What pages does a small business website need?

When you're planning a website, "how many pages?" is one of the first practical questions — and it drives both the timeline and the price. The honest answer for most small businesses: fewer than you'd think to start, then a few more as the business grows. Here's the breakdown.

The core: four or five pages

Nearly every small business site is built on the same foundation.

Home. Not a welcome mat — the page that does the most work. It says who you are, what you do, who it's for, and what to do next, above the fold. Most home pages are a stack of sections: a headline, your main services, a bit of proof (reviews, logos, numbers), and a clear call to action.

About. People buy from people, especially locally. This page is where trust gets built: who's behind the business, why you do it, how long you've been at it, credentials or affiliations. It doesn't need to be long. It needs to be real.

Services (or Products). What you offer, laid out so someone can scan it and find the thing they came for. For a simple business this is one page with a section per service. For a business with a few distinct offerings, each service often earns its own page — more on that below.

Contact. A form, your phone number, your email, your service area or address, and hours if they matter. Make it effortless. Every extra click here costs you enquiries.

Pricing — sometimes. If your pricing is straightforward, a page (or a section) that shows it builds trust and filters out mismatched leads before they reach your inbox. If every job is custom, a "how pricing works" explanation plus a quote form does the same job.

That's a complete, credible site. A lot of businesses never need more.

Pages worth adding as you grow

Individual service pages. This is the big one for getting found. A single "Services" page can't rank well for every service in every town you cover. A dedicated page for "kitchen renovations" or "commercial cleaning" — with that phrase in the heading and copy written for someone actively searching it — can. Add these for the services that actually bring in work, not all of them.

Location or service-area pages. If you serve several towns and want to show up in local searches for each, a page per key area helps — provided each one has genuinely distinct, useful content. Thin, near-duplicate town pages do more harm than good.

Portfolio, case studies, or a gallery. For visual or project-based work (trades, design, events), proof matters more than description. Even a handful of before/afters with a sentence of context is persuasive.

Testimonials / reviews. Can live as a section on the home page, or as its own page once you have enough to fill one.

FAQ. Useful when you get the same questions over and over — it saves you email time and answers objections before they stop a sale. Works well as a section on a service or pricing page too.

Blog / resources. Only worth it if someone will actually keep it updated. Done consistently, it's how you rank for the questions customers ask before they're ready to buy. Done once and abandoned, it just looks stale.

Booking page. If you take appointments, an embedded scheduler removes the back-and-forth entirely.

Pages you almost certainly need (but won't think about)

• Privacy Policy — required if you collect any personal data, including through a contact form or analytics.
• Terms — sensible if you sell services or products online.
• A proper 404 page — so a mistyped link points people back to something useful instead of a dead end.
• Thank-you / confirmation page — what someone sees after submitting a form. Handy for confirming next steps and for tracking enquiries.

Pages you can usually skip

• A separate page for every single service when you only have three.
• "Our Process" as its own page — it's usually a section, not a destination.
• A team page with ten headshots when you're a team of two.
• Anything you're adding because a competitor has it, not because it earns its place.

Start lean. Every page is something to write, design, and keep current, and an empty or thin page is worse than no page.

How page count affects cost

More pages means more design, more copy, and more testing, so it's usually the main lever on price — whether you're paying once or on a plan. That's why plans tend to be structured around page count: a one-page presence, a standard four-page site, or a larger site with room for individual service pages. Our pricing page shows how the tiers map to that, and the services page covers what's included on each page we build.

Not sure which pages your business actually needs? The quote form walks through your services and goals and comes back with a recommended sitemap and a price — no obligation.