What to put on a small business website: a checklist

A stranger who lands on a plumber's website at nine at night is checking five things, in roughly this order: do you fix what just broke, do you come to my street, what will it cost, can I trust you enough to call, and what is the number. If the page answers those in that order, they call. If it opens with "Welcome to our website" and a stock photo, they hit back and try the next result.

Most advice on this topic is a list of pages: Home, About, Services, Contact. That is the wrong unit. A visitor does not want a Services page; they want to know whether you do the thing. So this checklist is ordered by what a visitor checks, and every item is a yes or a no.

The order visitors check things in#

People do not read websites. Nielsen Norman Group put test users in front of web pages back in 1997 and found that 79 percent scanned any new page and only 16 percent read word by word. The same content rewritten to be concise, scannable, and objective scored 124 percent better on their usability measures. That was on desktop monitors. On a phone, one handed, in a parking lot, it is worse.

So each of the five questions above is a gate. Fail one and the visitor leaves before reaching the next, which means the order on the page matters as much as the words. Your best review does nothing if it sits below a paragraph about your values, because nobody scrolls past the values paragraph.

1. What you do, in one line, at the top#

The test: cover everything on the first screen except the headline. Can a stranger say what you do and for whom?

"Quality you can trust" fails. "Emergency plumbing in Tulsa, same day, licensed and insured" passes. So does "Dog grooming in Northeast Portland, we come to you."

Use the trade word, the one people type into Google when they need you: plumber, electrician, tutor. The business name is not the headline unless it already says what you do; "Rodriguez and Sons" tells me nothing, so put the name in the logo and let the headline work. Under it, one shorter line for the promise: "Same-day appointments" or "Free quotes over the phone." Next to it, a real photo of you, your van, or your shop.

2. Who and where you serve#

Right after what you do, a visitor checks whether it applies to them. Two things, near the top, not in the footer.

Where: name the towns or the radius. "Serving Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Bixby, and Jenks" beats "serving the greater metro area" because the visitor in Jenks now knows, and because search engines read place names too. If you have a shop, the address and hours do the same job.

Who: residential or commercial, kids or adults. If you do both, say which comes first.

Also say what you do not do. "No commercial roofs" or "appointments only, no walk-ins" feels like turning away business, but it only filters out the calls you would have said no to anyway.

3. What it costs, or at least where it starts#

This is the question most small business sites dodge on purpose. The reasoning is usually "every job is different" or "I don't want competitors seeing my prices." Both are true and neither helps the visitor, who will guess a number anyway and often guess wrong in the direction that loses you the job.

You do not have to publish a full rate card (the case for showing a price at all is its own post). Any of these passes:

• A starting price for your most common job. It needs a real number in it; "competitive rates" is not a price.
• A call-out or diagnostic fee, and whether it comes off the final bill.
• If you truly cannot put a number down, how pricing works: hourly or fixed, what is included, and that the quote is free.

Then say what happens next. "Call and we'll give you a ballpark in two minutes" is a price answer. Silence is not. Deposits and cancellation fees go here too. A surprise at the invoice stage turns into a bad review.

4. Proof: photos of real work and two or three reviews#

Now the visitor wants to know you are real and not terrible.

Reviews first. BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey found that 97 percent of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 74 percent look for reviews written in the last three months. Pick two or three that mention something specific. "Great service, would recommend" proves nothing. "Fixed the water heater on a Sunday and charged what he quoted" proves a lot. Use the reviewer's first name and town as written on Google, and link to the profile so people can check. Swap in a fresh one every few months, because a site whose newest review is three years old reads as a business that might have closed.

Then photos. A picture of a real job, taken on your phone, beats any stock image. Before and after shots for trades, the finished cut for barbers. Three or four is enough; nobody scrolls a gallery of forty.

For licensed trades, put the license number and the word "insured" near the phone number. It is a two-second check for the visitor. "Since 1998" works here too, if the year is real. "Years of experience" is filler.

5. How to reach you (phone first, form second)#

This is the only item on the list that produces a customer, so make it impossible to miss.

