What a small business website actually needs

Somebody quoted you two thousand pounds for a website. Somebody else said you don't need one at all any more, just a Google listing and a phone. A third person mentioned that you should really have a blog. You've now had four conversations about this and you're less clear than when you started.

Here's the uncomfortably simple version. For most small local businesses, a website has one job: answer the questions somebody has between finding you and ringing you. Everything else — the design, the photography, the clever bits — is decoration on top of that job, and a site that does the job badly in a beautiful way is worse than a plain one that does it well.

Start from what the visitor is doing

Nobody browses a plumber's website. They arrive with a specific worry and about twenty seconds of patience, and they're trying to settle one of four things.

Do these people do my kind of thing, and do they come out to where I live. Roughly what will this cost me. Can I get hold of them, and how soon will somebody actually answer.

That's it. That's almost the entire reason anybody visits a small business site, and once you've seen it you can't unsee how many sites fail to answer any of the four above the fold.

The five pages that cover it

A homepage that answers the four questions in the first screen. What you do, where you do it, a rough price signal, and how to contact you. Not a slideshow, not a welcome message, not "quality service since 1998" over a photograph of a sunset.

A page for each main thing you do, so one for boiler repairs, one for bathrooms, one for landlord checks. Keep them separate, each in plain language, each with a price range and a note of what's included. These are also the pages that get found in search, because they match what people actually type.

A page saying where you work, naming the actual towns and neighbourhoods rather than a county. This is the most commonly missing page on small business sites, and it answers the question that comes up second most often.

A contact page that makes contact easy. A phone number that dials when tapped, an email address, and whatever messaging app you actually use. Your hours, and one line on how fast you normally reply.

A page that shows you're real, carrying a few photos of finished work, a paragraph about who you are, and whatever registration or insurance matters in your trade. One page, not a whole section.

That's five pages, which is a weekend to write — rather less if you stop trying to make it sound like a brochure.

What you don't need

A blog, unless you're going to write it, which you aren't. An empty blog with two posts from 2022 is worse than no blog, because it dates the whole site.

A slider on the homepage, because they look expensive and nobody has ever read past the first slide.

An "our process" page with five numbered steps and a row of icons. Everybody has one, and nobody reads it.

Stock photography of people in hard hats shaking hands, which signals quite precisely that no real photographs were available.

A booking system, unless your work genuinely fits into fixed slots. Most trades don't, and a calendar that offers times you can't honour creates more problems than the phone ever did.

Prices are the thing you're avoiding and the thing that matters most

Almost every small business site leaves prices off, for a reason that feels solid: every job's different, and you don't want to be held to a number.

But the visitor has to find out somehow, and the only route you've left them is ringing a stranger to ask. A good share won't, so they go to the next site and the one after, and eventually somebody has published a range and gets the call.

You don't need a price list. You need a signal. "Most bathroom floors come in between £1,200 and £2,200 depending what's underneath" tells somebody whether they're in the right shop, which is all they were trying to work out. It also stops the enquiries from people with a £300 budget, which is a saving in itself.

Make it work on a phone, which mostly means make it plain

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often outdoors, often in a hurry. That has practical consequences.

The phone number should be tappable and near the top, and the text should be big enough to read without pinching. The site should load on a bad signal, which mostly means not putting a huge video on the front page. And the four answers should be visible without much scrolling.

None of that costs money, and most of it is a matter of leaving things out rather than adding them.

The gap between what a page says and what somebody asks

Here's the ceiling every small business site hits. You can write five good pages, and people will still turn up with questions you didn't predict — whether you'd look at a system that old, whether you could come before Friday, whether the price includes taking the old one away, whether you'd do the smaller version.

They ask those at ten at night, into a search box or an AI app rather than a phone, because asking a person feels like a commitment they're not ready for. A page can't answer back, so the ones who don't ring simply move on.

That's the gap we built hailera around: you write your answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent, so your site and the apps people now ask can answer directly rather than guessing from whatever's on the homepage. The five pages above do most of the work on their own, though, and they cost nothing but a weekend, so build those first and see what's still getting missed.

Build the cheap version first

If you haven't got a site, don't start with a designer — start with a document. Write the five pages in plain words, the way you'd explain them to somebody in a pub.

Then put them on the simplest thing that'll host them. What you'll discover is that the writing was ninety per cent of the job and the software was ten, which is the reverse of how it's usually sold to you.

You can always make it prettier later, and plenty of people do. What you cannot do is make a pretty site say something it doesn't say.

Today: open your site on your phone and time how long it takes to find what you do, where you do it, and a rough price. If any of the three takes more than ten seconds, that's your first job.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.