The five pages every service business needs, and the six it doesn't
A pattern shows up in almost every audit of a small service business. The site has twenty-two pages. Nine of them have had no visitors in six months. And the three questions every customer asks before they ring you are answered nowhere.
Sites do not get bloated on purpose. They accumulate — a page per campaign, a page per idea, a page because a template had a slot for it. Here is a structure that covers the actual job.
The five
1. A homepage that says what you do and where
Within the first screen, without scrolling: what service, which area, and one obvious action. Not a slideshow. Not a mission statement. Somebody who arrived from a map listing should be able to confirm they are in the right place in about three seconds.
2. One page per service you actually want to sell
Not one page listing all eleven services. One page each for the three or four that make you money. These are the pages that get found, because they are the only ones that match what someone actually typed.
Each one wants: what it involves, what it costs or what it ranges between, how long it takes, and what happens after they get in touch.
3. A price or price-range page
The most-avoided page and the most-visited one. "Contact us for a quote" reads as "we will work out what you can afford", and a good proportion of visitors leave rather than start that conversation.
A range with the variables named — "most kitchens come in between £4,000 and £9,000 depending on units and worktop" — filters out the wrong enquiries and converts the right ones far better than silence. It also happens to be exactly the kind of passage that gets quoted back by an assistant.
4. Proof that the work is real
Photographs of your own jobs, with a sentence about each. Not stock photography, not renders. This is the page people scroll slowly, and it does more work than any testimonial carousel.
5. A contact page that is a phone number and a form with three fields
Name, contact, and what they need. Every additional field costs you enquiries, and you can ask everything else once they have replied.
The six you almost certainly do not need
- A blog nobody writes. Three posts from 2021 signals abandonment more clearly than having none at all. Delete it or commit to it.
- A separate "Our Process" page. Four steps on the relevant service page. It is not a destination.
- A team page for a team of two. Put the faces on the homepage where they build trust immediately.
- A "Why choose us" page. Nobody has ever searched this. Whatever is on it belongs on the service pages, as evidence rather than adjectives.
- An FAQ page holding the answers that should be on the service pages. Move each answer to the page it belongs to, then delete the container.
- Individual pages for services you would rather not take. If you hate doing it, stop advertising it.
The pages that are usually missing
One per area you serve, if you serve several — and only where you genuinely work differently or have jobs to show. Empty template pages naming forty towns are transparent and do nothing.
And a page for the awkward question in your trade. Do you work with insurers. Do you do emergency call-outs at weekends. Can you match existing tiles. Whatever customers ring up to ask before booking is a page, and it will quietly become one of your best performing.
Before you delete anything
Check what the page currently receives, and redirect rather than remove. A page with no visitors this month may still hold a link from a supplier directory that took eight years to appear. Deleting is fine. Deleting without a redirect is how sites lose ground they never get back.