What a small business website needs, page by page.
Visitors come to a small business website with a few plain questions, usually on a phone. The pages and details that answer them, and what to leave out.
Updated 12 October 2026
Answer the first questions on the first screen
Someone who lands on your site from a search wants four answers before they scroll: what you do, whether you cover their area, whether you can help soon and how to reach you. On a phone, the first screen has room for a headline, one line under it and a button, so the answers have to fit there.
Write the headline in the words customers search with. "Dog grooming in north Austin, open Saturdays" tells a visitor more than "Your pet deserves the best", and it tells Google more too. Under it, put the one action most customers take, whether that is calling or booking.
Build the pages people look for
Most small businesses need a short set of pages: a home page, a page for each main service, an about page with the real people, a contact page and a privacy notice. Add a prices page if you can publish prices, and a gallery if your work photographs well. Leave out pages you will not keep up. A news page whose last post is years old makes visitors wonder whether you are still in business.
Give each main service its own page. A page about one service can answer that service's questions and show up for the searches people make about it, which one long list of services cannot do.
Make every contact route work on a phone
Put your phone number at the top of every page as a link that starts a call when tapped, with your opening hours beside it. Add a short form for people who would rather write, and an email address for those who want to send photos or documents. If customers come to you, give the address with a link that opens their maps app.
Say how soon you reply, and keep to it. Remove any route nobody watches. A chat window that never answers, or an inbox checked once a month, loses people who would happily have called. If your business runs on appointments, the booking route needs the same care: see how to get more bookings from your website.
Show proof that is real
A new visitor wants to know you are a real business that has done this before. Photos of your own work and your actual team do that. Stock photos of smiling strangers do the opposite, because people recognise them. Before and after photos work well for many trades: ask the customer first, and keep faces and house numbers out unless they agree.
Link to your reviews on Google or another site where visitors can check them, instead of pasting quotes with no name attached. List the qualifications, licences, insurance and memberships your trade expects, and never invent reviews or numbers.
Keep it fast on a phone
A page that is slow to show anything loses people before they read a word. The usual causes are photos uploaded straight from a camera and scripts added over the years for widgets nobody uses any more. A video or slideshow at the top slows the first screen on its own.
Test on a real phone over mobile data as well as on the office Wi-Fi. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows what slows each page down, including images far larger than the screen needs.
Set up the search basics
Each page needs its own title and description that say what is on it, and a main heading that matches. Structured data gives Google your business name, address, opening hours and services in a form it can read, and a sitemap lists the pages you want found. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console. It also shows the searches that bring visitors and any pages Google could not index.
Claim your Google Business Profile and use the same business name, address and phone number there as on the site. Only write a page for a town or area if you have something specific to say about it. Google's spam policies treat near-identical town pages as doorways.
Handle privacy and ownership properly
Publish a privacy notice that says what your forms collect, who receives it and how long you keep it. Ask only for what you need to reply: a date of birth or health details on a general contact form put people off and add risk. If you use analytics or advertising cookies, ask first where the law requires it, and make saying no as easy as saying yes. If the site does no tracking at all, there is nothing to ask consent for.
Register the domain in your own name and keep the logins for the hosting and every account. If a past supplier still holds them, ask for them now.
Where to start
Open your current site on your own phone and go through this list. If most of it is missing, starting again is often less work than patching: see how a website redesign works.
Every site we build is checked on phones and desktops, for speed and for its search setup, and the client owns the site, domain and accounts. See websites.