You have about five seconds before someone gives up on your page. That's the whole game. Here's what earns those five seconds.

1. It loads fast

On a phone, on a job site, on two bars of signal. Big images are the usual culprit: a 6 MB photo straight off a modern camera takes ten seconds to appear, and people leave before it does.

Resize photos before uploading. Most phone photos can be shrunk to about 1600 pixels wide and still look sharp. If your builder lets you choose, use JPG or WebP, not a raw format.

2. It reads on a phone without zooming

Most of your visitors are on a phone, held one-handed, possibly in the cold. Text at 16px or bigger, dark on white, generous line spacing, and no wide tables or tiny captions. Test the whole page on your own phone before you call it done — not on the laptop.

If your page makes someone pinch to zoom, they don't read it. They leave.

3. The phone number is impossible to miss

Large, near the top, and tappable so it dials. Not "contact us." Not a form. Not an image of a number, which phones can't dial and screen readers can't read.

Put it in the header as well as the body. Somebody who has decided to call shouldn't have to scroll to find you.

4. It says what you do in the first line

Not "Welcome to our website." Not the business name alone. A sentence: "Driveway plowing and salting in Grand Island, Tonawanda and Kenmore."

That sentence is also what shows up in search results, so it's worth writing carefully.

5. It names the towns

Local searches are town-shaped. People type "plowing Grand Island," not "plowing." Naming the places you serve is both the most useful thing for a customer and the cheapest local search improvement available to you.

6. It looks like a business that exists

Real photos of your truck, your work, your hands. A real address or at least a real town. A phone number that rings. Consistent details — if the page says Kenmore and your Google listing says Buffalo, that's a small crack in trust.

Nothing here needs a designer. It needs to look true.

7. It's finished

No "Coming soon." No placeholder text. No copyright line from 2019. No broken image icons. An out-of-date page is a message about how you run your business, whether you meant to send it or not.

If you can't maintain more than one page, don't have more than one page.

What doesn't matter nearly as much as people think

• Animated introductions. They delay the thing the visitor wanted to see.
• A logo. A clean business name in bold type is fine. Most local businesses don't need a mark.
• Brand colors. Pick one that isn't hard to read and move on.
• A blog. Three posts in 2022, then nothing, is worse than no blog.
• Social media icons. If the accounts are dead, they subtract.
• "Modern" design. The trendiest layout of 2026 will look dated in 2029. A plain page will still look plain, which is fine.

The five-second test

Show your page to someone who doesn't know your business, on a phone, for five seconds. Take it away. Ask three questions: what does this person do, where do they work, how would you contact them?

If they get all three, you have a good small business website. It doesn't need to be anything else.

If they miss one, that's your next edit — and it's probably the thing covered in what a website should include. Also worth reading: how to get customers to actually visit it.