Chase Boulay · August 15, 2026

The Only Pages Your Small Business Website Actually Needs

I walked into a barbershop in Pawtucket a few months back. Nice place, good location, clearly doing real business. I pulled up their website on my phone before going in — figured I'd see what I was working with.

Twelve pages. Home, About, Services, Team, Gallery, Testimonials, FAQ, Blog, Press, Careers, Privacy Policy, and something called "Our Philosophy." I clicked through most of them. The Blog had one post from 2021. The Careers page said "No current openings." The Team page had three paragraphs about people who probably don't even work there anymore. The FAQ page had four questions, one of which was "Do you accept walk-ins?" — answered with "Yes."

This is what happens when a web designer gets paid per page.

Most small business websites — the ones I see walking through Providence, Cranston, Warwick, up into the North End and down through Federal Hill — they don't have a content problem. They have a clutter problem. Pages that exist to make the site look substantial, not to help a customer decide to call.

Here's what you actually need.

The Home Page Does One Job

Your home page has one job: tell someone who you are, what you do, and where you are — fast. A person who lands on your site is probably on their phone, probably in a car, probably comparing you to two other options they have open in other tabs.

Above the fold — meaning before anyone scrolls — you need:

• What you do (not your tagline, your actual service — "auto body repair," "hair color and cuts," "tax prep for small businesses")
• Where you are (city, neighborhood, or street — something a local recognizes)
• A phone number they can tap

That's it. Everything else on the home page is secondary. A photo of your space or your work. A short paragraph explaining what makes you worth calling. Maybe a few reviews if you have good ones. A button that goes to your contact page or dials your number.

The phone number is the most important thing on your website. I've written about this before — click-to-call is the most important feature your website can have. If someone has to hunt for your phone number, you've already lost them.

What to do: Open your website on your phone right now. Without scrolling, can you see your phone number? Can you tell what city you're in? If the answer to either is no, that's the first thing to fix.

The About Page Should Sound Like a Person

Most About pages I see are written in the third person, full of language like "XYZ Company has been proudly serving the community since..." and they tell me nothing about the actual human being running the place.

Here's something most people don't realize: for a local small business, the About page is a trust page. People aren't just buying a service — they're deciding whether they want to hand money to a stranger. A real photo of you (not a stock photo, not a logo, you) and a couple paragraphs that sound like a real person wrote them does more for conversions than any bullet-pointed list of credentials.

Tell them your name. Tell them how long you've been doing this. Tell them why you do it, if there's a real reason. If you've been cutting hair in Cranston for 20 years, say that. If you opened your shop after 10 years working at someone else's, say that. People connect with stories. They don't connect with mission statements.

I go deeper on this in a separate post: what your About page should actually say.

What to do: Write three sentences as if you were telling a customer in your shop how you got started. Use that. It will be better than whatever corporate-sounding paragraph is on your About page right now.

The Services Page Exists to Pre-Qualify Customers

Your Services page isn't a brochure. It's a filter. Someone reads it and either thinks "yes, this is what I need" or "this isn't for me." Both outcomes are fine. The worst outcome is a page so vague they can't tell.

I see a lot of services pages that say things like "We offer a full range of automotive services." Okay. Do you do transmissions? Do you do collision? Do you do tires? Does "full range" mean you'll work on my 2019 Subaru or do you specialize in American-made trucks?

Give enough detail that someone with a real problem can see themselves in it. You don't need a price on every service (though for some businesses that helps), but you need enough specificity that the right person feels like they found the right place.

If you have a visual business — a tattoo shop, a hair salon, a landscaping company — this page might also be where you show a few examples of your work. Not 80 photos. Five or ten good ones that show your range and your standard.

What to do: List every service you offer by its actual name. Under each one, write one or two sentences about who it's for and what the result is. That's your services page.

The Contact Page Removes All Friction

This page should have everything someone needs to reach you without having to Google anything separately:

• Phone number (tappable on mobile)
• Physical address (linked to Google Maps)
• Hours — real hours, accurate ones
• A map embed so they can see where you are
• A simple contact form if you want one

The hours thing is underrated. I can't count how many times I've seen a contact page with hours that are clearly wrong — the business opens at 9 but the site says 10, or it says "Mon-Fri" and they're actually closed Wednesday. Someone drives out and finds a locked door. That's not a minor inconvenience, that's a lost customer and a bad Google review.

If your hours change seasonally or for holidays, update the site. Or at minimum, make sure your Google Business Profile has the right hours so people checking Google Maps aren't misled.

What to do: Open your contact page and confirm every piece of information is current. Then open Google Maps and confirm your hours match there too.

Gallery or Portfolio — Only If You Show Before-and-After Work

Not every business needs this. A tax preparer doesn't need a gallery. A plumber probably doesn't either.

But if the quality of your work is what sells it — if you're a tattoo artist, a contractor, a landscaper, a hair colorist, a body shop — then a gallery of your actual work is one of the most persuasive things you can put on your website. People want to see what they're going to get.

The key word is actual. Real photos from real jobs. Not stock images, not photos lifted from Pinterest, not "inspiration" shots. Your work. Taken on a decent phone camera in good light.

Keep it manageable. Fifteen strong photos beats seventy mediocre ones. Update it when you have new work you're proud of.

What to do: If you have a gallery, go through it right now and pull out any photo that's blurry, dark, or doesn't represent your best work. The ones left over are your gallery.

Pages Most Businesses Do Not Need

This is the part that might be hard to hear if a web designer already talked you into these.

A blog. Unless you're going to write at least one real post per month for the foreseeable future, don't bother. A blog with three posts from two years ago doesn't help you. It just looks abandoned. There are specific situations where blogging makes sense for local SEO, but for most small businesses I talk to, it's not worth the ongoing effort.

A testimonials page. Your best reviews should be on your home page or services page, woven in where they support the sale. A separate testimonials page is where reviews go to be ignored. Put them where people are already reading.

A team page. If it's just you, or you and a couple of employees, this doesn't need its own page. Put the real people in your About page. A team page with one entry looks odd. A team page with fake stock photos is worse — and I've seen it.

An FAQ page. If your most common questions are actually about price, hours, and location — those should be answered in context, not buried in a FAQ. If customers are asking the same question over and over, the real fix is to answer it on your services page or home page, not to add another page.

A press page. Unless you've been in the Providence Journal or featured somewhere your customers would actually recognize, this page just looks like you're trying too hard.

The pattern here is simple: every page that exists should be earning its place by helping someone decide to contact you or trust you enough to walk in. If a page doesn't do that, it's just clutter that makes your real pages harder to find.

Five Pages Is Usually the Ceiling

Home, About, Services, Contact, Gallery. For most small businesses — barbershops, nail salons, auto shops, restaurants, landscapers, gyms — that's a complete website. You can say everything that needs to be said in those five pages, sometimes four.

I've built websites for businesses in Providence, Warwick, Pawtucket, and around the state, and the ones that work the hardest are almost always the simplest ones. Not because simple is trendy. Because simple means the right information is easy to find, and easy to find means people call.

The whole goal of your website is to turn a stranger's search into a phone call or a visit. A good small business website does that without making anyone think too hard. Twelve pages makes people think. Five pages (done well) gets them to the phone number.

The Bottom Line

You don't need a big website. You need a clear one. Five pages with real information, real photos, and a working phone number beats twelve pages of thin content every time. If your current site has pages that are either empty or have one sentence on them, you're better off deleting them than leaving them up.

Take an hour this week, go through your site page by page, and ask yourself honestly: does this page help someone decide to call me? If the answer is no, get rid of it.