The honest minimum
A small business website does not need to be big. It needs to answer the questions a customer has before they will contact you, and it needs to make contacting you effortless. Most sites fail on the second part.
If you did nothing else, five pages will serve almost any local business: a home page, a page for each main service, an about page, and a contact page. That is enough to be found and enough to be trusted.
Hand your phone to someone who has never seen your site and ask them to find your prices and phone you. Watch without helping. Whatever they struggle with is your real list of problems.
The home page
The job of the home page is to answer three questions in about four seconds: what do you do, where do you do it, and how do I reach you.
- A plain first line. "Emergency plumber covering Oldham and Rochdale" beats "Welcome to our website" every time
- Your phone number visible without scrolling, and tappable on a phone
- What you actually offer, in the words customers use, not industry terms
- Some proof: reviews, photos of real work, accreditations
- One obvious next step, repeated down the page
A page per service
This is the single most common gap. Businesses list eight services on one page, then wonder why they do not show up for any of them.
Each service worth being found for wants its own page: what it involves, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and who it suits. A boiler repair page and a bathroom fitting page are different searches by different people with different worries.
Three good service pages beat one page mentioning nine services.
The details people look for and rarely find
These are the things that quietly lose you work when they are missing.
- Where you actually cover. Name the towns. "Greater Manchester and surrounding areas" makes people guess, and guessing means phoning someone else
- Some indication of price. A range, a starting figure, an hourly rate, a typical job cost. Silence on price reads as expensive
- Your hours, and whether you do out of hours at all
- Whether you charge for a callout or a quote
- Credentials. Gas Safe, NICEIC, DBS checks, insurance. Numbers where you have them
- How quickly you reply. "We answer same working day" removes a real hesitation
Making contact genuinely easy
People contact you in different ways and the difference is generational and situational rather than a preference you can argue with. Someone with a burst pipe phones. Someone comparing three salons at eleven at night will not.
Give them options and make each one work properly:
- A tappable phone number, not a picture of one and not plain text a thumb cannot dial
- A short form. Name, contact, and what they need. Every extra field loses people, and asking for a postcode before you have earned any trust loses a lot of them
- WhatsApp, if you actually monitor it. A dead WhatsApp button is worse than none
- Your email, written out, for the people who want a paper trail
Then test it. Send yourself a message through your own form. A surprising number of small business websites have forms that quietly go nowhere, and the owner only finds out months later.
Fill in your own contact form and see whether the message arrives. If your site has been live a while and you have never tested it, there is a genuine chance you have been losing enquiries without knowing.
What you can safely leave out
Plenty of standard website furniture does nothing for a small local business.
- A blog you will not write. An empty blog with two posts from 2023 looks worse than no blog. Only start one if you will keep it going
- Stock photos of strangers in headsets. Everyone recognises them and nobody believes them. A phone photo of your actual work beats them comfortably
- A carousel of sliding banners. They slow the page, most people never see slide two, and they push your actual message down
- A long company history on the home page. Useful on an about page, in the way on a home page
- Live chat you cannot staff. An unanswered chat window is a worse impression than no chat window
- Social feeds embedded on the page. They slow everything down and send people away from the site you just got them to
A short checklist
Print this, open your own website on your phone, and tick honestly.
- Does the first line say what you do and where?
- Is your phone number visible without scrolling, and tappable?
- Does each main service have its own page?
- Are the towns you cover named individually?
- Is there any indication of price?
- Are your credentials and insurance stated?
- Does the contact form actually deliver?
- Does the whole thing load in under three seconds on mobile data?
- Is there real proof: reviews, photos, or both?
You will also need a privacy policy and possibly a cookie banner, which this guide covers. Anything you could not tick is worth more than a redesign. Length is not the issue either, which we covered separately. If you would rather someone else went through it, send us your address and we will tell you what we would change, whether or not you use us.