What a small business website actually needs

TL;DR — A small business website needs five things: fast on a phone, clear about what you do, correct hours and location, an obvious way to contact you, and readable by Google. Everything else — blogs, online stores, live chat, animations — is optional until those five are solid.

A small business website needs five things: it has to load fast on a phone, say clearly what you do, show where you are and when you’re open, make it obvious how to contact you, and be something Google can actually read. Almost everything else is optional.

Speed, on a phone, is not negotiable

Most people finding you for the first time are on a phone, standing somewhere, deciding in the next few seconds whether to keep looking at your site or go back to the search results.

If your homepage takes five seconds to load because of a giant unoptimized photo slideshow, you’ve already lost a chunk of those people — and you’ll never know it happened.

Say what you do, in the first few seconds

Don’t make someone scroll to figure out whether you’re a bakery or a bakery-supply wholesaler. Put it in plain words, near the top: what you do, and who it’s for. Save the clever tagline for later, if at all.

Hours, location, and contact information — correct and easy to find

This sounds too obvious to mention, and it’s the thing that’s wrong most often.

• Wrong hours cost you a customer who drove over and found you closed
• A phone number that isn’t a tappable link on mobile costs you someone who would have called right then, not later
• A missing or outdated address sends people to the wrong storefront

Get the basic facts right before you spend a dollar on anything else. Nothing fancier fixes wrong hours.

A way to contact you that actually reaches you

A contact form is fine. A contact form that quietly stops working because nobody noticed the email stopped forwarding six months ago is not fine, and it happens more than you’d think. Test it. Actually send yourself a message through it every few months.

Something Google can read

A website can look perfectly normal to a person and still be nearly invisible to Google, usually because of missing page titles, missing descriptions, or content that’s locked inside an image instead of real text.

This is the part that’s hardest to check yourself, and it’s usually why an otherwise decent-looking site isn’t showing up in search.

What you don’t need yet

A blog with fifty posts. An online store, if you don’t sell things online. A live chat widget. Animations. Most of what agencies upsell you on solves a problem you don’t have yet.

Get the five things above right first — that’s most of the value, and it’s most of what a website that brings in work actually means.