What makes a good small business website

Websites get judged on how they look because that is the only thing a non-specialist can assess. So that is what gets sold, and what gets built.

But the site is not a brochure. It is the step between someone finding you and someone calling you, and it either helps or it leaks.

The five things that actually matter

1. It loads in about a second on a phone

Most people find you on a phone, often on mobile data, often standing somewhere inconvenient. Every extra second costs you visitors, and the losses are front-loaded — the gap between one second and three is brutal.

Test it properly: your own phone, wi-fi off, cold load. Not your laptop on the office connection where everything is cached.

2. It says what you do and where, immediately

Someone landing on your homepage should know within two seconds what you sell and whether you cover their area. That means plain words in the headline, not a brand statement.

“Emergency electricians across the Inner West” works. “Powering your possibilities” does not. The second one tested well with the people who wrote it and nobody else.

3. Contacting you is obvious from anywhere

• Phone number in the header, tappable, on every page.
• A form short enough to finish in a car park — name, phone, one free-text box. Every extra field costs completions.
• Your service area in writing, so people can self-qualify.
• Hours, so nobody wonders whether it is worth ringing.

A surprising number of sites bury the phone number on a contact page. Every tap you add between intent and action loses some of the people who had it.

4. It answers the questions that stop people calling

There are four or five things a person wants to know before they ring a stranger about money. Do you cover my area. Roughly what does this cost. How soon can you come. Are you licensed and insured. What happens if it goes wrong.

Most sites answer none of them, so the visitor leaves to find a site that does. Answering them plainly — including price ranges — is the single cheapest conversion improvement available to most businesses.

5. It proves you are real

Photos of your actual work. Your actual face. Your ABN. Reviews with names on them. A street you actually operate from, or a service area you actually cover.

Stock photography does active harm here. Everyone has seen that smiling call-centre woman on forty other sites. She signals that nothing else on the page is necessarily real either.

What matters much less than people think

• Animations and scroll effects. They cost load time and nobody has ever hired a tradie because of a fade-in.
• A blog, if you will not maintain it. Three posts from 2023 is worse than no blog.
• Being on the newest platform. Customers cannot tell and do not care.
• A long About page. Useful for trust; not the reason anyone arrived.
• Chat widgets, unless someone is genuinely there to answer. An unattended one is a worse phone number.

The structure that works for most service businesses

1. 01Home — what you do, where, proof, and the next step.
2. 02One page per service. Not one page listing all of them. This is also what makes you findable.
3. 03Suburb pages, for the areas you genuinely work in and can say something true about.
4. 04About — who you are, with a face on it.
5. 05Contact — phone, form, hours, area.
6. 06Pricing, if you can. Most competitors will not, which is exactly why it works.