Website design for small business: the 5 things that actually matter.

I'm going to save you a lot of money and a lot of stress. After looking at hundreds of small business websites this year — repair shops, coaches, dentists, locksmiths, salons — I can tell you the five things that actually matter for a small business website.

Spoiler: animations aren't on the list. Neither are video backgrounds, fancy hover effects, or any of the things designers love to charge you for.

1. Mobile first, mobile always.

Over 70% of your traffic is on a phone. Maybe 80% if you're a local service business. If your site doesn't work beautifully on a phone, nothing else matters. Period.

Open your site on your phone right now. Are the buttons big enough to tap with a thumb? Does anything overlap? Does the contact form work? Can you tap your phone number to call? If any of those is "no," fix it before you fix anything else.

2. Trust signals above the fold.

The "fold" is what someone sees before they scroll. Within the first thumb-swipe of your homepage, they need to see:

• What you do (in plain English, not slogans)
• Where you are
• How long you've been doing it (or your review count)
• One clear way to contact you

That's it. If they have to scroll to figure out what business this is, you've already lost them.

3. Reviews. Reviews. Reviews.

Real, recent, named reviews. Not "Customer A loved it" — actual quotes from actual people, with their actual first names and last initials. Three to five reviews on the homepage works perfectly.

If your business has 50+ reviews on Google or Yelp, your website is doing you a disservice if it doesn't pull those onto your homepage. People trust strangers more than they trust your sales copy. Always.

4. One clear next action.

Every page should have one obvious thing for the visitor to do. Call you. Book a consult. Buy. Get a quote. Walk into the shop.

The biggest mistake small businesses make is offering five different "next actions" — call, email, fill the form, book on Calendly, message on Instagram, text us, follow us on Facebook. Pick one. Make it the obvious one. Make the rest optional.

I tell my clients: if your grandmother visited your website, what's the one thing she should do? That's your CTA.

5. Speed.

If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on a phone with average internet, half your visitors are gone before they see anything. Half. Gone.

Speed isn't optional. It's table stakes. Most small business sites are running on 2015-era WordPress themes that load 2 megabytes of jQuery before the first sentence appears. If you're on one of those, you're hemorrhaging customers and don't even know it.

What you don't need

You don't need:

• Custom illustrations
• Animated mascots
• Parallax scrolling
• Cinematic intro videos
• "Innovative" navigation
• Three different fonts
• A blog with 300 posts
• A newsletter signup popup that triggers in 3 seconds

I'm not saying these are bad — I'm saying they're not the difference between a website that prints money and one that doesn't. The five things above are.

The hard truth

Here's the part most designers won't tell you: most small business websites are over-designed and under-functional. They look pretty. They don't work hard.

The best small business website I saw this year was for a Brooklyn cobbler. Three pages. Big phone number at the top. Six photos of his shop. Twelve reviews. Hours, address, what he repairs, prices. Done. He was booking out a week in advance.

That's the bar. Hit those five things and ignore the rest.