A small business website needs six things: a headline saying what you do and for whom, a list of services, real photos, a few reviews, your service area, and a way to get in touch that works on a phone. One page, roughly in that order. Everything else — the mission statement, the hero slider, the blog nobody will write — is optional at best and friction at worst.
That answer hasn’t changed much in a decade. What has changed is who reads the page: alongside customers and Google, AI assistants now summarize your business for people who never open your site, and more buyers than you’d guess need the page to work with a keyboard or a screen reader. Conveniently, the structure that serves a hurried customer serves both. Below: the six sections, the builder-versus-developer question with real prices, what to leave off, the accessibility basics worth an hour, and how to ship it in two evenings.
What does a small business website actually need?
Six sections on a single page: headline, services, photos, reviews, service area, contact. No tabs, no sub-pages, no “About” maze. Between them they answer every question a prospect asks before picking up the phone, and they’re the most you can realistically keep current. Small business sites usually fail by adding, not by omitting.
- A headline that names the job and the customer. Business name plus one sentence: “Plumber in Leeds — repairs and installations in homes and flats.” Skip “comprehensive solutions for demanding clients.” If someone reads only this line, they should know whether they’re in the right place.
- Services as a list, not essays. Names of the things you do is enough; you don’t owe each one a paragraph. If you can stand it, add rough prices or “same-day quote.” Concrete pricing sets you apart immediately, because most of your competitors are hiding from it.
- Real photos. Before-and-after shots, the workspace, you doing the work. Phone photos beat stock images of models in hard hats, and visitors sense the difference instantly. Reuse whatever you already uploaded to your Google Business Profile.
- Two or three reviews, quoted verbatim. Pull your best from Google and paste them as quotes with the reviewer’s first name. Third-party proof outperforms anything you write about yourself.
- Your service area, spelled out. If you travel to customers, name the towns, neighborhoods and radius in plain text. It’s the thing people check before calling, and it’s also the text that helps you turn up in searches that include a place name.
- Contact that works with one thumb. A click-to-call phone number and a three-field form — name, contact, message. Put the number in the first screenful, not five scrolls down. Statcounter put mobile at 51.5% of global web traffic in June 2026, and for a local service business the phone share is usually the half that’s ready to call.
Should you use a website builder or hire someone?
Use a builder. For a six-section page, Wix, Squarespace or Google Sites will do the job in an evening for the price of a couple of coffees a month, and the result will be responsive and reasonably fast without you touching code. Hire someone when the site has to do something a builder can’t.
Prices, for anchoring: as of a July 2026 Tech.co pricing breakdown, Squarespace’s entry Basic plan runs $16/month billed annually or $25/month billed monthly. Website Builder Expert’s Wix guide lists Wix Light at $17/month and Core at $29/month on annual billing, plus a permanently free tier that shows Wix ads and puts you on a wixsite.com address. Check current numbers before buying — builder pricing moves — but the order of magnitude holds: a first business site costs between nothing and about $300 a year, plus $10–20 for a domain.
Pay a professional when you need bookings wired into your own systems, a real product catalog, several locations, or a brand that can’t look like a template. Those are legitimate reasons. “It should look more serious” is not — a clear page from a template converts better than an expensive one that buries the phone number.
What should you leave off?
Every extra section is work for you and friction for the visitor. Cut the mission statement, the rotating hero slider, the ten-field contact form, the blog you won’t maintain, and anything that animates on entry. If a section doesn’t move someone closer to contacting you, it doesn’t belong on the page.
- “Our mission.” Customers are looking for price and availability, not philosophy.
- Sliders and carousels. Nice motion, unread copy, slower page on a phone.
- Long forms. More fields, fewer submissions. Name, contact, message.
- A dormant blog. An “Updates” tab holding one post from 2024 actively hurts you. (If you do want to publish, do it deliberately — our AI search checklist covers what makes a post worth writing.)
- Autoplay audio, splash screens, entry pop-ups. It isn’t 2010.
Do small businesses really get sued over an inaccessible website?
In the United States, yes — routinely. Accessibility vendor UsableNet, which tracks federal and state filings, reported more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 and found that 64% of the companies sued had annual revenue under $25 million. E-commerce drew close to 70% of the cases. In the UK and EU the pressure is regulatory rather than litigious, but the duty is real.
Two caveats before you panic. UsableNet sells accessibility services, so read the framing as an interested party’s, even though the filings are court record. And the risk is concentrated: a local plumber’s six-section page is a far smaller target than a storefront taking online orders.
Outside the US the picture differs by jurisdiction. In the UK, GOV.UK’s guidance for service providers explains that the Equality Act 2010 requires providers to “think ahead and take steps to address barriers that impede disabled people,” and that you “should not wait until a disabled person experiences difficulties.” That anticipatory duty has no small-business exemption, though what counts as a reasonable adjustment does account for your resources. WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard the UK imposes on public sector sites; private providers aren’t bound by those regulations, but WCAG is the yardstick everyone reaches for.
In the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 — and here small really does mean exempt. Article 4(5) of Directive 2019/882 exempts microenterprises providing services, defined as fewer than 10 people and turnover or balance sheet total not above €2 million. Most one-van trades and two-chair salons sit under that line.
