What to actually put on a small business website

Most advice on this is a flat list of pages — home, about, services, contact — presented as equally important, with nothing to say about which parts actually decide anything. We went looking for evidence instead, and found a 2026 survey that answers the question directly and that almost nobody writing about it is using.

It reframes the whole thing. Start with how little time you have.

You have about five minutes, and you're one of three

BrightLocal surveyed 1,227 US consumers who had searched for a local business in the previous three months. What they found about the shape of the decision:

• 75% decide which business to use in under 30 minutes. 28% decide in under five.
• 72% consider three businesses or fewer. Only 1% look at more than ten.
• Just 6% simply click the top result. The other 94% are comparing.

So your website is not a brochure being read at leisure. It's a two-minute verification pass, against two competitors, by someone who has already decided roughly what they want. Every decision below follows from that.

The site's job is verification, not discovery

People rarely arrive at a small business website cold. They found you on Google, Maps, a review site or social — 75% use more than one channel — and 54% visit the website after reading positive reviews. By the time they're on your page they're not asking “who are you”. They're asking three things a review couldn't answer: are you right for me, what does it cost, and how do I reach you?

A homepage that opens with a slogan and a stock photo answers none of them.

The more useful list: what makes people leave

Checklists tell you what to include. This tells you what loses you the job, which is more actionable — and more surprising. Ranked, from the same survey:

Read the second row again. Unclear pricing is the number two reason people reject a local business — ahead of a low star rating, ahead of missing information, second only to bad reviews. And it's the one thing on that list entirely within your control today.

Pricing: the section owners most want to skip

The instinct is to leave prices off — jobs vary, you want the conversation, you don't want competitors seeing them. The data is unusually one-sided against that instinct.

Clear pricing is the #3 factor in the final decision (29%) and a top-five research factor. In trades and home services specifically — the vertical whose owners resist this hardest — 36% of customers name transparent pricing as what they're looking for.

In fairness, the honest counter-argument: we found no study testing whether publishing prices reduces total enquiries while improving their quality. It plausibly filters out people who were never going to book. The survey measures who rules you out, not who eventually pays — so treat it as strong evidence about the shortlist, and an open question about revenue.

What belongs in the first screenful

Eye-tracking work by Nielsen Norman Group found 57% of page-viewing time is spent above the fold, and 74% within the first two screenfuls. On a phone that's a small budget. Spend it on:

• What you do and where. “Mobile car detailing across east Austin” beats “Excellence, delivered”. Proximity is the single most-checked factor at 44%.
• A price signal. Even a starting figure.
• The action. Tappable phone number, book button, or directions.
• Hours, in text — not baked into an image.
• Your star rating and review count, if they're good.

Contact: phone first, form second

“Quick response time” is a 22% decision factor, and when 28% of people decide within five minutes, a contact form is an asynchronous promise in a synchronous moment. Put a tappable tel: link in the header of every page. Keep the form as the option for people browsing at 11pm, and ask only for what you need to reply.

On form length, the folklore — “never more than three fields” — is weaker than it sounds. One well-known test found that removing fields cut conversions by 14%, and a later 19% gain came from relabelling fields rather than deleting them. Clarity beats brevity. (Several precise-sounding statistics in this area — “each extra field costs 4.1%” and similar — trace to sources that don't appear to exist. We left them out.)

Photos: yours, not stock

Missing photos is a 16% rejection reason, and photos are a 24% research factor. More interestingly, Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking found that people study photos of real people and premises as content, while generic stock imagery is systematically ignored — looked past as decoration.

You'll see it claimed that real photos convert 35% better than stock. We tried to trace that figure; the study it's attributed to is on a site that no longer exists and no version states a sample size. The mechanism is well evidenced. The number isn't. Take phone photos of your actual shop, your actual work, your actual face.

Reviews on the page, and keeping them fresh

Reviews occupy three of the top five rejection reasons. What's changed recently is the expectation of recency: 74% prioritise reviews from the last three months, and outdated reviews are themselves a 21% rejection reason. A wall of glowing testimonials from 2021 reads worse than three from last month.

Show your star rating, review count, and three or four recent named reviews with dates — then link out to the profile so people can check you're not choosing the flattering ones.

Build for the phone — and get the number right

You'll read that 64% of web traffic is mobile. That's a global figure across all websites, and US mobile share is materially lower — quoting it as “your customers” is misleading.

The right number for a local business is more striking anyway: 73% of local business searches happen on a mobile device, because that study measured local-business search sessions rather than all web traffic. Design for a thumb, on a phone, outdoors, in a hurry.

What to leave off

• Rotating carousels. The most-cited data is Notre Dame's 2013 analysis: about 1% of visitors clicked a carousel feature at all, and 84% of those clicks went to the first slide. It's old data and one of the tested carousels did better, so treat it as directional — but the practical objection stands regardless: slides two through five are where your content goes to be ignored, and the carousel pushes your hours and phone number below the fold.
• Auto-playing video or audio. Beyond being unwelcome, sound that auto-plays for more than three seconds without a control is a WCAG Level A failure — the lowest bar there is.
• A splash page. No modern study exists on these, so we'll argue it from the decision window: you have five minutes and you're spending the first click on a door.
• A blog you won't maintain. Looking inactive is its own rejection category. A blog last updated in 2022 is worse than no blog.

Accessibility, described accurately

You'll see this presented two ways — ignored entirely, or “you will be sued”. Neither is right.

There is currently no federal regulation specifying a web accessibility standard for private US businesses; the 2024 rule adopting WCAG 2.1 AA applies to state and local government. The real exposure is private litigation, and it is very unevenly distributed: of the 3,117 federal web accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, roughly 70% targeted e-commerce and 21% food service. Notably, 64% of defendants had revenue under $25 million — this is not only a big-company problem.

The practical response is small. WebAIM's annual scan of a million home pages finds six error types account for 96% of everything detectable: low-contrast text, missing form labels, empty buttons, missing image alt text, empty links, and a missing page language. On a small site that's an afternoon, no consultant required.

One list doesn't fit every business

The short version

Say what you do and where in the first screenful. Publish prices, or a range, or a starting figure. Make the phone number tappable. Use your own photos. Keep reviews recent. Get the hours right. Then stop — the person reading has two minutes, two other tabs open, and no interest in your brand story.