What should a small business website include?

Far less than most templates suggest, and a few specific things almost every small business leaves out. A visitor arrives with three or four questions and a low tolerance for hunting. A good small business site answers them immediately and then gets out of the way.

The five things the first screen must answer

Before any scrolling, a stranger should be able to tell:

1. What you do — in the words a customer would use, not an industry phrase.
2. Who it is for — and, for most local businesses, where. "Plumber" is not the same as "emergency plumber covering Leeds and Wakefield".
3. Whether you are credible — one real proof point, not a wall of badges.
4. What it costs, or how pricing works — even approximately.
5. What to do next — one obvious action, repeated.

The most common failure is a beautiful photograph and a slogan that could belong to any business in any sector. If your homepage headline would work for a competitor with the name swapped, it is not doing its job.

Pages that earn their place

A small business site rarely needs more than a handful of pages, but it usually needs different ones than it has.

One page per service

This is the single highest-value structural decision. A page listing eight services briefly will lose to eight pages that each cover one properly — both for the customer deciding, and because a search engine can only match a page against what people search for. If you offer boiler servicing, that deserves a page saying what it includes, what it costs and how long it takes.

A contact page that actually contains contact details

Not just a form. A phone number, an email address, and for anyone with premises, an address and opening hours. A form-only contact page reads as a business that does not want to be phoned.

Proof

Real customer feedback with names or places attached, photographs of actual work, and any accreditation that a customer would recognise. One specific testimonial about a job like theirs beats a carousel of anonymous praise.

An about page that is about the customer's confidence

This page is widely misunderstood. Visitors read it to decide whether to trust you, not to learn your founding date. How long you have done this, who will actually turn up, what you are careful about — those build confidence. A company history does not.

The details businesses forget and customers look for

These are unglamorous and they are the ones people actually hunt for.

• Do you cover my area? Name the towns, districts or postcodes. Vagueness here loses enquiries silently.
• When are you open? Including any difference at weekends or over holidays.
• How quickly do you respond? Even "we reply the same working day" removes hesitation.
• What happens next? A short description of the process — enquiry, quote, visit, work — removes the fear of committing to something unknown.
• Parking, access, or where to find you if people come to you.
• How to pay and whether a deposit is required.

Prices: an honest look at both sides

There is a real argument against publishing prices — genuinely variable work is hard to quote honestly, and a number without context invites unfair comparison. But the argument for is stronger for most small businesses: people filter on price whether or not you help them, and a site with no indication at all is filtered out by everyone who assumes it will be expensive.

The workable middle is a range with what drives it: "Most kitchens come in between £X and £Y, depending on size and whether the layout changes." That respects the variability, saves you quoting for people who were never going to proceed, and reads as confidence rather than evasion.

Trust signals that are real, and ones that are not

Real: named customer feedback, photographs of your own work, genuine trade accreditations, a physical address, a phone number that a person answers, clear terms. Not real: stock photographs of an office you do not have, invented awards, badges nobody recognises, and counters claiming a suspiciously round number of happy customers. Visitors have learned to discount the second list, and its presence undermines the first.

The technical minimum

It does not need to be sophisticated, but it does need to work on a phone, because that is where most people will meet you. Beyond that: pages that load quickly enough that nobody waits, text that can be read without zooming, buttons big enough to hit, a contact number that dials when tapped, and every page reachable in a click or two. If your site is slow, oversized images are the usual culprit and are usually the cheapest thing to fix.

The bottom line

Answer the five questions above the fold, give each real service its own page, put your actual contact details on the contact page, and include the boring practical details people genuinely search for. That beats a more beautiful site that makes a visitor work. If you are still deciding whether you need one, see whether social media is enough on its own; if you have one and it is not being found, see how to get your business found on Google.