A small business website has one job: make it easy for the right person to decide you are the right company and get in touch. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is where most of the budget goes.
We have spent years teaching free website-building workshops at the SF LGBT Center and the San Francisco Public Library. The same pattern shows up every time. Owners want a site that looks like the big competitor’s. What they need is a site that answers a stranger’s questions faster than the competitor’s does.
This is the checklist we use. It applies to a two-person shop and a forty-person firm alike.
1. The five questions every visitor is asking
What do you do. Who do you do it for. Where are you. How much does it cost, or how do I find out. How do I reach you. A visitor who cannot answer all five in the first thirty seconds leaves.
The home page should answer them in order, in plain words, with each answer linking to a page that goes deeper. “Solutions” is not what you do. “Commercial HVAC repair and maintenance for restaurants in the East Bay” is.
2. A services structure that matches how people search
One page per service, named the way a customer would say it. Each page describes the problem, how you solve it, what it typically costs or what determines the cost, and how to start. If you serve multiple locations, a page for each, with real content rather than a find-and-replace of the city name.
When John and Snyder came to us, their site needed to clearly present four distinct services: executive search, leadership coaching, team design, and needs assessments. Giving each one room to be explained, rather than cramming them into a single “What We Do” page, was the difference between a visitor understanding the firm and guessing at it.
3. Local search, which is mostly not on your website
For most small businesses, the Google Business Profile drives more calls than the website does. The website’s job is to support it.
- Claim and complete the Business Profile: category, hours, phone, photos, services. Keep it current.
- Put the same business name, address, and phone on the website footer, exactly matching the profile.
- Add LocalBusiness structured data to the site with that same information so search engines can read it directly.
- Ask satisfied customers for Google reviews and respond to every one. Never buy reviews or gate them; the FTC treats both as violations.
- Create a real page for each location or service area, with content specific to it.
4. Forms that reach a human
The most common failure we see in audits is a contact form that no one receives. It was set up to email an address that no longer exists, or it lands in spam, or it works but nobody checks it. Test it monthly. Send yourself a message and time the response.
Ask for what you need to reply well: name, phone or email, and what they need. Offer a phone number beside the form for people who will not fill it out. Say when they will hear back, and mean it.
5. Proof, without the wall of logos
Two or three short, specific stories from customers do more than twenty logos. Who they were, what they needed, what happened. Named if they agree.
Steve John of John and Snyder told us, after their rebrand and new site, “We have been busier this year than ever before.” That single sentence, attributed and true, is worth more than a page of adjectives.
6. The hosting and security nobody budgets for
Cheap websites rarely fail all at once. They fail slowly, through downtime, a hacked plugin, a lost backup, or a contact form that went silent months ago. We wrote about this at length in The True Cost of Cheap; the short version is that the monthly cost of doing it properly is a rounding error next to one week of missed leads.
- HTTPS everywhere, with the certificate renewing automatically.
- WordPress core, theme, and plugins updated on a schedule, by someone who checks the site afterward.
- Daily off-site backups you have actually tested restoring.
- A web application firewall and malware scanning.
- Two-factor authentication on every admin account, and no account named “admin.”
- A host that is not shared with hundreds of other sites, and a person to call when something breaks.
7. Speed and mobile, which are the same thing
More than half of your visitors are on a phone, often on a cellular connection, often standing somewhere. A home page that loads in under three seconds on a mid-range phone is a fair target. Compress images, remove the plugins no one remembers installing, and skip the page builder effects that look impressive on a designer’s laptop.
8. Accessibility, which is also just good design
Real text instead of text in images. Contrast of at least 4.5:1 for body copy. Form fields with labels. A site that works with a keyboard. Alt text on any image that means something. This serves customers with disabilities, older customers, and anyone in bright sunlight, and it reduces exposure to ADA demand letters that increasingly target small businesses.
9. What you do not need yet
A blog you will not maintain. A chatbot. An app. A member portal. Six social feeds embedded on the home page. A newsletter with no plan for what to send. Each of these adds maintenance and gives visitors one more place to notice that nobody is home. Add them when you have a reason and a person responsible.
Case study: John and Snyder
A full rebrand and website that became a working platform for hiring, content, and payments.
A good small business website is quiet. It answers the questions, makes the call easy, and then gets out of the way. That is harder to build than it looks, which is why so few businesses have one.
If yours is not doing that, we can help. We have built for firms, shops, studios, and practices across the Bay Area and beyond, and we handle the technical parts so you can run the business.
How we help Small & Midsize Businesses →
This article is general information for business owners, not legal advice. Review, endorsement, and accessibility obligations vary by jurisdiction and industry; confirm yours with counsel.