What "small business website" lists actually show you
Search for small business website designs and you will find a lot of galleries. They are pleasant to scroll and almost entirely useless, and the reason is hiding in plain sight in the lists themselves.
We went through one of the better ranked articles on the topic and wrote down every business it featured. The list included Allbirds, which is a publicly traded shoe company. The Farmer's Dog, a venture-backed pet food operation. Bellroy. Moo, the printing company. And, genuinely, the New York Times Store, which belongs to the New York Times.
Fourteen examples of small business web design, and a decent share of them belong to companies with product teams, brand agencies and design systems. Another popular roundup runs to fifty-eight screenshots. Fifty-eight. Nobody making a decision about their own website needs fifty-eight of anything.
None of this is a swipe at the sites themselves. They are good sites. The problem is what happens when a landscaper with a truck and a phone tries to learn something from a direct-to-consumer shoe brand. The lessons do not transfer, because the two businesses are not trying to make the same thing happen.
There are two kinds of small business website
Almost every small business site is doing one of two jobs, and nearly all the design advice floating around is written for the first one.
| Sell a product | Get a call | |
|---|---|---|
| What success looks like | A checkout | A phone ringing, or a form |
| Who is visiting | Someone browsing | Someone with a problem right now |
| What they need to see | The product, clearly | That you are real, close, and available |
| Time on the decision | Days, sometimes weeks | Often under a minute |
| What design does | Builds desire | Removes doubt |
Galleries are full of the first kind because product sites photograph well. A grid of beautiful shoes makes a great screenshot. A roofing company's service area page does not, even when it is the single most valuable page on the site.
If your customers pay you to come and do something at their address, you are running the second kind. That covers most trades, most home services, most local professional work, and a good share of the businesses reading a list about small business website designs in the first place.
The design decisions that matter when you need the phone to ring
Here is what actually moves the needle on a get-a-call site, in rough order of how much difference it makes.
A phone number that survives scrolling
Not a number in the footer. Not a contact page. A number that is visible and tappable at the moment someone decides to act, which is rarely at the top of the page and rarely at the bottom. On a phone, that usually means it stays put while the page moves.
This is boring and it beats everything else. We have looked at a lot of trades sites and the gap between the ones that get calls and the ones that do not is more often the placement of a phone number than anything a designer would recognise as design.
Proof that you are a real business in their town
License number, insurance, years in business, the towns you cover written out individually. Someone is about to let a stranger into their house. Everything that makes you look less like a stranger is doing more work than your color palette.
Writing "serving the greater area" is the most common version of this mistake. It reassures nobody and it ranks for nothing.
One sentence about what things cost
Not a price list. A posture. A diagnostic fee, a free estimate, flat rate pricing, anything that answers the question every visitor is quietly asking. Silence reads as bad news, because people assume the number is being hidden for a reason.
Photographs of the actual work
Your van. Your crew. A job you finished. Slightly crooked is fine and often better. Stock photography is instantly recognisable to customers who have seen the same smiling model on four competitors' sites, and it quietly signals that there was nothing real to show.
The ten minute test. Open your site on your phone. Start a timer. Can a stranger find your phone number, work out which towns you cover, and see one piece of evidence you are legitimate, in under thirty seconds? If not, that is the whole project. Everything else on the page is decoration until those three things are true.
What the gallery aesthetic quietly costs you
The designs that win awards tend to share a set of features, and most of them are working against a service business.
- Full screen hero video. Looks expensive, delays the page, and pushes your phone number below the fold on the device most people are using.
- Scroll animations. Content that fades in as you scroll is content that is not there when someone arrives in a hurry.
- Minimal navigation. Hiding the menu behind an icon is fine for a brand people already know. It is a problem when someone is trying to find out whether you cover their town.
- Very little text. Sparse copy photographs beautifully and gives Google almost nothing to rank you for.
- Custom fonts and heavy images. Every one of these is a delay, and a slow page on a phone is the version Google actually indexes, as its mobile-first indexing documentation spells out.
