What a small business actually needs from a website (and what it doesn't)

Here is the conversation I have with about half of my new clients: they show me the proposal they got from the last agency. It’s twelve pages. It has a timeline, a mood board, and a budget that includes a “custom admin portal,” a chatbot, a “brand story video” embed, and six months of “digital strategy consulting.” The website they actually need is five pages, a phone number, and a form that works on mobile.

The expensive mistake most businesses make isn’t hiring the wrong developer. It’s not knowing what to ask for. And the industry — let’s be honest — has little incentive to tell you.

What actually drives calls, leads, and revenue from a website

I’ve built enough sites and talked to enough clients afterward to know what moves the needle. It’s not subtle.

Speed. If your site takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile connection, a measurable percentage of potential customers leave before seeing a single word you wrote. Google’s data puts it at around 53% abandonment at the three-second mark. This is not a hypothetical. Your competition is often one tap away. A fast site is a competitive advantage that most small businesses give away by buying a heavy WordPress theme and installing fifteen plugins on top of it.

Clarity of call to action. What do you want someone to do when they land on your homepage? Call you? Fill out a form? Book an appointment? There should be one primary action, it should be visible without scrolling, and it should be obvious. I’ve seen sites where the phone number is buried in the footer of a contact page that you reach through a dropdown. This is a direct conversion killer.

Trust signals. For most local and service businesses, people need a reason to choose you over the business they already know. Photos of your actual space, actual staff, or actual work do this better than stock photography. A handful of real Google reviews embedded or quoted on the page. A physical address if you have one. An “about” section that sounds like a human wrote it. These are low-cost, high-return elements that many expensive sites skip in favor of animations.

Mobile. More than 60% of small business website traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t designed for a phone first, you’re already behind. This doesn’t mean “responsive design” in the checkbox sense — it means the phone number is a tappable link, the form fields aren’t microscopic, and the menu doesn’t break on a 375px screen.

The features you don’t need

I’ll be direct here because most people won’t be.

A custom CMS you’ll never update. Every client says they’ll keep the blog current. Roughly one in eight actually does it consistently after the first month. If you know you won’t write monthly blog posts, don’t budget for a content management system as if you will. A few static pages that load instantly will outperform a blog with three posts from 2022.

A chatbot. Unless you have someone staffing it, a chatbot is a frustrating dead end for your customers. Automated chatbots rarely answer real questions well, and the moment a customer types something the bot doesn’t understand, the trust you’ve spent the rest of the site building evaporates. A visible phone number and a fast-loading contact form do the same job better.

A twelve-item navigation. Your navigation menu is not an index of everything your business does. It’s a decision guide for people who aren’t sure where to go. Five items, maximum. Services, About, Contact, and maybe one or two more. Everything else belongs on those pages or doesn’t need to exist on the site at all.

Parallax carousels and entrance animations. These feel impressive in a demo. On a slow mobile connection, they feel broken. They also don’t communicate anything a static headline and subheading wouldn’t communicate more clearly. Design that makes information harder to access is not good design, regardless of how it looks in a Figma mockup.

The minimum viable website — and why it often outperforms the “premium” one

A minimum viable website for a local service business looks like this: a homepage with your core offer, a photo of the work, and a prominent contact method. A services page that explains what you do and who it’s for. An about page that builds trust. A contact page. That’s four pages. It can be built in a week, hosted for less than ten euros per month, and load in under a second.

I’ve watched this kind of site outperform a 30,000-euro custom build because the fundamentals were right. The fast load time meant Google ranked it. The clear CTA meant visitors became leads. The trust signals meant leads became customers.

The premium build had twelve pages of content nobody read, a CMS the client stopped using after two months, and a homepage hero animation that added two seconds to the load time.

More doesn’t mean better. Done means better. Fast means better. Clear means better.

Maintenance costs nobody talks about

Here’s the number the proposal almost never includes: the total cost of ownership over three years.

WordPress sites require ongoing maintenance. Plugin updates break things. Security vulnerabilities require paid plugins or professional monitoring to patch. Hosting that can handle real traffic isn’t cheap. If something breaks — and something will break — you’re either paying a developer to fix it or struggling through it yourself.

A static site built with modern tools has essentially no maintenance surface. There’s no database to corrupt, no plugins to update, no server to patch. You pay for hosting (often under five euros per month on services like Netlify or Cloudflare Pages) and nothing else. The site you launch in 2025 will look exactly the same in 2028 without a single update.

That’s not a small difference. Over three years, the maintenance overhead of a complex dynamic site can easily exceed the original build cost.

How to evaluate proposals — red flags and green flags

When you’re comparing proposals from different developers, here’s what to look for.

Red flags:

• The proposal focuses on features and technology before asking about your goals and customers
• There’s no mention of page speed, mobile optimization, or Core Web Vitals
• They’re proposing WordPress without explaining why it’s the right tool for your situation
• The maintenance plan is vague or buried in a separate “ongoing retainer” you’ll need to discuss separately
• They won’t show you work they’ve done for businesses similar to yours

Green flags:

• They ask about your customers before recommending a solution
• They can explain, in plain language, why a given technology choice serves your business
• They provide a clear breakdown of ongoing costs and who is responsible for maintenance
• They show you Lighthouse scores or real performance data from their existing work
• They push back on features that don’t serve a clear purpose

A developer who tells you something is unnecessary is a developer you can trust. Everyone else is just selling you what you asked for, which may not be what you need.

What to do next

If you’re evaluating whether your current site is working, start here: pull up your site on your phone on a cellular connection, and time how long it takes to load. Then ask yourself: is the first thing a visitor sees what you actually want them to see, and is it obvious what they should do next?

If either answer is no, that’s where to focus — before anything else.

A website that loads fast, communicates clearly, and makes it easy to get in touch will outperform a beautifully designed site that doesn’t almost every time. Get the basics right first. The rest is optional.