The small business website pages that earn their place come down to five. Most businesses need exactly these on a small business website: Home, Services, About, Contact and something that proves you are good at the job. Everything beyond that is optional, and a fair amount of what gets added is actively unhelpful. If you only ever build those five and write them properly, you are ahead of most of your competitors.
Here is what each page is for, which ones you can safely skip, and how the list changes depending on whether you are building one page or ten.
The Small Business Website Pages That Earn Their Place
A page earns its place if it answers a question a customer actually has before they get in touch. If it does not, it is just something else to keep up to date.
Home
The job of the home page is to answer three questions in the first few seconds: what do you do, where do you do it, and how do I get hold of you. Everything else on the page is secondary.
Of all the small business website pages, this is the one people over think the most. The most common mistake is opening with a welcome message. Nobody searched for a welcome. Lead with the service and the area, plainly. Something like this works far better than anything more creative:
Emergency plumbing and boiler repairs across Preston and the surrounding villages.
Put a phone number or an enquiry button where it is visible without scrolling. Then use the rest of the page to summarise your services and link through to the detail.
Services
Of the small business website pages you will build, this one earns its keep, and on a lot of sites it is the thinnest. List what you do in the words your customers use, not the words your industry uses. Somebody searching for a blocked drain is not searching for drainage solutions.
If you offer several distinct services and you want to be found for each of them, they eventually deserve a page each. That is the main reason a small business website grows past three pages. Start with one good services page and split it later when you know which services matter most.
Include prices if you can. Not everybody can, and there are good reasons not to. But a price range removes the single biggest reason people leave a site without contacting anybody.
About
The About page is more useful than most people think, because it is often the last page somebody reads before deciding to call. It is where you stop being a website and start being a person.
Keep it factual. How long you have been doing this, who actually turns up, what you are qualified for, which areas you cover. A photograph of the real person or team is worth more than three paragraphs of description.
What it does not need is a company story that starts with a childhood passion. Nobody is checking your origin story. They are checking that you exist and that you seem competent.
Contact
Contact is the shortest of the small business website pages and the easiest to get wrong. Make it boring and complete. A phone number, an email address, the areas you cover, your opening hours, and a form if you would rather people typed than rang.
Two details get missed constantly. The first is response time: telling somebody you reply the same working day removes the worry that the message vanished. The second is what happens next, in one line. People are far more likely to fill in a form when they know whether they will get a call or an email.
If you are a limited company, your company number and registered office belong here or in the footer. That is a legal requirement, not a design choice.
Proof That You Are Good At The Job
This is the one most often missing from a set of small business website pages, and it does the most quiet work. It can be a gallery of finished jobs, a set of reviews, a case study, or your accreditations. Which one depends on the trade.
For anything visual, photographs of your own completed work beat stock images by a wide margin. Phone photographs are fine. Customers are not judging the photography, they are judging the finish.
For services where the result is not visual, reviews and qualifications carry the weight instead. Which? and similar consumer bodies consistently find that verifiable detail, real reviews, real credentials, moves people more than claims a business makes about itself.
Pages That Usually Do Not Earn Their Place
Every one of these can be justified in a specific case. As default small business website pages they mostly add maintenance without adding enquiries.
- A news or blog page you will not maintain. Three posts from two years ago is worse than no blog at all. Only start one if you will keep it going.
- A separate FAQ page. The questions are usually better answered on the page they relate to, where somebody is already reading.
- A Meet the Team page for a team of one. Fold it into About.
- A Prices page with no prices on it. If you cannot publish figures, say what affects the cost instead, on the services page.
- A gallery of stock photographs. Actively harmful. It reads as having nothing of your own to show.
You also need a privacy notice and, if you take payment, terms. These are not marketing pages so they live in the footer, but they do need to exist.
How This Maps To A One, Three, Five Or Ten Page Small Business Website
Most packages are sold by page count, so it helps to know which small business website pages fit where.
One page. Everything on a single scrolling page with anchored sections: what you do, services, a few proof points, contact. It works genuinely well for sole traders and new businesses. The limitation is search: one page can realistically rank for one main thing.
Three pages. Home, Services, Contact. The standard shape for a small business, and enough for most trades. About usually gets folded into Home.
Five pages. Home, About, Services, Gallery or Reviews, Contact. This is the point where the site stops feeling minimal, and where you have room for proof.
Ten pages. The five above plus a page per major service, or per area you cover. This is where a site starts earning search traffic for several different things at once, which is the main reason to go past five.
What Every One Of These Small Business Website Pages Needs
Four things apply to every page on a small business website, and getting them right matters more than the page count.
One clear heading that says what the page is. Not a slogan. If the page is about boiler servicing, the heading should contain the words boiler servicing.
A way to get in touch, visible without scrolling to the bottom. People decide to contact you at unpredictable moments. Do not make them hunt.
Your location. Somewhere on every page, ideally in the footer. A large share of local searches include a place name, and a site that never states where it operates is invisible for all of them.
Text that works on a phone. More than half your visitors will be on one. If you only ever check the site on a laptop, you are checking the minority experience.
How To Decide What You Actually Need
Choose your small business website pages by working backwards from the questions you get asked on the phone. Write down the five questions customers ask before they book. If a page on your site does not answer at least one of them, it is decoration.
Then be honest about maintenance. Every page is something to keep accurate. A five page site that is entirely current beats a twelve page site where four pages contradict each other on price.
Start smaller than you think you need. Adding a page later is easy. Removing one you have been quietly embarrassed by for a year is somehow much harder.
Common Questions
Is one page really enough? For a sole trader offering one main service in one area, often yes. The limit shows up when you want to rank for several different services, because one page cannot be about five things at once.
Do I need a blog? Only if you will keep it going. A neglected blog dates your whole site. If you would publish something useful once a month, it will help you get found. If not, skip it without guilt.
Should each service get its own page? Once you have more than three distinct services and you want search traffic for each, yes. Before that, one strong services page is better than four thin ones.
What about a page for each town I cover? Useful if the areas are genuinely different markets and you can write something specific about each. Copies of the same page with the place name swapped are obvious and do not work.
The Short Version
Five small business website pages, written properly, cover almost every business. Home to say what you do and where. Services to sell it. About to make you a person. Contact to make it easy. Proof to make it credible.
Build those, keep them accurate, and add more only when a real question needs answering. If you would like the structure handled for you, our packages are sold by page count so you can pick the shape that fits, or take a look at the demo websites to see how the five page version reads in practice. It is also worth knowing what a small business website cost looks like across DIY, freelancer and agency builds before you commit.