What to put on a small business website (and what to leave off)

Start with the person, not the page

Most small business websites are built the wrong way round. Someone sits down, thinks hard about their business, writes what they want to say, and ends up with a site that describes a company to nobody in particular. It reads like a leaflet. It converts like one too.

The sites that work start somewhere else. They start with one specific person. Picture them: they have just been given your name by a friend, or they have found you in a search, and they are standing in a kitchen or sitting on a bus with a phone in one hand. They are not browsing. Nobody visits a plumber’s website for pleasure. They arrived with a job in mind and three questions running underneath everything they read.

1. Do you do the thing I need? Not “are you a builder”, but “do you do loft conversions”. People search and think in the specific job, not the trade.
2. Do you do it near me? If you cover their town they want to know in the first few seconds, because if you don’t, nothing else on the page matters.
3. Can I trust you with it? This is the one that decides it. They are letting you into their home, or their wedding, or their books.

Everything on the site should help answer one of those three. Anything that doesn’t is in the way. That single rule will do more for your website than any amount of design, and it is the reason a plain site with the right things on it beats a beautiful site with the wrong ones.

You have less time than you think to answer them. Most people give a page a few seconds before deciding whether to keep reading, and on a phone that decision is made on the first screen, before any scrolling. Design for that person and you will have designed for nearly everybody.

The seven things every site needs

There are only seven. Most of them fit on one page, which is why a good single page site beats a bad five page one.

1. One sentence that says what you do and where. “Emergency plumbing across Bristol, day and night.” Not a slogan, not a welcome, not your values. The first line should let a stranger say back to you what you do. If they can’t, rewrite it.
2. A way to get in touch that works on a phone. A tappable number, an email address, and a short form. Put the number in the header so it sits on every screen, not buried on a contact page two taps away.
3. Your services, in your customer’s words. Write what people search for. A decorator writes “painting and wallpapering”, not “interior finishing solutions”. Each service gets a line or two: what it is, who it suits, and what happens when they book.
4. Proof. Photographs of real work, reviews with a name attached, and any accreditation that means something in your trade, whether that is a TrustMark registration, a trade body, or a manufacturer approval. One genuine photograph of a job you finished last week beats any stock image ever taken.
5. Who you are. A short paragraph and a photograph of the actual person. People hire people, and this is where a small business beats a national chain. Don’t hide it. There is a separate guide to writing an About page if you want to get this part right.
6. The practical details. Opening hours, the area you cover, whether you need booking in advance, parking if people come to you. Every one of these is a phone call you will not have to take.
7. One clear next step. Call, book, get a quote, order. Pick the one that matters most and repeat it at the top, after the services, and at the bottom.

Why the order beats the design

The same seven things in the wrong order make a worse website than plainer content in the right order. People read from the top and leave the moment they are unsure they are in the right place, so the sequence has to match the questions in their head rather than the pride you have in your business.

The order that works for nearly every local business is this. What and where, then how to reach you, then what you offer, then proof, then who you are, then the practical details, and finally the next step again.

Notice that the about section is fifth. Owners nearly always put it first, because it is the part they care about most. Customers care about it only once they have decided you might be able to help them. Put it first and you spend your best screen space on the thing they are least ready to read.

The same rule governs your menu. Three to five items, named plainly, in roughly that order. “Services, Our work, About, Contact” is a good menu. “Home, Welcome, Solutions, Gallery, News, Testimonials, Links, Contact Us” is a menu that makes people guess, and guessing is the thing you are trying to remove.

Writing the words

This is where most small business websites actually fail, and it is nothing to do with writing ability. It is that people switch into a strange formal voice the moment they write about their own business. They become “we”, they start “providing solutions”, and every sentence gets a coat of varnish that makes it slide off the reader.

The fix is simple to describe and slightly uncomfortable to do. Write it the way you would say it to a customer standing in front of you. If you would never say “we pride ourselves on delivering bespoke solutions tailored to your requirements” out loud, don’t write it. You would say “tell me what you need and I’ll price it up”. That is better copy, and it is already in your voice.

Four tests that fix most of it

• The so what test. After every sentence, ask “so what?” “We are passionate about quality” fails it. “We clear up every evening so you can use your kitchen” passes, because the customer can feel the difference.
• The competitor test. Could a rival put their name on this sentence and have it still be true? “Reliable, professional service” could go on any website in the country. Anything that survives this test is worth keeping.
• The out loud test. Read the page aloud. Where you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. Where you feel embarrassed, the sentence is not you.
• The specifics test. Swap adjectives for facts. “Fast response” becomes “we answer the phone until nine at night”. “Experienced” becomes “twenty two years, mostly Victorian terraces”. Specifics are believable in a way adjectives never are.

Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences. On a phone, a five sentence paragraph is a wall, and people skip walls. Use headings that say what the section contains rather than being clever, because most visitors scan the headings first and read only the section they need. That habit also happens to be what helps you get found in the first place, since search engines read those headings to work out what the page is about.

The same paragraph, twice

Here is the kind of thing that ends up on a kitchen fitter’s about page, and it is not a straw man. Variations of it are on thousands of small business websites.

“Established in 2009, we are a family run business dedicated to providing our valued customers with the very highest standards of workmanship. We pride ourselves on our attention to detail and our unwavering commitment to complete customer satisfaction.”

Every clause could belong to any of a thousand firms. Nothing in it is checkable, nothing is specific, and no reader finishes it knowing anything they did not know before. Now the same business, written the way the owner would actually say it:

“We’re a family firm in Taunton and we’ve been fitting kitchens since 2009. Most of our work comes from people who saw one we did for a neighbour. We’ll price the job in writing, start on the day we said, and clear up at the end of every evening so you can still use the room.”

The second version is barely longer. It names a town, gives a year, explains where the work comes from, and makes three promises a customer can hold you to. That last part is the whole trick: specific claims are believable precisely because they could be wrong, and a reader senses that even without thinking it through.

Photographs, and what to shoot

Photographs do more selling on a small business website than words do, particularly for anything visual. Someone choosing a plasterer, a landscaper or a salon is trying to picture the finished result on their own house or their own head. They cannot judge your technique, so they judge the only evidence available.

The good news is that professional photography is optional and real photography is not. A slightly imperfect photograph of a job you actually finished beats a beautiful stock image every time, because people recognise stock instantly and it quietly tells them you had nothing real to show.

Taking better photographs on a phone

• Shoot in daylight, near a window or outside. Indoor ceiling lights make everything yellow and flat. Overcast days are better than bright sun, which throws hard shadows.
• Tidy first. Move the bag, the mug, the extension lead. Thirty seconds of tidying is the difference between a photo you can use and one you can’t.
• Get the whole thing in, then get closer. One wide shot for context, two or three close shots for the detail you are proud of. The detail shots are the ones that show craft.
• Take before shots. People underestimate this constantly. A before and after pair is the single most persuasive thing on a trade website, and the before takes five seconds while you are standing there anyway.
• Hold still and take several. Storage is free. Blurry photographs read as careless, which is exactly the impression you are trying to avoid.
• Ask before you photograph people or the inside of homes. A quick verbal yes is enough for most jobs, and it saves an awkward conversation later.

Ten good photographs are plenty to launch with. If you have none at all, launch anyway and add them as you go. A site with no pictures that goes live today will bring in more work than a perfect site that never quite gets finished.

The contact form

The form is where the website stops being a brochure and starts being a business. It is also, on most small sites, the place where the most enquiries are quietly lost, because somebody added every field the builder offered.

The rule is short: every field you add costs you enquiries. Somebody standing in a cold garage with one bar of signal will fill in three boxes. They will not fill in nine. So ask for the least you need in order to reply, which for almost every business is a name, one way to reach them, and a sentence about what they want.

• Do not require both phone and email. Let people choose how they are contacted. Making both mandatory loses the ones who dislike phone calls and the ones who never check email.
• Cut “how did you hear about us?” It is a question for the phone call, not the form, and it is the field people abandon on.
• Let them attach a photograph. For any trade this is the single most useful field on the form. A picture of the leak, the fuse board or the room saves an entire exchange of messages and often lets you quote without a visit.
• Ask roughly when, not exactly when. “As soon as possible, in the next few weeks, just planning ahead” tells you what you need and takes one tap.
• Say what happens next. “We reply to everything within one working day” under the button reassures people that the message is going somewhere. Then do it.

You are also collecting personal information the moment somebody fills that form in, and the Information Commissioner’s Office publishes plain guidance for small businesses on what that means in practice. It is less onerous than people fear, but it is worth ten minutes.

Two practical things matter more than the design of the form. The first is where the message goes: send it to an address you actually read, and send yourself a test enquiry after launch and again every few months, because a form that silently stopped working is one of the most common and most expensive faults on a small business website. The second is the message people see after submitting. “Thanks” is a wasted screen. Use it to say when you will reply, give the phone number for anything urgent, and point them at your work while they wait.

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What to leave off

Cutting is harder than adding and does more good. Every one of these is common, and every one makes a website worse.

