What Makes a Good Business Website? The Honest List

In short

A good business site answers four questions in the first screen: what you do, where, for whom, and how to reach you.
Every page needs a job. If you cannot say what a page is for, it is decoration.
The information that has to be on the site is shorter than most owners think, and it must be findable in seconds.
Speed, mobile and a clear next step matter more than any design trend.
The test is not whether you like it. The test is whether a customer with a problem can use it.

This is the first of 4 guides on website basics. The rest are listed below.

The stranger test

Imagine a woman standing in a kitchen with two inches of water on the floor. She has a phone in one hand and a towel under her foot. She types four words into a search box, taps the second result, and your website loads.

She is not interested in your story. She does not care that you were founded in 2009. She wants to know three things: do you fix this, do you fix it here, and can she get you on the phone right now. If the answer to each is visible before she has to scroll, you have a good business website. If she has to hunt, you have a brochure, and she has already gone back to the results to try the next name.

That is the stranger test, and it is the only test that matters. The web industry has spent twenty years inventing other ones. Awards for design. Scores for "engagement." Reports that measure how long people looked at a page as if staring were a form of buying. None of that puts a truck in her driveway. A good business website is a tool for a stranger with a problem, and it should be judged the way you would judge any tool: does it do the job, and does it do it fast.

A website is not a place your business lives. It is a door your customers walk through. Build the door.

The five jobs a business website has to do

Strip away the trends and every business site has the same five jobs. Whether you sell plumbing, legal advice, custom cabinets or software, the list does not change. What changes is how well each job gets done.

1
Be found.
The site has to show up when someone searches for what you do in the place you do it. That means pages built around the words customers actually type, a Google Business Profile that agrees with the site, and a structure a search engine can read. The SEO basics guide covers this in full.
2
Say what you do, fast.
One sentence at the top of the home page that a stranger can repeat back. Not a slogan. A description. "Residential plumbing repair in San Antonio, same-day." If a visitor cannot say what you do after three seconds, the page has failed.
3
Prove it.
Reviews with names and dates. Photos of real work, not stock. Licenses, insurance, years, the towns you cover. Trust is built from specifics, and the trust guide lists the ones that count.
4
Make the next step easy.
A phone number that dials when tapped. A form that takes thirty seconds. A booking button if you book. The conversion guide explains why the form with four fields beats the form with eleven.
5
Stay out of the way.
Load in under two seconds on a phone in a driveway. Work on every screen. Never make a visitor pinch, wait or guess. The speed guide shows what slow costs.

What a small business website should include

Here is the information that has to be on the site. Not the information that would be nice, or that a consultant will bill you for. The information a customer needs to choose you and reach you. Most of it fits on one screen if you are disciplined about it.

On the home page, above the fold

What you do, in one plain sentence, with the service and the place in it.
Your phone number, as a tappable link, in the header on every page.
The area you serve, by name. "San Antonio and the Hill Country" beats "the greater metro region."
One clear next step: call, get a quote, book. Pick the one that matters most and make it the biggest thing on the screen.
One line of proof: a rating, a license, a number of jobs, a year founded. Something a stranger can check.

Somewhere on the site, easy to find

A page for each service you want to be hired for. Not one page listing them all. One page each, so it can rank for its own search and answer its own questions.
Your service area, with the towns named. If you cover twenty towns, the service area page guide explains when each deserves a page.
Reviews, pulled from Google or shown with names, and a link to leave one.
Real photos of your work, your people or your place. A stock photo of a smiling stranger in a hard hat proves nothing.
Hours, including whether you answer after hours, and what happens when you do not.
An about page that is about the customer's confidence, not your journey. Who is on the crew, how long, what you are licensed for.
A contact page with the phone, the email, a short form and, if you have one, the address and a map.
Pricing or a price range, wherever you can stand behind one. The cost guides apply the same logic to websites: the business that names a number gets the call.

Notice what is not on the list. A blog, unless you will actually write it. A mission statement. A carousel of slides nobody clicks. An "our process" page that describes filling out a form. The content guide covers what is worth writing; the short version is that every page should answer a question someone has actually asked.

