Decide what the site is actually for
Ask ten owners what their website is for and most will say something like presence. Being findable. Looking professional. All true, and none of it is a job you can measure or design against.
A business website has one job, and it is narrow: take somebody who is already partly interested and move them to the point of contacting you. Everything else on the site is either serving that or competing with it.
This matters because it settles arguments. Does the animated banner serve it? Does the company history on the homepage serve it? Does the newsletter popup that appears after four seconds serve it? Once the job is stated, most design debates answer themselves, and the ones that remain are worth having.
It also gives you a number. Not visits, which flatter and mean little. Enquiries, calls, bookings, quote requests. A site with three hundred visits a month and eleven enquiries is beating a site with four thousand visits and two.
The first five seconds
Somebody arrives, usually on a phone, usually from a search result, usually with about a quarter of their attention on you. In roughly five seconds they answer three questions, and if any answer is unclear they leave and try the next result.
- What is this? Your slogan does not answer this. What you do, in words a stranger uses. “Craftsmanship you can trust since 1998” answers nothing. “Bathroom and kitchen renovations in Halifax and Dartmouth” answers it completely.
- Is it for me? The town, the service, the kind of customer. Somebody in Sackville needs to see that you cover Sackville without hunting for it.
- What now? One obvious next step, visible without scrolling. On a phone that usually means a phone number that dials when tapped.
The most common failure is a beautiful full-screen photograph with three words over it, where all three questions are answered somewhere below the fold. It looks like the sites in the design gallery it was copied from. Those sites belong to brands people already know, which is why they can afford to open with an image.
Structure beats page count
The instinct is to add pages. Usually the right move is fewer pages, each doing more.
A small business site with a page per real service, a page per town you cover, an about page with an actual person on it, and a contact page will outperform a fifteen-page site where eleven pages are thin. Search engines have been discounting thin pages for a decade, and readers were never fooled.
Two rules that carry most of the weight:
- One page, one job. A page about heat pump installation is about heat pump installation. If it also covers ductwork, boilers and financing, it is not really about anything, and it will not rank for any of them.
- Every page reachable in two clicks. If a page needs three menus and a footer link to find, it is not part of your site as far as most visitors are concerned.
The town pages deserve a warning. A real page about the work you do in a town, with specifics, is genuinely useful. Eleven copies of the same page with the town name swapped is a pattern search engines have penalised for years, and it reads as contempt to anybody who notices.
Speed is a feature, not a technical detail
Speed gets filed under technical housekeeping, which is why it stays broken. It is not housekeeping. It is the first thing every visitor experiences and the only feature that is entirely negative: nobody notices a fast site, and everybody notices a slow one.
The realistic target for a small business site is a page that shows something useful in under two seconds on a phone on mobile data, not on your office broadband on a laptop. Most sites that feel fine to their owner are three to four times that for an actual customer.
What usually causes it, in order of how much it costs:
- Enormous images. A photo straight off a phone camera can be several megabytes. Resized and served in a modern format it is a fraction of that, and looks identical.
- Too many plugins. Each one adds code to every page, including the pages that never use it.
- Heavy page builders. Convenient to edit, and they ship a great deal of code to describe a layout that plain markup would express in a fraction of the size.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, tracking, review embeds, fonts loaded from three sources. Each one is a request to somebody else's server that your visitor waits on.
None of this requires rebuilding. Most sites can be brought under the target in a day of unglamorous work, which is what site optimization is, from $299.
Write like somebody explaining, not selling
The single biggest difference between a site that earns work and one that does not is usually the writing, and it is the part that gets the least attention because it is the part that cannot be admired in a screenshot.
Three habits fix most of it:
- Say the specific thing. “Quality workmanship” is a claim every competitor makes. “We photograph every stage of a bathroom strip-out so you can see what is behind the wall” is a claim only somebody who does it can make.
- Answer the question they actually have. What does it cost, roughly. How long does it take. What happens on the first visit. Do you cover my town. Sites that answer these get calls. Sites that make people phone to find out mostly do not get phoned.
- Write it the way you would say it. Read a paragraph aloud. If you would never say it to somebody in a driveway, rewrite it.
Most owners want to keep price off the site so they can qualify people on the phone. It usually costs more than it saves. A range with the variables named, such as “most kitchens land between two and four weeks depending on cabinetry lead times”, filters out the wrong enquiries and reassures the right ones. Silence just sends people to the competitor who answered.
Proof beats adjectives
Every business claims to be reliable, experienced and customer-focused, which means those words now carry no information at all. What carries information is anything a competitor could not copy in a sentence.
- Photographs of your own work. Stock photography does not count. A real, slightly imperfect photograph of a job you did outranks a professional stock image of somebody else's, because it is evidence rather than decoration.
- Reviews with a name and a place attached. Ideally pulled from a public source people can check. See the guide on collecting them.
- Specific numbers you can stand behind. Years in business, jobs completed, the towns you cover. Never invented ones, because they get checked more than people expect.
- A real person. A name and a face on the about page. For a small business this is a genuine advantage over a larger competitor, and most small businesses hide it in an attempt to look bigger.
Make the last step easy
A site can do everything right and lose the enquiry in the final ten seconds. The contact step is where the effort goes to die, and it is the cheapest thing on this page to fix.
- The phone number is a link. On a phone it should dial when tapped. A number typed as plain text asks somebody to memorise ten digits and switch apps.
- Ask for less. Every field is a chance to give up. Name, contact, and what they need is usually enough. Company size, budget bracket and how they heard about you can wait for the reply.
- Say what happens next. “We reply the same day, usually within a couple of hours” converts better than a bare send button, because it removes the fear of being added to a list.
- Confirm receipt immediately. Silence after submitting a form reads as a broken form, and people go and call somebody else while wondering.
- Then reply fast. The fastest reply wins a startling share of the time, which the speed to lead guide covers with the numbers.
What you can safely ignore
Some of the most expensive things sold to small businesses do very little. Worth knowing before you buy them:
- Scroll animations on everything. A little movement guides attention. Every element sliding in delays the content and irritates people on a slow connection.
- The chat widget nobody staffs. A chat box that goes unanswered for six hours is worse than none, and it loads on every page.
- A blog you will not maintain. Two posts from 2022 make a business look closed. If you will not write monthly, better to have none.
- Ranking guarantees. Nobody outside Google controls where Google ranks you. A guarantee is either about a phrase nobody searches or it is a story.
- A redesign, when the site is only slow and thin. Frequently the existing site needs speed, structure and writing rather than a new coat of paint, and that is a much smaller bill.
Answer three questions in five seconds. Fewer pages, each doing one job properly. Fast on a phone on mobile data. Written the way you would say it. Proof instead of adjectives. A contact step that asks for little and replies quickly. That is most of it, and none of it is exotic. What it costs is covered in the pricing guide.