The small business website checklist: 21 things every site needs

Whether you are briefing a designer or auditing the site you already have, this is the list. Twenty-one items, grouped, in the order they matter. Most take minutes to check and cost nothing to fix.

The pages you actually need

• 1. A homepage that says what you do, where you do it and who for — within the first screen, no scrolling required.
• 2. A page per main service. One page trying to cover plumbing, heating and bathrooms will rank for none of them.
• 3. An about page with a real photo of a real person. It is often the second most visited page on a small business site.
• 4. A contact page with a phone number, an email address, your service area and a form.
• 5. Proof of work — a gallery, case studies or before-and-afters. Six honest photos beat sixty stock ones.
• 6. Location or service-area pages if you cover several towns, each with genuinely different content.

Contact and conversion

• 7. Your phone number in the header, clickable on mobile, on every single page.
• 8. One obvious call to action per page — "Get a quote", "Book a visit" — not five competing buttons.
• 9. A form that asks for what you need to quote: job type, location, timing. A bare name-and-message form creates a second phone call.
• 10. Instant email notification of enquiries, and a thank-you page or message so people know it sent.
• 11. Your opening hours and how fast you reply. "We answer within one working day" removes a reason to keep shopping.

Trust signals

• 12. Reviews on the site, with names and locations. Pull the best few from Google.
• 13. Accreditations, insurance and trade body logos where you have them — Gas Safe, NICEIC, CHAS, Checkatrade.
• 14. A real business address or at least a stated town. "Nationwide" with no location reads as a call centre.
• 15. The padlock. An SSL certificate is free and standard; without it browsers actively warn people off.

Missing trust signals is one of the signs of a cheap website that quietly costs enquiries — the site works fine, people just do not believe it.

Speed and mobile

• 16. Loads in under three seconds on 4G. Test it on your own phone, off wifi, not on the office broadband.
• 17. Images compressed and sized properly. Unoptimised photos are the single most common cause of a slow small business site.
• 18. Readable on a phone without pinching — proper font sizes, tappable buttons, no horizontal scrolling.

Findability

• 19. A unique page title and meta description on every page, each mentioning your service and your area.
• 20. Google Search Console and a submitted sitemap, plus a claimed Google Business Profile. Without these you are guessing.

Those two go hand in hand with the wider basics in local SEO for small businesses.

The legal bits (UK)

• 21. A privacy policy, a cookie notice if you use analytics or tracking, and — if you are a limited company — your company name, registered number and registered office somewhere on the site. That last one is a legal requirement, not a nicety.

Nearly every underperforming small business site fails on the same three: it is slow, the phone number is buried, and it never says which town it serves.

What you can safely skip

Plenty of things get sold as essential and are not. You do not need a live chat widget, an auto-playing video header, a blog you will never update, a newsletter sign-up before you have anything to send, or a bespoke logo animation. They add weight, cost and maintenance without adding enquiries.

How to use this list

Open your website on your phone and go through the twenty-one in order. Anything you cannot tick in ten seconds is a job. Fix the speed, contact and location items first — they are cheap and they move the needle fastest. Design comes after, not before.

If you are getting quotes, hand this list to whoever is pitching. A good web designer will already have covered most of it; anyone who has not should be able to say why. It also makes quotes comparable, which is half the battle when working out how much a cheap website should cost.