What your website actually needs to do
A small business website has one job: convert visitors into contacts, customers, or leads. Everything else is secondary. A beautiful design that doesn’t communicate what you do and how to contact you has failed its primary purpose. A simple, clear site that answers the visitor’s questions and makes it easy to take the next step has succeeded.
Start with that clarity and the platform and design decisions become much simpler.
Platform choices
Squarespace or Wix: Good for small businesses that want to build and maintain their own site without technical knowledge. Templates are attractive, hosting is included, and the learning curve is low. Cost: $16–23/month. Appropriate for most service businesses, restaurants, local retailers, and solo professionals.
WordPress: More flexible and more powerful, with a steeper learning curve and more maintenance overhead. Worth it if you need specific functionality (complex e-commerce, membership areas, heavily customized features) that simpler platforms can’t provide. Requires separate hosting ($5–20/month) and domain.
Shopify: Purpose-built for e-commerce. If selling products online is central to your business, Shopify is the cleaner choice over WordPress with WooCommerce. Cost: $29–79/month.
For most small businesses: Squarespace or Wix is the right starting point.
The pages you actually need
Homepage: What you do, who you do it for, and what the next step is. No more than 3 sections. The most common mistake: a homepage that talks about the business’s values and history without telling the visitor what you sell or how to buy it.
Services or Products page: What specifically do you offer, and what does it cost or how does pricing work? Pricing ambiguity is a conversion killer.
About page: Who is behind this business? People buy from people. A photo and a brief, human description of who you are outperforms corporate-speak every time.
Contact page: How to reach you. Phone number, email, physical address if relevant, and a contact form. Make this easy to find — in the navigation, not buried in the footer.
What you can skip for now: Blog (unless you have a content strategy), testimonials page (put them on the homepage instead), elaborate about pages, animated intros.