Small Business Website Checklist: What You Actually Need

You have either no website, a Wix page you put together in 2022 and have not touched since, or a quote from a web designer sitting in your inbox. You have also read every kind of advice about what a site needs. A blog. Video. Live chat. A lead magnet. Fifty pages of content.

Most of that advice comes from people who sell those things. This checklist does not.

What follows is the honest short list: the things a small business site must have before you send anyone to it, and the things it does not need yet. Work through it yourself in an afternoon. You do not need a developer for most of it.

The five pages that cover most small businesses

A small local or service business needs five pages. That is it. Adding more before these five do their job is how sites become confusing and slow.

1. 1.Home page. One sentence saying who you help and what you do. One call-to-action button or phone number above the fold (the part of the page visible before scrolling). Nothing else competes with it.
2. 2.Services page. One page per service if you have several, or one page listing all of them. Each service gets a short plain description and its own call-to-action. No jargon, no industry awards, no feature lists.
3. 3.About page. Two or three paragraphs about who runs the business, how long you have been doing it, and where you serve. A real photo of you or your team. This is the page that converts skeptical visitors into callers.
4. 4.Contact page. Your phone number (clickable on mobile), an email address or short contact form, your service area or address, and your business hours. Nothing else.
5. 5.One legal page. A privacy policy is required if your site collects any data, including Google Analytics. Most website platforms generate one automatically. Add it, link it in the footer, and move on.

That is the structure. If your current site has thirty pages and you cannot find your phone number on it, you have a thirty-page problem.

One clear call-to-action per page

Every page should tell a visitor what to do next. Call. Book. Get a quote. Fill in this form. One action per page. When a page offers five options, most visitors choose none of them.

The most common mistake we see when running the Playbook homepage scan is a home page with a hero banner, three buttons, a newsletter signup, and a chat widget all competing for the same click. The visitor cannot tell which one matters. Pick one and make it obvious.

For most service businesses, the right call-to-action is a phone number or a booking link. Put it in the top right corner of every page. Make the phone number a clickable link so a visitor on mobile can tap it and call directly.

Click-to-call: the one mobile must-have

StatCounter data from September 2026 shows mobile devices account for 60% of web traffic worldwide. Most of your visitors are reading your site on a phone. If your phone number is plain text, they have to remember it, switch apps, and dial it manually. Almost none of them will.

A clickable phone number means a tap opens the dial pad with your number already filled in. Every website platform supports this. It takes about two minutes to set up and it is the single highest-return change on most small business sites.

Test it yourself. Open your site on your phone and try to call from it. If you cannot do it with one tap, fix that before anything else.

Mobile load speed under three seconds

Google research from 2016 found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load, based on data from 3,700 mobile websites.

The most common causes of slow pages for small business sites are large uncompressed photos, unused plugins or apps the platform installed, and a cheap hosting plan that takes two seconds just to wake up.

• •Compress every photo before uploading. Tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh are free and take seconds per image.
• •Remove any apps or plugins your platform installed that you do not actively use.
• •Run Google PageSpeed Insights (free, at pagespeed.web.dev) on your home page. It gives you a score and a short list of what to fix, in plain language.
• •If your score is under 50 on mobile and you are on a shared hosting plan, consider switching to a faster one before spending money on ads or SEO.

Most speed problems on small business sites are fixable in about thirty minutes with that free tool.

Real photos of your business

Generic stock photos tell a visitor nothing about you. They are the visual equivalent of saying 'we are passionate about delivering excellent service.' Every competitor has the same images.

Real photos of your work, your shop, your team, or your finished projects do three things stock photos cannot. They prove you are real. They show the quality of what you do. And they give a visitor something specific to remember.

You do not need a professional photographer. A phone camera in good daylight is enough to get started. Take five to ten photos of actual work. Put at least one on your home page and one on your About page. Replace them with better ones later.

BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 US adults found 71% of consumers use Google to discover local businesses. When they land on your site from a search, the first thing they check is whether you look like a real business. Real photos answer that question in two seconds.

Google Business Profile: embed the map, do not duplicate hours

Your Google Business Profile is where most local searches end. Your website and your GBP work together, and there are two rules for keeping them in sync.

First, embed a Google Maps link or map widget on your Contact page. A visitor who wants directions should not have to leave your site to find them.

