If you are paying for a new website, the most useful question to ask before anything else is what it needs to do. A small business site in Hull does not need forty pages and a mega menu. It needs to answer a handful of questions quickly, on a phone, and make it easy for someone to get in touch.
I get asked what a small business website should include more than almost anything else, so here is the plain version. Use it as a checklist when you brief a developer, or to judge the site you already have.
Start with the questions a visitor arrives with
Someone searches for what you do, clicks your site and gives it a few seconds. In that time they want four answers. What do you do? Do you cover my area? Can I trust you? How do I contact you? Every page and every section should serve one of those answers. If it does not, it is probably there because somebody felt a website ought to have it.
The pages most small business sites need
For a typical local service business, five pages do nearly all of the work.
Home: one sentence on what you do and who for, one obvious next step, and a short piece of proof such as a review.
Services: one page per main service rather than a single long page. Each page can then match its own search, such as boiler repair in Hull or kitchen fitting in Beverley.
About: who you are, where you work and how long you have been doing it. People hire people, and a name and a face beat a paragraph of company history.
Contact: a phone number that can be tapped on a mobile, an email address, a short form, your service area and your opening hours.
Proof: reviews, finished jobs and any accreditations. Use real ones only, and ask permission before naming a customer.
That is it for a launch. You can add pages later when you have something real to say, and it is far easier to grow a clean site than to prune a bloated one.
What sits behind the pages
The parts nobody sees matter as much as the pages. The site should load quickly on a phone over mobile data, because that is how most local searches happen. Each page needs its own title and description, written the way a customer would search. The site should run on HTTPS, which any decent host sets up as standard.
There is also the legal housekeeping. If you use analytics, a contact form or any marketing tags, UK data protection rules mean you should have a privacy policy and a cookie notice that does what it says. Your developer should set that up, not leave it for you to discover.
Then there is looking after it. A WordPress site needs updates, backups and a way to restore if something breaks. I broke down what that costs in what a website costs to run each year. Ask any developer who is quoting you who does that work once the site is live, and what it costs.
Finally, you should be able to edit your own text and swap your own photos without phoning anyone. If changing an opening time needs a developer, the site has been built the wrong way round.
What you can leave out
Plenty of things look impressive in a demo and do nothing for a small business. Image sliders push your important message off screen and slow the page. Autoplay video irritates people and eats mobile data. Pop-ups that appear within two seconds of arriving send visitors straight back to Google. Social media feeds embedded in the footer add weight and rarely get a click.
A blog is the one I would think hardest about. A blog that was last updated eighteen months ago tells a visitor the business may have gone quiet. If you will not write regularly, skip it. Three good articles that answer real customer questions will do more than a feed of thin posts.
Where WordPress fits
For most small business sites WordPress is a sensible base. You can edit it yourself, a plugin or a developer can extend it later, and you are not tied to the person who built it. It is the platform I use most for WordPress web development for small businesses around Hull and East Yorkshire, and the list above is what I work from.
WordPress is only as good as the way it is built, though. Too many plugins, a heavy theme and underpowered hosting will undo everything above. The checklist is about the result, not the tool, so if someone proposes a different platform, ask them how it handles the same points.
How to use this list
If you are getting quotes, send each developer the same short brief so the answers can be compared. I wrote about how to do that in how to brief a web developer. If you want to know how long the work should take, how long a WordPress website takes to build covers the stages.
If you already have a site and are unsure whether it needs replacing, read do you need a new website or just a fix. Often the answer is that the pages are fine and the behind-the-scenes parts need attention.
Whichever way you go, write down the five questions your customers ask most before you talk to anyone. If the site answers those five clearly, you are most of the way there.
If you would like a second opinion on your current site or a quote you have received, book a free 30 minute surgery with me. Bring the address of your site and I will go through it against this list with you. You can get in touch here.
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