What a Small Business Website Actually Needs

Four questions, in this order

Who are you and what do you do. Not a slogan. The plain sentence a customer would use if they were describing you to a friend, positioned where it is the first thing read rather than buried under a stock photograph of a handshake.

Do you serve me. This is where most local businesses quietly lose people. A visitor needs to know you cover their town and do the specific thing they came for, and if they cannot confirm both in a few seconds they leave and check the next result.

Can I trust you. Photographs of real work you have done, in real places, beat any amount of writing about your values. Reviews belong here too.

How do I contact you. Which sounds obvious and is the single most commonly broken thing on small business websites.

Make contacting you a single tap

A phone number that is plain text on a phone screen is a phone number nobody is going to dial. It has to be a link that starts the call when touched, and the same goes for a text or an email.

Put it where the customer already is rather than on a contact page they have to go and find. Someone reading about your work is at their most interested at that exact moment, and asking them to navigate somewhere else to act on it loses a share of them permanently.

If you take enquiries by form, keep it to the fields you genuinely need. Every extra box costs you submissions, and most of what gets asked for up front is information you could get in the reply.

Speed is a feature, and you cannot see it

You look at your own site on good Wi-Fi, from a phone that has already loaded it, which is the one set of conditions under which a slow site feels fine. Your customers are on mobile data in a car park with a dozen tabs open.

Slow sites lose visitors before anything on them has been read, and the cause is usually the same small number of things: enormous uncompressed images, a pile of third party scripts, or a theme carrying features nobody uses. A fast, plain page beats a beautiful slow one every time, because the beautiful one does not get seen.

Google measures this too, so it is both what visitors experience and part of how you rank. It is the rare case where the thing that is good for customers and the thing that is good for search are identical.

Say where you work, in words

Local searches are most of what a service business gets, and the site has to actually contain the places it serves. Not hidden in a footer. In the sentences a person reads.

Keep it honest and keep it consistent with your Google Business Profile, because Google cross references the two and claiming places you do not really cover works against you rather than for you.

The same applies to your name, address and phone number. If they differ between your site, your Business Profile and the directories you are listed in, that inconsistency is doing quiet damage to how confidently Google can connect them.

A social page is not a website

A Facebook or Instagram page is a good place to be found and a bad place to be the only thing you have. You do not own it, you cannot change how it works, and the platform can restrict your reach or suspend you with no warning and nobody to call.

It also sells to your customers while they are looking at you. A visitor reading your page is surrounded by advertising, some of it from competitors who paid specifically to appear next to businesses like yours. A visitor on your own site is not being marketed to by anyone else.

The practical answer is both. The social account is where people discover you and see that you are active. The website is where the ones who are actually deciding go, and where you can be found by everybody who searched for the service instead of for you by name.

What you can skip

Most of it. A chat widget nobody staffs is worse than no chat widget. Animations that delay the text a visitor came to read cost you more than they impress. A blog you will abandon after three posts looks worse at post three than it would have looked at zero.

The stock photography question is worth being blunt about. A slightly imperfect photograph of your actual van, your actual counter, or your actual work outperforms a polished image of people who have never been to your business, because customers can tell and it quietly signals that there was nothing real to show.

Build the small version properly and add to it when something specific is missing. Almost every site that gets abandoned was too big on the first day.