Good versus expensive: they are not the same thing

The website business has a habit that would be funny if it were not so costly. It sells the look of quality in place of quality. A site with a full-screen video, animated transitions and a font nobody can read at arm's length is presented as "premium." A site that loads instantly, says what it does and shows the phone number is presented as "basic." The premium one loses the woman in the kitchen. The basic one books her.

This is not an argument for ugly. It is an argument for judging a site by what it does. Here is the difference in practice.

Looks like quality	Is quality
A full-screen video hero that takes six seconds to load	A headline and a phone number visible in under one second
"We are passionate about excellence"	"Licensed, insured, 2,400 jobs since 2011"
A contact form with eleven fields	Name, phone, what do you need. Send.
Stock photos of models in your trade	Photos of your crew on your jobs
One Services page listing twelve things	Twelve service pages, each answering its own search
An animated menu that hides the phone number	The phone number in the top right of every page
Built on a template with forty plugins	Built as software that does only what you need

The right column is not cheaper to build. It is harder, because it requires knowing what the customer needs and having the discipline to leave everything else out. But it is what you should be paying for, and the guide to what a website costs will help you tell whether you are.

The half of a good website you cannot see

Everything above is visible. The other half of a good business website is not, and it is where most of the difference between sites that work and sites that sit is decided.

Speed. A page that takes four seconds on a phone loses a large share of its visitors before it paints. This is measurable and it is the single most common defect we find on business sites. It comes from bloated templates, oversized images and scripts that were never needed. It is fixable, and fixing it is often worth more per dollar than any other change.

Mobile. More than half of the visitors to a service business site are on a phone, and for emergency services it is most of them. A site that "works on mobile" in the sense that it technically renders is not the same as one designed for a thumb. The mobile guide is the test.

Structure. Search engines read titles, headings, links and structured data. A site with clean structure gets found; a site that is a pile of pretty pages does not. A good developer builds structure in. A page builder leaves it to chance.

Security and hosting. An SSL certificate, backups, updates, uptime. Boring, until the day it is not. The technology guide explains each in plain words so you know what you are paying for.

Tracking. If you do not know how many calls and forms the site produced last month, you cannot know whether it is good. Conversion tracking is a one-time setup and it turns opinion into a number.

How to tell whether your site is a good one

You do not need a consultant for this. You need ten minutes and a little honesty.

The ten-minute review

On a phone, over cellular, the headline and phone number are readable within two seconds.
A stranger can say what you do and where after one glance.
Every service you want to be hired for has its own page, with its own title.
The phone number dials when tapped and appears on every page.
The main form has four fields or fewer and a button that says what happens next.
There is at least one review with a name on the home page.
The photos are of your actual business.
The site has not been touched in a year, or it has, and you know what changed.
You know how many calls and forms it produced last month.
It shows up when you search your main service and your town.

Seven or more, and the site is doing its job; the conversion guide will help it do more. Four to six, and you have a fixable site with real leaks, the kind covered in why people leave a website. Three or fewer, and it is time to read the redesign guide and decide whether to fix or replace.

The rest of this series

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Questions people ask

Straight answers

The one sentence at the top that says what you do and where, with the phone number next to it. Everything else on the site supports that sentence. If a stranger cannot find it in two seconds, nothing below it gets read.

Yes. The profile gets you into the map results; the website is where the profile sends people to decide. A profile with no site, or with a site that fails on a phone, loses the click to the next business. The two work together, and the site is what you own outright.

Enough to answer the customer's questions and enough for a search engine to know what each page is about, and no more. A service page usually needs several hundred words that say what the service is, who it is for, what it costs or how it is priced, and how to get it. A home page needs less. Padding to hit a word count helps nobody.

Wherever you can stand behind a number or a range, yes. The business that names a price gets the call from the customer who was going to ask anyway, and loses only the ones who were never going to pay it. If your work is quoted per job, say how the quote works and how fast it comes.

Slow loading, stock photos, a wall of text with no headings, a phone number you have to search for, broken links, and a design that was clearly a template with the logo swapped. Customers may not name these things, but they feel them, and they leave. The website credibility checklist lists each one.

Count the calls and forms it produced last month. If you do not know the number, the site is not being measured, and an unmeasured site cannot be improved. Conversion tracking is a one-time setup that answers the question every month after.

Where to go from here