The small business website checklist

Before anyone starts building

Most website projects go wrong here rather than in the build. Half an hour of thinking now saves a fortnight later.

• Decide what one thing the site is for. Phone calls? Quote requests? Online orders? Applications? A site optimised for three goals is optimised for none.
• Write down who it is for. Not “anyone who needs a plumber” — the actual person: a homeowner in a panic on a Sunday, or a letting agent placing a repeat job. They need different pages.
• List the questions customers ask before they buy. Every one of these is a section, a page, or an FAQ entry. This list is the single most useful document in the whole project.
• Note the three competitors you keep losing to. Look at their sites. You are not copying them; you are finding out what your customers have already seen.
• Gather your assets. Logo, photographs, certifications, insurance details, review screenshots. Missing assets are the number one cause of a project stalling.

The pages you need

Five pages is genuinely enough for many businesses. The mistake is not having too few pages, it is having one vague page where you need three specific ones.

• A homepage that says what you do and where. Within one screen, without scrolling, a stranger should know what you sell and whether you serve them.
• One page per service you actually want more of. This is the highest-value thing on the list. A single “Services” page listing eight things ranks for none of them; eight pages can rank for eight.
• An about page with real faces. People buy from people, particularly for anything happening in their home. Photographs of the actual team outperform stock images so consistently it is barely worth debating.
• A contact page with every option. Phone, email, form, address, hours. Let people choose how to reach you rather than forcing a form.
• Proof: reviews, case studies, or both. Real ones, attributed. Three specific reviews beat thirty generic ones.
• Prices, or at least a starting point. “From £450” loses you a few enquiries you were never going to convert and wins you the ones you were.

On every single page

• A phone number in the header, tappable on mobile. Not an image, not a form link. A real tel: link.
• One clear next step. Every page should end with an obvious thing to do next, and it should be the same thing.
• A heading that describes the page, not your brand. “Emergency boiler repair in Reading” beats “Welcome to our website”.
• Text a stranger can skim in ten seconds. Short paragraphs, subheadings, no walls.
• A unique page title and description. These are what people see in Google before they see your site. Duplicates across pages are wasted opportunities.

The technical basics

You do not need to do these yourself, but you should check that whoever built the site did.

• Loads in under two seconds on a phone on 4G. Check it with Google PageSpeed Insights, on the mobile tab, not on your office wifi.
• HTTPS with a valid certificate. The padlock, and no mixed-content warnings.
• Works properly on a phone. Not “it shrinks” — buttons big enough to tap, text you do not have to zoom into, forms that work with a thumb.
• Google Business Profile claimed and complete. For a local business this frequently sends more traffic than the website does.
• Google Search Console verified, with a sitemap submitted. It is free and it is the only way to see what you actually rank for.
• Schema markup for your business. Name, address, phone, hours and services in a format search engines read directly.
• A sensible 404 page. With links back to the pages people want.

Before you go live

• Send yourself a test enquiry, from a phone. Then check it did not land in spam. Do this again a month later.
• Check the site on a real phone and a real tablet. Borrow one that is not yours.
• Confirm who owns the domain — you — and that you can log in to the registrar.
• Confirm backups exist and someone has restored one. An untested backup is a hope.
• Read every page aloud once. You will catch things your eye skips over. Everyone does.

If you only do six things

Genuinely short of time? These six account for most of the difference between a site that generates enquiries and one that does not.

1. One page per service you want more of.
2. A tappable phone number in the header of every page.
3. A homepage that says what you do and where, above the fold.
4. Real photographs of real people.
5. A claimed, complete Google Business Profile.
6. A page that loads in under two seconds on a phone.