What a small business website actually needs
The short list of things a small business website has to get right, and the longer list of things it doesn't need yet.
TL;DR — A small business website requires five things: speed on a phone, clarity about what you do, correct hours and location, an obvious means of contacting you, and legibility to Google. Everything else — blogs, online stores, live chat, animations — remains optional until those five are genuinely solid.
A small business website requires five things: it has to load quickly on a phone, state unambiguously what you do, show where you are situated and when you are open, make it obvious how somebody contacts you, and be something Google can actually read. Almost everything beyond those five remains entirely optional.
Speed, on a phone, is not negotiable
Most people discovering you for the first time are holding a phone, standing somewhere inconvenient, and deciding within the next few seconds whether to continue examining your site or return directly to the search results.
If your homepage requires five seconds to load because of an enormous unoptimized photograph slideshow, then you have already lost a substantial proportion of those people — and you will never learn that it happened.
Say what you do, in the first few seconds
Do not oblige somebody to scroll downward merely in order to establish whether you are a bakery or a bakery-supply wholesaler. State it in plain words near the top of the page: what you do, and precisely whom it is intended for. Reserve the clever tagline for considerably later in the page, assuming it belongs anywhere at all.
Hours, location, and contact information — correct and easy to find
This sounds too obvious to warrant mentioning, and it is simultaneously the thing that is wrong most frequently. Incorrect hours cost you a customer who drove across town and found you closed. A telephone number that is not a tappable link on mobile costs you somebody who would have called immediately rather than later. A missing or outdated address sends people to entirely the wrong storefront.
Get the basic facts correct before spending a single dollar on anything else, because nothing more sophisticated compensates for incorrect hours.
A way to contact you that actually reaches you
A straightforward contact form is perfectly adequate. A contact form that quietly stopped working because nobody noticed the email had ceased forwarding six months ago is not adequate, and it happens considerably more often than you would expect. Test it periodically, by actually sending yourself a message through it every few months.
Something Google can read
A website can appear perfectly normal to a person and remain nearly invisible to Google, ordinarily because of missing page titles, missing descriptions, or content locked inside an image rather than existing as real text.
This constitutes the portion that is hardest to verify independently, and it is usually the underlying reason an otherwise respectable-looking site fails to appear in search results whatsoever.
What you don’t need yet
A blog carrying fifty posts, an online store assuming you do not sell things online, a live chat widget, animations: most of what agencies upsell you on resolves a problem you do not yet actually have.
Get the five things above right first, because that constitutes most of the value, and it constitutes most of what a website that brings in work actually means.
If you run a practice
Pasadena Works helps independent medical, dental, and eye care practices in the San Gabriel Valley get more patients and run a calmer front office. We are paid by the practice and nobody else, so we will tell you when something is not worth what it costs.