The five pages every small business website needs
The five pages every small business website needs, what each one has to answer, and the eight pages people build first that nobody ever reads.
There are five pages every small business website needs, and the list hasn’t changed in fifteen years: a home page, a services page, a prices page, an about page and a contact page. If you build those five well, you’re in business. Everything else is a later decision, and most of it is a decision you’ll never need to make.
The reason people get this wrong is that they plan a website like a brochure, by topic, and end up with fourteen pages of two paragraphs each. A visitor doesn’t browse. They arrive from a search with one question, they want it answered on the page they landed on, and then they want to know what it costs and how to reach you. Five pages, each one doing a whole job, beats fourteen doing a fifth of one.
The five pages every small business website needs#
| Page | The question it answers | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Home | What do you do, where, and am I in the right place? | 400 to 600 words |
| Services | Do you do the specific thing I need? | 600 to 1,000 words |
| Prices | Can I afford you, roughly? | 300 to 500 words |
| About | Are you real, and will you turn up? | 300 to 400 words |
| Contact | How do I start, right now? | 150 words and a form |
Note that none of those questions is "what is your company history". Every one of them is a thing a stranger wants to know before parting with money.
What the home page has to do in eight seconds#
The home page is the only page that has to work for someone who doesn’t yet know what you sell. It needs three things above the fold: what you do, the town or area you do it in, and one way to get started. A headline that reads "Quality workmanship since 2011" fails all three. A headline that reads "Bathroom remodeling in Dayton and Lorain" passes all three in six words.
Below that, put three or four short blocks pointing at the services page, a handful of real photographs of your own work, two or three reviews with names on them, and the contact details again at the bottom. There’s more on what earns its place in our guide to what to put on your homepage and what to leave off.
The services page is where the money is#
If you only get one page right, get this one right. It’s the page that ranks for the thing people search, and it’s the page that turns a reader into an inquiry. For each service, write four short things: what it is in plain words, who it suits, what it costs or a range, and what happens when they get in touch. Repeat for each service. Don’t write a paragraph of adjectives.
Once a service is worth more than about $1,500 a year to you, give it its own page rather than a section. That’s how you end up ranking for "water heater repair Dayton" instead of hoping one generic page covers eleven trades. We go into the structure in detail in writing a services page that gets inquiries.
Put your prices on the page, even as ranges#
Almost every business we build for wants to leave prices off, and almost every one of them changes their mind within three months. The reason is that hiding prices filters out the people who can afford you, because they assume you’re expensive and awkward, and it fills your inbox with people who are shocked by the quote.
You don’t need a fixed price list. A range works: "Most kitchens we install come in between $12,000 and $25,000 depending on the cabinets and the countertop." A starting price works: "From $55 for a standard cut and finish." A worked example works best of all, because it shows what the money buys.
Writing the about page and the contact page#
The about page is a trust page, not a memoir. Three things: who does the work, one line on how long you have been doing it and what qualifies you, and a photograph of a real human being. Certifications go here too, because that’s where people look for them. It should take four minutes to write. If you’re stuck, how to write an About page people finish reading has a template.
The contact page needs a form with five fields, your email address written out, your hours, and the area you cover. Not a fifteen-field form with a dropdown of inquiry types. Every field you add loses you inquiries, which is the argument in the inquiry form: five fields, not fifteen.
A weekend plan for writing all five#
- Saturday morning. Write the services page first, not the home page. It’s the hardest, and everything else is easier once the wording exists.
- Saturday afternoon. Prices. Pull your last ten invoices, find the low, the high and the typical, and write those three numbers as ranges.
- Sunday morning. Home page. Lift the best sentence from the services page as your headline, then write four blocks that point at it.
- Sunday lunchtime. About and contact. Both are short. Take a photograph of yourself on a phone, outdoors, in daylight.
- Sunday afternoon. Read all five out loud. Cut every sentence you would be embarrassed to say to a customer in person.
What a bike shop in Dayton put on each page#
A two-person bike shop came to us with a Facebook page and no site. They sell servicing, repairs and second-hand bikes. Their five pages ended up as: home ("Bike servicing and repairs in Dayton, usually back the same week"), services (three sections, one each for servicing, repairs and wheel building), prices (a table with a bronze service at $60, silver at $95, gold at $150, and a line saying parts are extra and quoted first), about (two names, two photographs, one sentence about twenty-two years between them), and contact (a form, an email address, opening hours, and the fact they’re closed on Mondays).
They added a sixth page four months later, for wheel building, because that was the work they wanted more of and nobody local had a page about it. That’s the right order: five pages, then add one because you have a reason.
The pages you can leave off#
- Testimonials. Put reviews on the pages where the decision happens, not on a page of their own that nobody clicks.
- Gallery. Same argument. Photographs belong next to the service they illustrate.
- News, unless you’ll write it. Stale is worse than absent.
- Our process, our values, our mission. One sentence on the about page covers all three.
- FAQ, at first. Answer the questions on the page they relate to. Build an FAQ later, from the questions you’re asked.
Legal pages are the exception. A privacy policy, and terms if you sell online, belong in the footer where they can be found and nowhere else. They’re plumbing.
If you want the five written and built for you instead of doing it over a weekend, that’s what our small business website build is: we write the pages, build the site and put it online in seven days. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. That monthly carries a mailbox and the backups. Domain included on Complete, $18.99 a month. On Basic it’s billed at cost, about $12 a year. If you already have a site and it’s the wrong five pages, a redesign is the same work on an existing address.
Questions people ask about this
How many pages should a small business website have?
Five is enough to start: home, services, prices, about and contact. Most businesses that ask us for twenty pages end up with seven, because the extra thirteen were subheadings pretending to be pages. Add pages later when you have a real reason, such as a separate page for each service you want found in search.
Do I need a separate page for every service I offer?
Only for services people search for by name and that you want more of. A plumber who wants water heater work should have a water heater page, because that’s what gets typed into Google. A plumber who fixes the odd garbage disposal doesn’t need a garbage disposal page, because one line on the services page will do.
Should a small business website have a blog?
Only if someone is going to write it. Three posts from 2023 sitting under a Latest news heading do more harm than an empty section, because they tell a visitor the business may have closed. Get the five core pages right first and treat writing as a separate decision.
Do I need a privacy policy page?
Yes, if your site collects anything at all, and an inquiry form counts. Several state privacy laws require you to say what you collect and what you do with it, and a short, accurate page is fine. It doesn’t count as one of the five, because nobody browses to it; it just needs to exist and be linked in the footer.
While you are here
Reading about it is the slow way.
We design the website, write the words and put it online in seven days. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size. The hosting carries a mailbox, SSL, and the DNS and renewals on your own domain. Domain included on Complete, $18.99 a month. On Basic it’s billed at cost, about $12 a year. No contract and no notice period.