What to put on a small business website

Most visitors arrive with one question and leave the moment they cannot find the answer. Build the site around those questions, and keep each answer on a page of its own.

If you trade as a limited company, GOV.UK says that on business letters, order forms and websites you must show the company’s registered number, its registered office address, where it is registered (England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland), and the fact that it is a limited company. ^[1] The footer is the usual place. The same GOV.UK page adds that if you choose to include directors’ names, you must list all of them. ^[1]

Whatever your business structure, show a trading name and contact details that match the ones on your invoices, your vans and your listings. Consistency matters to customers and, as the next sections show, to Google too.

Two sets of rules apply to almost every business website, because almost every one uses cookies or a contact form.

Selling goods or services online adds rules on what you tell customers before and after they order. GOV.UK lists what you must provide before an order is placed, including your business name, contact details and address, a description of what you sell, “the price, including all taxes”, how the customer can pay, and delivery arrangements and costs. ^[5]

It also says you must tell customers they can cancel their order up to 14 days after it is delivered, without giving a reason, and that if you do not tell them, they can cancel at any time in the next 12 months. ^[5] GOV.UK also lists exceptions, such as financial services and food and drink supplied regularly, so read the full guidance for what you sell. ^[5]

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, are the standard most web teams work to. The current version, WCAG 2.2, was published by the W3C on 5 October 2023. ^[6] You do not need to read the standard to get the basics right, and the basics cover most of what goes wrong on small business sites.

• Text that contrasts clearly with its background and can be enlarged without breaking the page.
• Images with a short description, so screen readers can say what they show.
• Forms with a visible label on every field and error messages that explain what to fix.
• Every link and button reachable and usable with a keyboard alone.
• Headings in a sensible order, so the page makes sense when read aloud.

A business website and a Google Business Profile work as a pair. Google’s guidelines say your business name should reflect your real-world name, “as used consistently on your shopfront, website, stationery and as known to customers”. ^[7] Use the same name, address and phone number on the site as on the profile.

Beyond that, the service pages above do most of the work: each one gives Google a clear page to show for a clear search. Our local SEO checklist for Leeds goes through the rest step by step.

Run through this list on the day before the site goes live, on a phone as well as a computer.

• Every page has its own title and description, written for a person.
• The phone number, email and forms all work, and form messages arrive where you expect.
• Company details are in the footer, and the privacy notice and cookie banner are live.
• Old page addresses from any previous site redirect to their new homes.
• Pages load quickly on a mobile connection, and images are not huge files.
• The site is not blocking search engines: a common mistake carried over from the test version.
• You have the logins for the domain, hosting and site, in the business’s name.

Everything on this list is part of how we build websites in Leeds: the pages planned around your customers’ questions, the company details and cookie consent set up properly, and the launch checks done before anything goes live. To budget for it, read how much a website costs.