Phone number in the header, phone number at the bottom, both set up as tap-to-call links so they open the dialer on a phone. If you only take bookings online, put the booking button in both places instead.

The form comes second, for the person browsing at 11pm who does not want to leave a voicemail. Keep it short: name, a way to reach them, what they need. Every extra field costs you submissions. Say how fast you reply, then keep that promise. Skip the social icons in the header; they send people away from the page that was about to convert them.

If you build with Mr Create, the forms on your published site are wired up when you publish, so there is nothing to configure. Whatever you build with, submit the form yourself before you tell anyone the site is live.

6. The legal pages: privacy policy and terms#

If your site has a form, an email signup, or analytics, it collects personal information, and you need a page that says what you do with it.

California's online privacy law requires any commercial website that collects personal information from California residents to conspicuously post a privacy policy saying what is collected and who it is shared with. The EU's GDPR, in Article 13, requires telling people who you are, why you want the data, how long you keep it, and what rights they have. A website is visible from everywhere, so have one, keep it honest, and link it in the footer.

Terms of service matter less for a plumber than for a business that takes deposits, sells online, or runs bookings with cancellation rules. If any of those apply, write the rules down once and link them from the booking form.

Our privacy policy generator and terms of service generator fill in your business details and leave brackets where they cannot know the answer. Treat the output as a starting template and have a lawyer in your area glance at it before you rely on it.

Three things to leave off#

This is the part worth sending to the friend who asked you to "take a look" at theirs.

The mission statement. "We are committed to delivering exceptional service with integrity" is everywhere and has never caused a phone call. A visitor cannot check it, so they skip it. If you want to say something about how you work, make it checkable: "We show up in the window we quoted or the call-out fee is waived."

The stock photo of a handshake. Or the laptop on the white desk, or the woman smiling into a headset. Visitors recognize stock photography, and what it tells them is that you had nothing real to show. A slightly crooked photo of your actual van outside a customer's house proves the van exists.

"Welcome to our website." That sentence sits in the spot every visitor sees first and says nothing. The same goes for "please browse our site" and any news section with one entry dated the week you launched. Delete them and let the headline from item one take the space.

Before you hit publish: the ten-minute check#

1. Open the site on your actual phone, not the browser's phone preview, and tap the phone number. It should open the dialer. Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, so what you see here is what search sees.
2. Fill in your own form. Note where the submission goes and how long it takes to reach you.
3. Search your business name. The phone number, address, and hours on your site should match what Google shows for you. If Google shows nothing, start here.
4. Read the first screen out loud to someone who does not know your business. Ask them what you do and where. If they hesitate, fix the headline.
5. Click every footer link. The privacy policy and terms should open real pages.
6. Look at every photo and ask whether it is yours.
7. Check the hours and the year in the copyright line. A footer that says 2023 tells visitors nobody is home.

If you fail more than two, fix them before publishing. A site that fails on the phone is worse than no site, because it is your first impression.

Questions people ask#

Do I need an About page?#

Not as a page. A short paragraph with your name, a photo of your face, how long you have been doing this, and one line on why. A name and a face is the cheapest trust signal on the page. Put it under the reviews; nobody clicks "About" to find it.

How many pages do I need?#

One, for most service businesses. Everything above fits on a single page in the order a visitor checks it, and one page is easier to keep current. Every site Mr Create builds is a single page for that reason. Add pages when there is a real job for them: services people search for separately, a menu, a blog you will keep up. For a trade, Does a plumber need a website? covers which searches a page wins.

Do I need a blog?#

Not on day one, and probably not in year one. A blog helps when you can answer real customer questions regularly, in your own words, for years. An abandoned one with two posts looks worse than none. When customers keep asking the same question on the phone, write that answer down and you have your first post.

To see the checklist applied to your trade, the examples gallery has finished sites for plumbers, salons, dentists, landscapers, and a few dozen other businesses. If you would rather have the first draft built for you, the website builder takes a description of your business and a style and builds the page in a few minutes; the free plan covers your first build.