Guide
What your website actually needs
Most small business websites fail on the basics rather than on anything sophisticated. Here is the short list of what genuinely matters, and the longer list of what you can safely ignore.
The five pages that do the work
Home. What you do, where you do it, and how to contact you — visible without scrolling. Most visitors never go further than this page.
Services. One page per significant service if you can. People search for their problem, and a page that names the problem is what ranks.
About. More important than owners expect. People buying a service are choosing a person. A real photograph and a plain account of who you are outperforms any amount of polish.
Contact. Phone, email, address if you have one, hours, and a map. No cleverness.
Areas served. If you travel to customers, name the places. It is the difference between appearing in a suburb's results and not.
The details that decide it
Phone number in the header on every page. The most common failure on service websites, and the most expensive.
It has to work on a phone. Most local searches are mobile. If it is awkward on a phone, it does not work at all.
It has to load fast. People leave slow sites, and most slowness is oversized photographs.
Prices, or ranges. You do not have to publish everything. Publishing something beats publishing nothing, every time.
Proof. Reviews, photographs of finished work, licence numbers, how long you have been in business.
What you can skip
A blog you will not write. Three abandoned posts from 2023 look worse than no blog at all.
Live chat. Unless someone is actually there to answer it, it is a broken promise on every page.
An online store, unless you sell products. Covered properly in our Shopify comparison — service businesses almost never need one.
Animations and video backgrounds. They slow the site and impress nobody who was deciding whether to call you.
A newsletter, unless you have something to send. An empty list is a form nobody fills in.
The test
Open your site on your phone. Start a timer. Can a stranger tell what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you in under ten seconds?
If yes, the fundamentals are right and everything else is refinement. If no, no amount of design or SEO spending will fix it, because the problem is not traffic.