What to Include on a Small Business Website

Most people look a local business up before they call it. They might have a name from a neighbor, a truck they saw on the street or a search on their phone. Whatever brought them, your website has a short window to answer three questions, and that is the best guide to what to include on a small business website: do you do what I need, do you work where I am, and how do I reach you? Everything below serves those three questions. If you are planning a new site or tidying up an old one, use this as a checklist; our free website content worksheet helps you gather the details in one place.

Start with the first screen

The top of your home page, the part someone sees before scrolling, does most of the work. On a phone that is a small space, so be ruthless about what goes there:

Your business name, exactly as customers know it.
What you do, in the words a customer would use. "Plumbing repairs and water heaters" beats "comprehensive residential solutions".
Where you work: a town, a county or "the North Shore", whatever your customers would recognize.
One clear way to get in touch. On a phone, a button that starts a call is hard to beat.

If a visitor has to scroll or tap through a menu to learn whether you serve their town, many will simply go back and try the next business on the list.

Describe your services the way customers search for them

List the jobs you actually want. For each service, one or two sentences in plain language are enough: what it is, who it is for and anything that sets your approach apart. Use the words customers type and say. A homeowner searches for "water heater replacement", not "thermal appliance installation".

If you offer several distinct services, give each one its own section or page. Separate pages help people land on exactly the service they were looking for, and they give you room to answer the questions that come up for that job. Our Growth plan includes up to six pages for exactly this reason, while a focused one-page site works well when your list is short.

Say where you work and when

Customers want to know quickly whether you can come to them. Name the towns or neighborhoods you cover. If you have a shop or office that customers visit, show the address and opening hours. If you work at customers' homes, say so, and you can leave a home address off the site entirely.

Hours matter even for trades that work by appointment. "Weekdays 7 to 5, emergency calls answered on weekends" tells someone whether to call now or tomorrow. Keep holiday hours up to date; nothing frustrates a customer like a closed door the website said would be open.

Show proof that is real

People hire businesses they trust, and trust comes from specifics:

Licences and insurance you actually hold. If your state publishes licence numbers, consider listing yours so customers can check it.
Photos of your own work, your own vehicles and your own team. Real photos, even simple ones, beat glossy stock images that a customer has seen elsewhere.
How long you have been in business, if it is true and worth saying.
Reviews customers left on your Google profile or another review site. Link to them, or quote them with permission and exactly as written.

Never invent any of this. A made-up claim can cost you a customer, and in some cases it can break consumer protection rules.

Make contacting you effortless

Put your phone number and email address on every page, not just a contact page. On phones, make the number a link that starts a call. Say how you prefer to be contacted and how quickly you usually reply. If you text customers, say that too.

A contact form is optional. It helps when customers need to describe a job or send a photo, but it is one more thing that can break, and every message it sends must actually reach someone. If you add one, test it every month.

Get the behind-the-scenes basics right

A good-looking website can still be hard to find or slow to use. The basics that matter most:

A clear title and description for every page. These are what search engines show in results. Google's own guidance asks for a unique, descriptive and concise title for every page, without repeated keywords; see its guide to title links.
A layout made for phones first. Google indexes the mobile version of a site, and many of your visitors will be on a phone anyway.
Speed. Compress photos and avoid heavy extras that slow the first screen.
A secure address. Your site should load over https with no warnings.
Accessibility. Describe images in alt text, keep text readable and make buttons large enough to tap.

Every Sites by Digit plan includes this technical groundwork, so you can focus on the content only you can provide.

What you can safely leave out

Small business websites often try to do too much. You can usually skip:

A long company history. One honest paragraph about who you are is plenty.
Sliders and carousels. Most visitors never see past the first slide.
Music, autoplay video and pop-ups that cover the page on a phone.
Jargon and buzzwords. Write the way you talk to customers.
Pages you will never update. An empty "news" page from three years ago looks abandoned.

Keep it current

A website is not finished on launch day. Prices change, you add a service, your hours shift for the season. Set a reminder to look over your site every few months, and fix anything out of date straight away. If you would rather not handle changes yourself, our Growth plan includes changes each month, and our pricing page shows which plan fits.

A quick checklist

Before you call your website done, make sure a stranger can find, in under a minute on a phone:

What you do.
Where you work.
How to contact you, with one tap.
A reason to trust you that is specific and true.
A clear next step, such as calling for a quote.

If you would like a website that covers all of this without the hassle, see our plans and pricing or look at our example websites.