The Five Pages a Small Business Website Needs, and What It Does Not

Synopsis

The pages a small business website needs are five: home, one page per service, about, reviews and contact. The home page says what you do and where, each services page covers one thing you sell, the about page has a real face, the reviews page carries your Google reviews, and the contact page has a phone number that works on a thumb. That is the whole site for a trade, a local practice or a small shop. Everything else can wait until the five are doing their job, and most of it never needs to arrive at all.

This is the structure we build for every $750 website at the Studio, and it is not a budget compromise. It is what the customer who found you on Google actually wants to see, in the order they want to see it, on a phone, in under a minute.

What A Customer Is Doing On Your Site

Nobody reads a small business website. They check it. A person who typed "plumber Bowness" or was given your name by a neighbour opens your site for three reasons: to confirm you do the thing they need, to confirm you serve where they live, and to decide whether you look like someone they can call without regret. Each of the five pages answers one of those questions. A page that answers none of them is in the way.

That is also why the five-page site tends to be found more easily. Google and the AI answers read a site the way a customer does. One page per topic, with the trade and the area named in plain words, is easier to match to a search than one long page that mentions everything once.

The Five Pages, And What Goes On Each

Home

One sentence that says what you do, for whom, and where. "Residential electrician for homes in southeast Calgary and Okotoks." Not a slogan. Under it, the three or four services you most want calls about, each linking to its own page, a line of proof (your Google rating, years in business, a certification that matters), and the phone number. The home page is a signpost. Keep it short enough that the phone number is never more than one scroll away.

Services, one page each

If you do five things, you need five short pages, not one long one. "Furnace repair in Calgary" is a page. "Our services" is a list. Each services page says what the job involves, what affects the price, the areas you cover, and the question customers ask before they book. Two hundred to four hundred words is plenty. This is the page Google sends people to, and the page an AI answer quotes from, so write it the way you would explain the job on the phone.

About

A photo of you, or you and the crew, taken in daylight at a job. Your name. How long you have done this. Why you started. One paragraph, not a biography. The about page exists because a person is about to let a stranger into their home or hand them money, and they want to see who that stranger is. Stock photos of smiling models do the opposite of what you intend.

Reviews

Your Google reviews, pulled onto a page of their own, with a link to leave one. This page does two jobs. It shows the hesitant customer that other people in their neighbourhood already trusted you, and it gives you one address to send happy customers to when you ask for a review. If you have only three reviews, show the three. A page with three real reviews beats a page with none, and the page will fill.

Contact

A phone number that dials when tapped, an email, your hours, the areas you serve, and a short form with four fields at most: name, phone, what you need, where you are. No captcha puzzles. No "we will respond within 48 hours." If you are a service-area business and do not take walk-ins, say so rather than publishing a home address.

What To Leave Out At Launch

• A blog. An empty blog, or one with a single post from the week the site launched, tells the visitor the site is not maintained. Add writing when you have something to say and the time to say it. The guides on this site exist because we publish them; a page called Blog does not rank on its own.
• A portfolio of forty photos. Six good photos on the relevant services pages do more than a gallery nobody scrolls. Photos need to load fast on a phone in a truck.
• A pricing page you will have to defend. Put the things that affect price on each services page instead, and the starting price if you are comfortable with it. A full price list invites comparison shopping on the one thing you least want to compete on.
• Testimonials typed into the site. Use the Google reviews. A quote with a first name and no source persuades nobody in 2026.
• An online booking system, a client portal, a store. Each is a real project with its own cost and upkeep. If you need one, it is a different conversation, and the five pages still come first.

The Things That Matter More Than Page Count

Speed. The site should load in about a second on a phone, because the person checking you is standing in a kitchen with a leak. Plain pages on fast hosting do this; heavy page builders usually do not.

The phone number on every page, tappable. Most calls from a small business website come from someone who never reached the contact page.

Your name, address and phone written the same way on the site as on your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps and the directories. Google and the AI answers trust the business whose details agree everywhere.

One clear topic per page, named in the title. "Basement Development Calgary" is a title. "Services" is not.

How We Build It

The Studio's website service is these five pages, written for you from a thirty-minute call, built as plain fast pages on Cloudflare, connected to Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile, and live in ten working days for $750. The domain is yours. There is no monthly fee from us, because a five-page site does not need a retainer to keep standing.

If you already have a site with twenty pages and no calls, the fix is usually not more pages. It is these five, done properly, and the rest either folded in or retired.

FAQ