Advice
What a small business website actually needs
Most small business sites have too many pages saying too little. Here is the site most local businesses should have, page by page, and the five things you can safely leave off it.
Most small business websites have too many pages saying too little. The fix is not more content. It is deciding what each page is for and letting it do that one job properly.
Here is the site most local businesses should have, and why each part exists.
The homepage: answer four questions in four seconds
Somebody has landed on your site from a search or a recommendation. Before they scroll, they need to know:
- What do you do?
- Do you do it where I am?
- Are you any good?
- How do I get hold of you?
That is the whole brief. A headline saying what you do and where, one strong image of your actual work, and a phone number. Most homepages open with “Welcome to our website”, which answers none of the four.
Service pages: one per thing people search for
This is the single highest-value structural decision on any small business site, and the one most often got wrong.
If you are an electrician who does rewires, EICRs and EV chargers, that is three different customers typing three different things. One page called “Services” listing all three serves none of them well. Three pages, each answering that customer’s actual questions, serves all three, and gives you three ways of being found instead of one.
The test: would somebody type this into Google on its own? If yes, it wants its own page.
Proof: the page that does the persuading
Call it Projects, Our Work, Recent Jobs, Case Studies. Whatever the label, this is where a hesitant customer decides.
Photographs of work you have actually done, with a sentence about the job and where it was. Three done properly beat thirty thumbnails. If you have genuine reviews, put them next to the work rather than in a lonely carousel.
If you are a service business without anything photographable, this page becomes the story of a job instead: what the client came with, what you did, how it ended. Same function, different medium.
Areas covered: name the places
“And surrounding areas” is not an answer. Somebody in a village eight miles out needs to know whether you come to them, and “surrounding areas” makes them assume not.
List the towns and villages you genuinely cover. It answers the question and it happens to be exactly what makes you findable for “[what you do] in [place]”, which is how people search. Do not list forty places you would never travel to. It is transparent and it works against you.
About: less about you than you think
The About page is consistently one of the most visited on a small business site, and consistently the most wasted. People are not reading it out of curiosity. They are checking whether you are real and whether you will still exist next year.
So: how long you have been going, who you are, a photograph of an actual person, and anything genuinely verifiable: qualifications, memberships, insurance. Skip the founding-story mythology. “Started in 2009, still run by the two of us, based in Malton” does more work than three paragraphs about passion.
Contact: remove every obstacle
- Phone number as a tappable link, not typed as plain text
- Email address, visible
- A short form: name, email, phone, message. That is all
- Your actual hours
- Where you are, if customers come to you, with parking
Every extra field on a form loses you enquiries. Nobody has ever failed to win work because they did not ask for a postcode up front.
What you can leave out
- A blog you will not write. Three posts from 2022 is worse than none. It suggests a business that has stopped.
- A homepage slideshow. People do not wait for slide two. Pick the best image and use it.
- A page of stock photographs of nothing. Handshakes, laptops, generic teams. Actively harmful. It reads as having nothing real to show.
- A live social feed. Slow, and it publicly advertises how long since you last posted.
- A pop-up asking to join a mailing list you do not send.
The five-page version
Home · Services · Work · About · Contact. That is a complete, effective website for a great many local businesses, and there is nothing second-rate about it. You move up to ten pages when you have several services that people search for separately, not because ten sounds better than five.
The rule underneath all of it
Every page should answer a question a customer actually has. If you cannot say which question a page answers, it does not need to exist, and the pages that remain will be better for its absence.
