The 5 pages every small business website needs, and what goes on each
Short answer: a small business website needs 5 pages. Home, services, areas, about or our work, and contact. That is enough for Google to understand what you do and where, and enough for a customer to decide to get in touch. Most small business sites that fail do not fail for lack of pages. They fail because each page tries to do everything, or because the pages exist but say nothing. Here is what each page is for and what has to be on it.
The 5 pages at a glance
| Page | Its one job | Must have |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Tell a visitor in 5 seconds what you do, where, and how to get in touch | Trade and town in the heading, 3 proof points, one clear button |
| Services | Answer “do they do the thing I need?” | One section per service, in the words customers search for |
| Areas | Match you to searches in each town you cover | Every town and village named, with a line about the work there |
| About or our work | Turn a visit into trust | A real face, real photos of real jobs, reviews |
| Contact | Make getting in touch effortless | A short form to your email, hours, the area you cover |
If you only remember one thing from this post, remember the middle column. A page with one job is easy to write and easy to rank. A page with 5 jobs does none of them well.
1. Home
The home page is read on a phone, standing up, by someone comparing you with 2 other tabs. They decide in seconds. The first screen, before any scrolling, should carry:
- A heading that says what you do and where. “Accountants in Northwich” beats “Welcome to Smith and Co”.
- A line underneath that says who you help and why you, in plain words.
- 3 things a customer can check: years trading, a review score, an accreditation, a guarantee.
- One button that leads to the contact form. Not 4 buttons.
Below that, a short summary of each service with a link to the services page, 2 or 3 reviews, and the towns you cover. Leave the company history for the about page.
2. Services
This is the page that wins most searches, because people search for the service, not the business. Give each main service its own section with a heading, 100 to 200 words in plain English, and a price or a price range if you can give one. Name the service the way customers do. People search “boiler service”, not “heating system maintenance solutions”.
If one service brings in most of your money, or you want to rank for it in its own right, it deserves its own page rather than a section. That is a sixth page, and it is the most common reason a small business site grows.
3. Areas
The areas page is the one most small businesses skip, and it is the one that does the most for local search. A customer in Wilmslow searches “electrician Wilmslow”. If the word Wilmslow appears nowhere on your site, you are relying on your Google Business Profile alone.
List every town and village you actually cover. Add a sentence about each where you can: the kind of jobs you do there, the roads you know, how quickly you can get there. For the 2 or 3 towns you want most of your work from, a dedicated page with local copy does better than a line in a list. Our guide to local SEO explains why.
4. About or our work
People buy from people. This page needs a photo of you or your team, taken by you, not a stock image of a handshake. Add a short story: how long you have been doing this, why you started, what you will and will not take on. Then the proof. Photos of real work with a line about each, accreditations with numbers a customer can check, and reviews copied from Google.
For trades, “our work” usually does better than “about”, because a photo of a finished kitchen says more than a paragraph. For professional services, “about” usually wins, because the customer is choosing a person.
5. Contact
Keep the form short: name, email, what you need, and where. Every extra field loses some people. Put your email address on the page as text so people can copy it. Add your hours, the area you cover and a line on how quickly you reply. Then keep that promise.
A phone number is fine, but put it after the form if you are on a job all day and cannot answer. An email you can reply to at lunchtime beats a missed call that goes to a competitor.
What you do not need on day one
Plenty of small business sites are padded with pages that cost money and do nothing.
| Page | Why it can wait |
|---|---|
| Blog | Worth it only if someone will write for it every month. An empty blog looks abandoned. |
| Separate testimonials page | Reviews work better on the pages where people decide, not on a page nobody visits. |
| FAQ page | Put the questions on the pages they belong to. A services question goes on the services page. |
| Team page | For a team of 1 to 5, the about page covers it. |
| Gallery with no words | Google cannot read photos alone. Put them on “our work” with a line each. |
Add any of them later, when there is a reason. A new page each month is part of the care plan, and that is a better way to grow a site than building 15 pages at launch.
How much this costs
A 5-page site like this is £399 with us, written with you and live in 7 working days, and extra pages are £60 each. The full scope is on the pricing page. Whoever you hire, the 5 pages above should be inside the price, with the copy written for you. If a quote charges extra for an areas page or asks you to supply all the words, compare it with what we list in cheap website design: what £399 buys.
Questions to ask yourself
Open your own site on your phone and answer these honestly.
- Does the first screen say what I do and which town I am in?
- Can a customer find every service I sell, named the way they would search for it?
- Is every town I want work from named somewhere on the site?
- Is there a real photo of me, my team or my work?
- Can someone send me a message in under a minute without picking up the phone?
- Does any page exist only because a template came with it?
If you answered no to 2 or more, the site is not doing its job yet. Send us a short brief with your trade and your town, and we will tell you by email which pages to fix first.