The US-ready website checklist
Here's what a US buyer notices on a UK site, and what to change.
| What to change | What US buyers notice | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Wording | British terms and day-first dates | US English and MM/DD dates |
| Pricing | Pound prices or odd converted amounts | Round USD prices |
| Calls | Slots in UK hours, a +44 number only | Time-zone-aware booking and a US number |
| Proof | Only UK logos | US logos, case studies and investors, where true |
| Privacy | A UK cookie banner and nothing else | Check whether CCPA applies; add an opt-out link if it does |
| Accessibility | Low contrast, keyboard traps | Build to WCAG |
| Domain | A .co.uk only | A .com |
| AI search | AI answers name US competitors | US pages that answer US questions |
None of this means hiding that you're British. It means a US buyer never has to translate, convert or work out your hours before booking a call.
Copy, prices and calls
Write the site in US English: -ize endings instead of -ise, and -or where British English writes -our. Swap the terms too: ZIP code for postcode, resume for CV, revenue for turnover, sales tax for VAT. Dates go month first.
Set USD prices for the US market. A live conversion gives odd numbers that move with the exchange rate and tells the buyer you haven't priced for them.
Google reads the same details. Its guidance lists local addresses, phone numbers, language and currency as signals of which country a page serves.
UK clocks change on the last Sundays of March and October. US clocks change on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. So for two to three weeks in March, and about a week around early November, New York is four hours behind London instead of five.
Hard-coded slot times break in those weeks. Use a booking tool that shows times in the visitor's time zone, and offer UK afternoon slots: they land in the East Coast morning.
US proof, before and after your first US logo
US buyers look for companies like theirs. Put US logos and a US case study high on the homepage, list US investors on your About page, and name the person who looks after US accounts.
Before your first US customer, show what travels: the integrations US teams already use, your security documents, and UK results a US buyer can map onto their own business.
Don't pad it. The FTC's final rule of August 14, 2024 bans fake and AI-generated reviews, testimonials from people with no real experience of the product, and insider reviews that hide the connection, with civil penalties for knowing violations.
Only publish logos and quotes you have permission to use and can back up.
Privacy and accessibility
A UK cookie banner doesn't answer US privacy questions. Start with California's CCPA, which covers for-profit businesses that do business in California and meet one of three tests:
- Gross annual revenue of $26.625 million or more (the threshold from January 1, 2025).
- Buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households.
- Making 50% or more of annual revenue from selling or sharing California residents' personal information.
Covered businesses must honor opt-out signals such as Global Privacy Control and, in most cases, show a clear opt-out link, often labeled "Your Privacy Choices." Many seed-stage startups sit below the thresholds, but US enterprise buyers can still ask in vendor reviews. This isn't legal advice: get a short answer from US counsel and make your privacy policy match it.
The Department of Justice says the ADA applies to services businesses offer on the web. Its March 18, 2022 guidance sets no detailed technical rule for private businesses and points to WCAG.
UsableNet counted 5,114 ADA digital accessibility lawsuits in 2025: 70% against ecommerce and 64% against companies under $25 million in revenue. For a B2B startup, accessibility is more likely to come up in procurement than in court, and it costs less to build in than to retrofit.
One site or two: domains and hreflang
| Your situation | Set-up | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Same offer and prices, growth mainly in the US | One .com in US English, no hreflang | Nothing to keep in sync |
| Same product, different prices, proof or terms | One .com with UK and US subfolders; hreflang en-GB, en-US and x-default | Each market gets its own version on one domain |
| Separate entities or brands | Separate sites | Only when the businesses really are separate |
Google treats a country-code domain like .co.uk as a strong signal, but it targets one country only. Subfolders on a .com are the easiest set-up to run. Don't auto-redirect visitors or change content by IP address; show a banner that points to the other version.
With two versions, hreflang tells Google which to show. Use language plus region codes: en-GB for the UK version, en-US for the US one, x-default as the fallback ("en-UK" does nothing). Each version must list itself and every other version, or Google can ignore the tags.
Google only treats localized pages as duplicates when the main content is untranslated, so two near-identical English versions can be folded together. Make the US version differ where it counts: prices, proof, contacts and terms.
In Webflow, Localization supports locales such as English (United Kingdom) and adds hreflang to your pages and sitemap. Automatic visitor routing needs Localize Advanced or Enterprise, so the banner is the simpler default. 301 redirects don't apply to localized paths, so each locale needs its own rules.
Moving from .co.uk to .com is a domain migration, so follow the same steps as moving domains without losing rankings.
Getting recommended in US AI search
Pew found that 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, about double the 2023 share, and 28% of employed adults say they use it for work.
AI answers draw on pages that match the question, so how your brand shows up in AI answers depends on what your US pages say. Give US buyers pages that answer what they ask: USD pricing, support hours that cover their day, US customers and your security setup.
Buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews who to choose. We improve the pages and sources those answers draw on, from $3,500 a month.
We've worked with startups in the US, the UK and the UAE, and we schedule calls in your time zone. Send us your URL, the US buyers you want to reach and whether your US prices or terms differ. We'll tell you if you need one site or two and what a US-ready website build involves: start with a scope call.
