The five pages every small business website needs.

Here’s a useful way to think about it. Someone lands on your website with one of a handful of questions in their head: What do you do? Can you do it for me? Can I trust you? How do I get in touch? Each page below exists to answer one of those, quickly, on a phone, while they’re standing in a parking lot.

1. Home: what you do, for whom, and what to do next

Your homepage has about three seconds to say what the business is. Not a clever tagline, the actual thing: “Family-run HVAC repair in Baldwin County,” “A neighborhood coffee shop in Fairhope.” Put that in the biggest text on the page.

Then give people one obvious next step. Call, book, see the menu, get a quote. One button, not six. Everything else on the homepage, from photos to a short “why us,” supports that one step.

2. Services: one page per thing you actually sell

This is the page most small businesses get wrong, usually by cramming everything into a single paragraph. If you offer three main services, give each one its own short page: what it is, who it’s for, what it includes, and how to start. It’s better for customers, who can find exactly what they need, and it’s better for search, because “duct cleaning Daphne” now has a real page to land on.

Don’t have distinct services? A restaurant’s “services” page is its menu. A rental’s is “the stay.” Same idea: the things people are deciding about get their own space.

3. About: the part that makes people trust you

People buy from people. A good about page is short and human: who you are, how long you’ve been at it, why you do this, and a real photo if you can bear it. Skip the mission statement. Write it the way you’d explain your business to someone at a cookout.

4. Contact: make it impossible to get wrong

Phone number that’s tappable on a phone. Email. Hours. Address with a map link if people come to you, or “serving Fairhope, Daphne and Spanish Fort” if you go to them. A short form for people who’d rather not call. That’s it. The contact details should also appear in your footer on every page, so nobody has to hunt.

5. The one people forget: a page that answers questions

Call it FAQ, call it “good to know,” but have somewhere to answer the things you get asked every week. How much does it cost? Do you take walk-ins? Do you travel to Gulf Shores? Each answer saves you a phone call, reassures a nervous customer, and gives search engines a real, specific page to match against real, specific questions.

What you can skip

• A blog you won’t keep up. One good, current page beats twelve stale posts. (Notes like this one are only worth it if you’ll actually write them.)
• A “gallery” with no captions. Photos are great, but put them where they do work: on the service they illustrate.
• Testimonials you don’t have yet. Never invent them. An honest “new business, happy to share references” is worth more than a fake quote.

The short version

Home, services, about, contact, and a page of answers. Five pages, each with one job. Get those right and you’ll have a better website than most of the businesses on your street.