The nine
- What you do and where, in the first screen. A visitor decides whether they are in the right place before they scroll. A headline that could belong to any business in any industry has wasted the only guaranteed impression you get.
- A phone number that is tappable. On a phone, a number that is an image or plain text is a number nobody dials. It belongs in the header on every page.
- One page per service. Search engines match a search to a page, not to a business. A homepage listing eleven services competes properly for none of them.
- A real price or a real range. The most common objection to publishing prices is that every job is different. Every job is different for your competitors too, and the visitor who cannot find any number goes to whoever gave them one.
- Photographs of your own work. Stock photography is recognized instantly and it reads as a business with nothing to show. Ten honest phone photographs of real jobs beat any purchased image.
- Reviews, on your own page. Not only on a profile a visitor has to go and find. The proof should land before they leave.
- A form that works and gets answered. Test it monthly. A silently broken contact form is one of the most expensive faults a small site can have, and it produces no symptom other than quiet.
- Proof you are a real business. License number, insurance, years in business, service area, a real address or at least a real town. This is the layer that converts cautious buyers.
- Speed. In the Deloitte study of large retail and travel sites, a tenth of a second of extra speed was associated with 8.4 percent more retail conversions. Source: Deloitte with Google, Milliseconds Make Millions, 2020, covering 37 brands and more than 30 million sessions. It was measured on large retail and travel sites rather than on a local business, so treat it as the direction of the effect, not as a prediction about your site.
And the things it does not need
- A slider or carousel. Visitors almost never see slide two, and the first slide is usually delayed while the script loads. It is a way of avoiding the decision about what your headline should say.
- A stock photograph of a handshake. Or a headset, or a laptop on a white desk. They signal that there was nothing real to photograph.
- An About page that opens with "Founded in". Nobody arrived to read your history. Lead with what you do for them and put the history underneath it.
- A chatbot that invents answers. One that quotes a price you do not charge costs you more than having none. See how a website assistant should actually work.
- A popup before the visitor has read a sentence. It interrupts the one moment you had their attention, in exchange for an email address they will not remember giving.
The order to build them in
If you can only do part of this, do it in this order: make it clear what you do and where, make the phone number tappable, publish a range, then build one page per service. Those four are most of the available gain.
Everything else is real and everything else is second. You can check the technical half of the list on any site in about a minute with the free website report card.
Asked alongside this one.
Should a small business website show prices?
In most cases yes, at least as a range with what changes it. The objection that every job is different is true for your competitors too, and the visitor who finds no number anywhere usually calls the business that gave them one.
How many pages should a small business website have?
One home page, one page for each service you actually sell, an about page, a contact page, and a page for each area you genuinely serve. That is usually somewhere between six and fifteen, and it is driven by what you sell rather than by a target number.
Do I need a blog?
Only if you will keep it up and it answers questions your customers ask. Three posts from two years ago do more harm than no blog at all, because they date the site.
How fast should my website load?
As fast as you can reasonably make it, and the honest benchmark is that it should feel instant on a phone on mobile data rather than on your office wifi. Speed is one of the few design choices with measurable money attached.
Where to go next.
Do I need a new website is the objective check on the site you already have, what a website costs in 2026 covers the money, and WordPress or a custom build covers how it should be made.
Want this checked on your own business?
Send three lines about what you run and where. We come back with what we would fix first, why, and what it costs. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that is what you get.