Second, do not duplicate your hours on your About page or in your footer. Hours change. If you put them in two places on your site and one place on your GBP, you will eventually update one and forget the rest. A visitor who shows up at the wrong time does not come back. Keep your hours in one place on your site and manage them from your GBP.

For a full guide to setting up and optimizing your GBP listing, the post on how to optimize your Google Business Profile covers the complete setup in order.

Basic analytics before you launch

What you need is basic: know whether anyone is visiting and how they found you. Without that data, you cannot tell if anything you do is working.

Google Analytics 4 is free and connects to most website platforms in a few clicks. Google Search Console is also free and shows you which search terms are bringing people to your site. Set both up before you launch.

Once you have analytics running, you have the data to make decisions. Without it, you are guessing.

Legal pages: privacy policy and cookie consent

A privacy policy is required in most jurisdictions if your site collects any personal data, including analytics data. Most website builders generate one automatically. Use it, link it in your footer, and review it once a year.

Cookie consent banners are required under GDPR in the European Union and under some US state laws including California's CCPA. Whether you need one depends on where your customers are and how your site collects data. Check with your platform's legal resources or a local adviser for your specific situation.

Accessibility is also a legal and ethical floor. The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to businesses open to the public, and courts regularly use WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard in ADA Title III web accessibility cases. Most website platforms offer accessibility settings and checkers. Turn them on.

What your site does not need yet

The following are all fine to add once your site is live and working. Each one is a future upgrade, in the order that makes sense.

• •A live chat widget or chatbot. Most small businesses do not have staff to monitor live chat, which means a visitor gets an automated reply or no reply at all. That is worse than a phone number.
• •A carousel hero (the rotating banner with three or four images). Every usability study done on them shows visitors ignore them. A single static image with clear text outperforms a carousel every time.
• •Generic stock photos. Covered above. Real photos beat stock on every measure that matters.
• •A blog. A blog is a good long-term investment. Get the five core pages right first, then add content over time.
• •Fifty-plus pages of content. Thin pages with little useful information hurt more than they help. Ten well-written pages beat fifty hollow ones.

Vendors sell these things, so they appear on every checklist vendors write. That does not mean you need them now.

Which platform should you use

The right platform depends on what you sell and whether you want to touch code. Wix and Squarespace are fast to set up and require no coding. Shopify is the right choice if you sell physical products online. WordPress is more flexible but requires more maintenance. All four can produce a fast, mobile-friendly, accessible site when set up correctly.

The platform matters less than whether the basics on this checklist are done. A slow Squarespace site with no click-to-call is worse than a fast Wix site with a clear CTA and real photos. Start with the checklist, then pick the platform that fits your budget and your comfort level.

The two tests to run before you tell anyone the site is live

These two tests catch almost every launch mistake and both are free.

1. 1.Run Google PageSpeed Insights on your home page. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your URL, and run the mobile test. Read the top three issues it flags and fix them. A score above 70 on mobile is a reasonable starting point for a small business site.
2. 2.Click every link on every page. Broken links and wrong phone numbers are the most common launch mistakes, and they are invisible until someone tries to use them. Open your site on a desktop and on your phone. Click every button, every menu item, every phone number, and every contact form. Submit a test inquiry to confirm it arrives.

Those two tests take about twenty minutes. They will catch more problems than any automated checker.

What comes next after the basics are right

Once your site has the five pages, a clear CTA, real photos, a fast mobile load, and both tests passing, you have a working website. Most small business sites never fully reach this bar, so if yours does, you are already ahead of most local competitors.

The next layer is getting found. That means search engine optimization, which starts with your page titles, your page descriptions, and the words you use on each page. The guide to SEO for small business walks through that in order, starting from the basics.

After that comes the marketing plan: which channels to use, what to spend, and what order to do things in. The post on how to build a small business marketing plan is where that conversation starts.

If you want a free scan of what you already have, the Digital Positioning Playbook scans your homepage, scores six areas including load speed and mobile setup, and gives you a short list of what to fix. It takes an afternoon and costs twenty-seven dollars. If you want ongoing help with marketing content, drafts, and follow-up, Growth Autopilot drafts your marketing, follow-ups, and review requests. You approve each piece, then post or send it yourself.

The short version

Five pages. One clear call-to-action per page. A clickable phone number. Real photos. Mobile load under three seconds. A privacy policy. Google Analytics. Two tests before launch.

That is a website that works. Everything else can come later, after this is done and running.