The SiteRoot team6 min read
Somebody sits down to plan a website and writes a list of twelve pages. Home, About, Services, Our Process, Why Choose Us, Testimonials, FAQ, Blog, News, Gallery, Careers, Contact. Three weeks later four of them are written, eight are empty, and the whole thing has stalled because finishing it now looks like a month of evenings.
The answer is five. Home, Services, About, Contact, and something that proves you have actually done the work. That is a complete website for the overwhelming majority of Australian small businesses, and a site with five finished pages beats a site with twelve where eight say "content coming soon".
Everything past those five is optional, and most of what gets added is added because it was on somebody else's site rather than because a customer needed it.
The five that earn their place
Home. The page most people land on, and the one that has to answer three questions before anyone scrolls: what do you do, who do you do it for, and where. Then one obvious way to contact you. Not a slideshow. Not a welcome message. A visitor who cannot work out your trade and your area in four seconds is a visitor who has already gone back.
Services. What you actually sell, in the words a customer would use, not the words in your accounting software. If somebody rings and asks "do you do X", X needs to be on this page, spelled the way they said it.
About. The page people read before ringing a stranger and letting them into their house. Who you are, how long you have been doing it, your licence number if your trade has one, whether you are insured, who actually turns up. This is the page that converts a nervous customer, and it is the one most often left as three lines of filler.
Contact. Your phone number as a link that starts a call when tapped, an enquiry form that reaches an inbox you read, the suburbs or region you cover, your hours, and whether you answer after hours. If you have a shopfront, the address and a map.
Proof. Photos of finished jobs, a short write-up of a few projects, before and after shots, the brands you are accredited with. Whatever form it takes, it exists to answer the one question in every visitor's head, which is whether you are a real business that has done this before.
What each page has to answer
A useful way to check a page is to ask what question a visitor arrived with, and whether the page answers it in the part they can see without scrolling.
- Home: are these people right for me, and are they near me?
- Services: do they do the specific thing I need?
- About: can I trust these people in my house or with my money?
- Proof: have they done this before, for someone like me?
- Contact: how do I reach them, right now, and when will they get back to me?
If a page does not have a question, it does not need to exist. That single test deletes most of the twelve-page list.
One page per service, or one page with sections
This is the question that stalls people, and it has a simple rule.
Give a service its own page when both of these are true: somebody would search for that thing by itself, and you have at least a few hundred words of genuinely different things to say about it. A plumber who does blocked drains, hot water and gas fitting has three real pages there, because those are three different jobs with different urgency, different prices and different questions.
Otherwise put it as a section on one services page. A bookkeeper with eleven "services" that are really eleven tasks inside the same monthly engagement has one page, with a list on it.
The failure mode to avoid is eight pages that are the same page with one word swapped. A reader can tell instantly, and so can a search engine.
The pages that mostly do nothing
Said plainly, because every one of these costs you an evening.
- A splash or welcome page. An extra tap between a visitor and what they came for.
- "Why choose us" as its own page, when it is four generic claims that every competitor also makes. Put the real ones on the home page and delete the rest.
- An FAQ that repeats the services page. An FAQ is excellent when it answers the awkward things people genuinely ask: do you charge for a quote, do you work weekends, what is the call-out fee. It is filler when it asks "what services do you offer".
- A News page. Almost always abandoned. A news page whose most recent item is from 2022 tells a visitor your business might not exist any more, which is the exact opposite of what it was added to do.
- A blog you will not write. We run one, so we are not going to pretend it is worthless. But it only works if you actually publish, and for most local businesses the honest answer is that three excellent service pages will do more than thirty thin articles. If you do write, write the questions you answer on the phone every single week. Nothing else.
- Careers, until you are actually hiring. An empty careers page is a small lie.
The pages you may want for other reasons
Not marketing pages, but worth knowing about.
If your enquiry form collects names, phone numbers and email addresses, you are collecting personal information, and a short privacy page saying what you do with it is good practice and reassuring to read. If you take payments or deposits online, your terms belong somewhere findable. If you work in a licensed trade, your licence number usually has to appear on your advertising, and your website is advertising.
None of that is legal advice and we are not qualified to give it. It is a five-minute question for your accountant or your industry association, and worth asking once.
The order to build them in
Build in the order that makes the site useful earliest, which is not the order they appear in the menu.
- Contact details first, even before pages exist. Phone number, area, hours. A single page with those beats nothing at all.
- Home, because it is where people land.
- Services, because it is the reason they stayed.
- Proof, because it is what makes them ring rather than keep looking.
- About last of the five, because it matters most to the people who are already nearly convinced.
Anything else, add later, and only when you have a reason you could say out loud.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
When you build a site with us you answer a handful of questions about your business and the pages come back already written and structured, with the phone number as a tap-to-call link and an enquiry form that emails you rather than sitting in a dashboard you never open. The whole build takes about fifteen minutes and costs nothing.
You are not stuck with the page list it gives you. You can add a page, remove one, or change what is on it by asking in plain language, and you see it in a preview before anything goes live. The file that tells search engines which pages exist is refreshed every time you publish, so adding a page does not leave a stale list behind it.
Start with five. Add the sixth when a customer gives you a reason to.
