What Should a Small Business Website Include? A Practical Checklist

Most website checklists are a list of pages. That's the least useful version, because a page is a container and the question is what goes in it.

This one is ordered by what actually earns its place. Everything in the first two sections matters for every business. Everything after that is conditional, and it's fine to skip it — in fact skipping it is usually the right call at the start.

1. The thing everything else depends on: positioning

Before a single page: write one sentence that says what you do, who for, and where. Plain words, no adjectives.

"I do emergency plumbing for homes in Bristol." That sentence, more or less unaltered, is your homepage headline, your search description and your Google listing. If you can't write it, no amount of design will save the site — and this is the single most common reason a small-business website doesn't work.

• One sentence: what, who for, where
• The three questions customers ask before buying, written down
• What you want a visitor to do — call, book, enquire, buy. Pick one
• What makes you the obvious choice, stated without superlatives

if the homepage starts with "welcome to our website", the sentence is missing.

2. The non-negotiables

Every business site needs all of these, whether it has one page or twenty.

A homepage that answers, not greets

• What you do, visible before anyone scrolls
• Where you are, or the area you serve
• One clear next step, above the fold on a phone
• A phone number that can be tapped to dial
• Photographs of your actual work, not stock

What you sell, and roughly what it costs

Prices, or a range, or a starting figure. Not knowing whether they can afford you is the most common reason people leave a small-business site. "From $X" is enough. If you genuinely can't publish a figure, publish how you quote and how fast.

A way to get in touch that works

• A form with as few fields as you can bear — name, contact, message
• The email address it delivers to is one you actually read
• You have submitted the form yourself and watched the email arrive
• The phone number and email are also visible as plain text
• You say what happens next: "I reply within a working day"

That fourth line is the one that catches people. A form that silently fails looks identical to a form that works. Test it after launch, and again every few months.

Something that proves you're real

Your own photographs, your trading name, a real address or service area, and reviews — but only ones you genuinely have. Invented testimonials are both obvious and, in most places, illegal. If you have none yet, say what you'd want a customer to be able to say, and go get one.

It works on a phone

• Text readable without pinching
• Buttons big enough for a thumb
• Forms usable one-handed
• Nothing scrolls sideways
• Tested on a real phone, on mobile data, not just a narrow browser window

It's secure and it loads

• HTTPS, with the padlock and no warning
• Images resized before uploading — not 6MB straight off a camera
• Loads in a couple of seconds on a phone on mobile data

3. The pages, once you need more than one

In the order most small businesses should add them:

1. 01Home — the sentence, the proof, the next step.
2. 02Services or products — one page per thing you sell if they're genuinely different; one page with sections if they're not.
3. 03Contact — form, phone, email, area served, hours.
4. 04About — the person or people. For small businesses this is often the second most-read page, because people are deciding whether to trust you.
5. 05Work, gallery or case studies — proof, if your work is visual or your results are explainable.
6. 06Anything else — only when there's a reason.

Five pages is plenty for most. My packages go to seven and I regularly talk people down, because empty pages are worse than absent ones.

4. Local, if you serve an area

• The same business name, address and phone number everywhere — site, listings, socials
• A free Google Business Profile, filled in properly
• Towns or areas you serve, written where a human would read them
• Opening hours, kept current including holidays
• A map, if people visit you

One warning: resist making a separate near-identical page for every town in your county. Search engines have treated that as spam for years, and it makes your site worse for humans. One honest page listing your area beats thirty thin ones.

5. The search basics, and only the basics

You don't need an SEO strategy to launch. You need these not to be wrong:

• Each page has its own title, describing that page
• Each page has its own description, written for a human choosing a result
• One H1 per page, and headings in order — not chosen for size
• Descriptive link text: "see our prices", never "click here"
• Alt text on images that says what's in the picture
• The site is in Google's index (search your own name and see)
• No accidental "noindex" left over from the build

That's it for launch. Content comes later, and it beats every technical trick — which is the entire reason this blog exists.

6. Accessibility, which is mostly just good building

Not a legal seminar — the handful of things that make a real difference and cost nothing if done from the start:

• Text has enough contrast against its background to read outdoors
• Every image has alt text, or is marked decorative
• Form fields have visible labels, not just placeholder text
• The whole site is usable with the keyboard, and you can see where focus is
• Nothing important is communicated by colour alone
• Video has captions

The keyboard one is a good five-minute test: press Tab through your own homepage and see whether you can tell where you are.

7. Knowing whether it works

• Analytics installed, and a privacy notice that mentions it
• You know how many people came last month, and from where
• You know which page they land on most
• You can tell an enquiry came from the site

That last one is the only number that matters and almost nobody has it. Even asking "how did you find us?" and writing the answer in a notebook beats a dashboard nobody opens.

8. Policies, where they apply

• A privacy notice — as soon as you have a form or analytics, which is immediately.
• Terms — if you sell online or take deposits.
• Returns and delivery — if you ship things. Findable before checkout, not after.
• Cookies — if you set any beyond the strictly necessary.

These depend on where you are and what you sell. It's a genuinely good use of an hour of a local professional's time, and not something to copy off another website.

9. After launch, which is where sites die

• You know who renews the domain, and when
• Backups exist, and someone has tested restoring one
• Software updates happen on a schedule, not on an emergency
• You know how to change a price yourself, or what a change costs
• Someone checks the contact form still delivers, quarterly
• You know who to call when it goes down

This is the section that gets skipped and it's the one that decides whether the site is still good in two years. It's why I offer care plans at all — $19 a month for hosting and the certificate, $59 with monitoring, maintenance and backups, $99 with a monthly report on how it's actually doing. Plenty of people handle it themselves, which is fine. Handling it by not thinking about it is the failure mode.

The short version

If you only do six things: write the sentence, put it at the top of the homepage, publish a price or a range, make the contact form work and prove it, resize your images, and test the whole thing on your own phone.

That's a better website than most small businesses have, and none of it is about design.