• “Welcome to our website.” The visitor knows where they are. That line occupies the most valuable space on the page and says nothing. Use it to say what you do.
• A news or blog page you will not keep up. One post from 2023 tells people the business might have closed. If you are not going to write regularly, leave it out. It is easy to add later, and nobody notices its absence.
• A mission statement. No customer has ever chosen a roofer because of their core values. Show your values in how the site treats people: clear prices, honest timescales, a real phone number.
• Stock photos of handshakes and headsets. Recognised instantly, and they signal that nothing on the page is real.
• Reviews without names. “Great service! A customer” reads as invented even when it isn’t. Use a first name and a town, with permission, or link to the review where it lives.
• Anything that pops up. Newsletter boxes, chat bubbles asking how they can help before the page has loaded, cookie banners bigger than the content. On a phone a popup is the entire screen, and the back button is right there.
• Anything that plays by itself. Audio and video that start on their own are the fastest way to make somebody leave, usually while muting their phone in a quiet room.
• “Under construction” pages. Either the page is ready or it should not be in the menu.
• Pages that exist because the template had them. If you cannot say what a page is for in one sentence, delete it.

There is a pattern in that list. Almost everything on it was added because a template offered it or because it felt like something a proper website ought to have. That is also the trap with the tools people reach for first, which is worth understanding before you start: there is a real difference between a website builder and a website that has been built, and most of the clutter above arrives with the former.

How this changes with your trade

The seven things hold for everyone. What changes is which of them carries the weight, and that depends entirely on what your customers are trying to do when they arrive.

When the decision is urgent

For an emergency trade the whole site is really one thing: a tappable number, visible immediately, with enough proof beside it that the person dials rather than going back to the results. Everything else on the site exists for the planned work. That is why a good plumber’s website puts the number and the callout area at the very top and keeps the boiler and bathroom pages further down, and why an electrician’s site shows the registration where it cannot be missed. In electrical work in particular, customers check the paperwork before they check anything else.

When the decision is expensive

For a bigger job the balance flips. Somebody choosing who does their extension will read three websites carefully before ringing anybody, and what they want is evidence. This is why a builder’s website lives or dies on its project pages, with each job shown from start to finish, and why the same is true for the roofers, joiners, plasterers and landscapers whose work is judged almost entirely on photographs.

When the decision is about feel

Some businesses are chosen on atmosphere before anything practical. Nobody picks a salon the way they pick a plumber. They are choosing somewhere to sit for an hour and trust with how they look, so a salon website has to feel like the room before it lists a single price. The same applies to a yoga or pilates studio, where the site’s real job is reassuring a nervous beginner that they will not be the only one.

When the practical detail is the product

And for some businesses one page does nearly all the work. On a restaurant website the menu is the most visited page by a wide margin, so it needs to be real text rather than a PDF that has to be pinched and zoomed. For a writer or blogger the equivalent is readability itself: generous type, a sensible line length, and nothing sitting on top of the words.

If your business is not in that list, the method still holds. Work out what your customer is trying to do in the first ten seconds and build the page around that. There is a page for each kind of business we build for if you want to see how the shape changes.

A page by page checklist

For a site with a handful of pages, this is what belongs on each. A single page site simply stacks these in the same order.

That is the whole site. If you are building something with eleven pages, some of them are there because a template suggested them, and they are diluting the ones that matter.

How to tell if it is working

The measure of a small business website is enquiries, not visitors. It is easy to get attached to visitor numbers going up, and they are close to meaningless on their own. A hundred people who were never going to call are worth less than three who did.

The most useful thing you can do costs nothing: ask every person who contacts you how they found you. Write the answers down for four weeks. That single habit will tell you more about what is working than any analytics dashboard, because it captures the recommendation that ended in a search, which no software can see.

Beyond that, three things are worth watching and most things are not.

• Enquiries each month, however they arrive. The only number that pays wages.
• Which pages people land on. If one service page brings most of the visits, that is your business telling you what to expand.
• How many leave immediately. A page most people leave within seconds is usually answering a different question from the one they asked.

Two free tools are worth ten minutes each. Google Search Console shows which searches are already bringing people to your site, which is usually surprising and occasionally points at a service you should be pushing harder. PageSpeed Insights tells you how fast the site loads on a phone, which is the most common reason a page loses somebody before it has finished appearing.

Give it time. A new website does not arrive with an audience, and the work of being found is a separate job from the work of being good, which is covered properly in its own guide. Expect months rather than weeks before search brings much, and expect the site to start earning immediately with the people who were already being sent to you.

The short version

Say what you do and where in the first line. Put the phone number where a thumb can reach it on every screen. List your services in the words customers use, not the words your trade uses. Show real work and real reviews with real names. Say who you are, in fifth place rather than first. Cover the practical details so people don’t have to ring to ask. End every screen with one clear thing to do.

Then take off everything that doesn’t help a stranger decide to contact you. If you are unsure whether something earns its place, it doesn’t. And if any of the words in this guide were unfamiliar, the guide to what a website actually is covers the ground underneath all of it.