tools below and plenty more. Here's how to think about it.

What an integration actually is

An integration is just two pieces of software talking to each other through an API: a defined way for one system to send or pull data from another. Your website fills in a form; the API hands that data to your CRM. Your booking page checks the API for free slots in your calendar. A payment goes through Stripe; the API tells Xero to raise the invoice.

The practical upshot is that data only gets entered once, by the customer, and then flows wherever it needs to go. Nobody re-types a phone number. Nothing gets missed because the one person who checks the inbox was on leave.

Almost every serious business tool has an API these days. If yours does, we can usually connect it.

The tools worth connecting

You don't need everything wired up on day one. The connections that pay for themselves fastest are the ones that touch a lead or a dollar.

CRM and lead capture

This is the first one we'd do for most businesses. Instead of form submissions sitting in an inbox, every enquiry lands in your CRM tagged with where it came from, ready to follow up. Nothing slips. We go into the detail in connecting your website to a CRM.

Bookings and calendars

If you sell appointments, classes or consultations, letting people book themselves a time on your site beats phone tag every time. It syncs to your calendar so you're never double-booked, and it can take a deposit at the same time. More on that in online bookings and scheduling.

Payments and accounting

Take money on your site through Stripe, Square or PayPal, then push the sale straight into Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks so your books stay current without manual entry. The Australian specifics, GST and invoices included, are in connecting payments and accounting.

Email marketing and automation

New leads can flow into Mailchimp and start a welcome sequence, or trigger a chain of actions through Zapier or Make: notify your team in Slack, add a row to a sheet, create a task. Automation tools like these are the glue that connects the apps that don't talk to each other directly.

Reviews and chat

Pull your Google or Trustpilot reviews onto the site as live social proof, and add live chat or a tool like Intercom so visitors can reach you the moment they have a question.

What it looks like in practice

Say you run a clinic. A new patient finds you on Google and books a first appointment on your site. In one go:

• the booking takes a deposit through Stripe
• the time drops into your practice calendar
• the patient gets a confirmation and a reminder the day before
• their details land in your CRM, tagged as a new patient from organic search
• an invoice is raised in Xero

You did none of that. You just turned up to the appointment. That's a website earning its keep.

We integrate with these, and more

Across our projects we've connected sites to Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, Square, Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Intercom, Calendly, Google Calendar, Zapier, Make and others. The list isn't the point, though. The point is that if a tool runs part of your business and it has an API, your website can work with it instead of around it.

If you're planning a new site or a rebuild and want it doing real work rather than just looking the part, here's how we approach web design, or get a free website audit and we'll tell you what's worth connecting first.