None of this is legal advice, and none of it is an argument for buying an “accessibility widget.” The basics below are cheap, permanent, and useful to customers whatever any regulator does.
Which accessibility basics actually matter?
Four things cover most of it: readable color contrast, alt text on meaningful images, a page you can operate with the Tab key, and real headings instead of bold text pretending to be headings. Add proper labels on your form fields and you’ve cleared the errors that dominate the web.
That last claim is measurable. The February 2026 WebAIM Million report, which tested the top one million home pages, found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, averaging 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of pages, missing alt text on 53.1%, missing form input labels on 51%, and empty links on 46.3%. Six error types accounted for 96% of everything detected — meaning a handful of fixes puts you ahead of nearly every site in the sample.
| Basic | What to do | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Contrast | Dark text on light background, no gray-on-gray | WCAG 2.2 asks for 4.5:1 on normal text, 3:1 on large text; test in WebAIM’s free contrast checker |
| Alt text | Describe what the photo shows and why it’s there | Leave decorative images with empty alt; never write “image1.jpg” |
| Keyboard | Every link, button and field reachable with Tab | Press Tab through your own page; if you lose track of where you are, so will someone else |
| Headings | One H1, then H2s for sections | Bold text is not a heading — screen readers skip past it |
| Form labels | A visible label on every field | Placeholder text alone disappears the moment someone types |
Builders handle some of this for you and quietly undo other parts — a pale-gray-on-white template is the usual culprit. Fifteen minutes with a contrast checker and the Tab key catches most of it.
How do you make the page quotable by AI?
Write the way you’d answer a question out loud: put the question in the heading, then give the actual answer in the first two or three sentences, then expand. Keep prices, service areas and hours as plain text rather than baked into images. That’s most of it — the structure that makes a page skimmable makes it citable.
Google is unusually blunt about the rest. Its AI features guidance, updated 10 July 2026, states that “the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems,” that “structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add,” and that “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search.”
So add LocalBusiness schema because it feeds rich results and states your facts unambiguously, not because someone told you AI demands it. Note that Google’s guidance describes Google’s own systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude crawl separately and weight things differently, and for local questions they lean heavily on directory data, which we cover in AI visibility for small and local businesses. If you want to know what those tools currently say about you, here’s an evening’s test.
How do you build it in two evenings?
Evening one is content, evening two is assembly. The technical part is genuinely the easy part; what eats weeks is deciding between templates. Pick the first reasonable one-page template and move on.
- Evening one: gather. Write the six sections into a plain document. Pull 6–10 photos off your phone and your Google Business Profile. Copy your three best reviews.
- Evening two: assemble. Sign up, pick a one-page business template, paste your six sections in order.
- Wire the phone number as a clickable
tel:link, and keep the form to three fields. - Run the two checks: Tab through the page, and run your text and background colors through a contrast checker.
- Open it on your own phone. Is the number tappable? Is the text readable without zooming? Is “what you do plus how to reach you” visible on the first screen?
- Connect a domain and publish. A published page you improve later beats a perfect page that never ships.
Where should you start?
Start with the six sections and the phone number, publish, then fix. Once it’s live, the highest-value follow-ups are your Google Business Profile, a steady trickle of reviews, and making sure your business facts read identically everywhere — those move the needle more than another redesign.
If you’d rather know where your whole marketing stands before spending an evening on any of it, our free 3-minute marketing audit scores it and tells you what to fix first. If the specific question is whether AI tools recommend you, that’s what our AI visibility audit measures: 39 criteria across six areas, the same questions asked of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and a prioritized fix list, from PLN 499 net (around $125) with a five-fix-or-refund guarantee. Want to talk through your situation first? Book a free 20-minute consultation.
FAQ
How many pages should a small business website have? One is enough to start. Six sections stacked on a single page — headline, services, photos, reviews, service area, contact — answer everything a prospect needs before calling, and one page is far easier to keep current than five. Add separate pages later, when you have a specific reason: a service worth its own detailed page, or a location you want to be found for by name.
Is a website builder worse for search than a custom site? Not in any way that decides your outcome as a local service business. Builders produce responsive, crawlable pages, and local visibility is driven mostly by your Google Business Profile, reviews and consistent business details. A builder page with a clear headline, plain-text service area and real reviews competes fine. Nobody can promise you a specific ranking on any platform, whatever they build it with.
Does my small business website legally have to be accessible? It depends where you operate, and this isn’t legal advice. In the US, website accessibility lawsuits are common and land on small companies too — UsableNet counted over 5,000 filings in 2025, most against businesses under $25m in revenue. In the UK, the Equality Act’s anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments applies to service providers of any size. In the EU, the European Accessibility Act exempts microenterprises providing services. Either way, the basics take an hour and help real customers.
Do I need a blog? No. A blog pays off when you want to be found for question-shaped searches and you’ll genuinely publish on a schedule. For a new service business, a complete home page and an active Google Business Profile matter more. An abandoned blog is worse than no blog, because it dates your business in public.
Do I need my own domain, or is a free builder subdomain enough? A free subdomain works for launch, but your own domain is worth the $10–20 a year almost immediately. It reads as more credible on your Google profile, in search results and on a business card, and it means you keep the address if you ever change platforms. It’s the cheapest thing on this list with a real effect on trust.