None of these are crimes. They are choices that make sense for a brand with an audience already paying attention, and much less sense for a business whose next customer is a stranger in a hurry.
The page most small business sites are missing
Here is the one that almost never appears in a gallery, because it is impossible to make it look impressive in a screenshot. A service business needs pages about where it works.
Most small business sites handle location with a line in the footer and a sentence somewhere saying they serve the surrounding area. That single sentence is doing none of the work people think it does. Somebody two towns over searching for your trade plus their town name has no way to know whether you come out that far, and neither does Google.
The fix is dull and effective. List the towns individually. If a handful of them account for most of your work, give those their own page, and make each page genuinely about that town rather than the same paragraph with a name swapped in. Google has treated the swap-the-name approach as spam for years, and readers see through it about as fast.
What makes a town page real is specific knowledge you already have. The age of the housing stock, the streets where the same problem keeps showing up, the fact that half the properties in one neighbourhood were built in the same decade with the same fittings. That is the sort of detail no competitor can copy off you, because they would have to have done the work.
It is also worth marking your business up properly so search engines can read your location and hours without guessing. Google publishes its own specification for local business structured data, and it costs nothing to follow beyond the half hour it takes.
Ten honest town pages will do more for a local service business than any amount of visual polish on the homepage. They are also the part of the job most likely to still be undone, which makes them the fastest win available to most of the businesses reading this.
Five things worth copying from good small business sites
Some of what shows up in the galleries genuinely does transfer. These are the parts we would take.
Say what you do in the first line. The best product sites tell you what they sell before you scroll. The service equivalent is naming the trade and the area in the headline, not a slogan about quality and integrity.
One obvious next step. Good sites have a single dominant action repeated down the page. Bad ones offer six things at once and get none of them.
Real faces. Product brands photograph their founders for a reason. A photo of the person who will turn up is worth more to a homeowner than any stock image.
Short pages that answer one question each. A page per service beats one long page listing everything, both for the reader and for search.
Loading fast enough that nobody notices. The best small business sites feel instant. That is not an aesthetic, it is a decision to not put much on the page.
If you want the trades version of this worked through with real sites pulled apart one by one, we did exactly that in our breakdown of plumbing website examples, where the mechanisms are easier to see because the stakes are so obvious.
What a design like this actually costs
The galleries rarely mention price, which is convenient, because most of the sites in them cost more than a small business will ever spend on a website.
A custom agency build for a local service business typically lands somewhere in the low thousands and climbs from there, and a good share of agencies attach a monthly retainer on top. A template you build yourself is cheap in money and expensive in evenings. Our own pricing runs $497 to $997 one time, and you own the result, which we have written about at length in our breakdown of what a small business website costs and list plainly on our pricing page.
The thing worth understanding is that almost none of what makes a service website work is expensive. A phone number in the right place, a license number, a list of towns and a sentence about pricing are writing decisions, not design decisions. You can improve most trades websites in an afternoon without touching the layout.
How to judge your own site in ten minutes
Skip the inspiration galleries and do this instead. Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the shop wifi, and work down the list.
| Check | Pass looks like |
|---|---|
| Phone number | Visible without scrolling, and tapping it starts a call |
| What you do | Named in the first line, not implied by a photo |
| Where you work | Individual towns listed, not "the surrounding area" |
| Credentials | License and insurance visible on the homepage |
| Pricing | One sentence, even if it is only "free estimates" |
| Photos | Your work, not a stock library |
| Speed | Usable within a couple of seconds on mobile data |
| Services | A page each for the jobs you most want to be called about |
Most sites we look at fail three or four of those, and it is almost never the same three or four. Fixing them does not require a redesign in the way the word is usually meant. It requires someone to sit down and write the missing sentences.
If you would rather see what your site looks like with all of that handled, that is the thing we do. Paste your URL and we build you a working version to look at before you decide anything, which we cover on our trades pages.