There is a version of this article that lists thirty must-have features, and it is the version most agencies write, because every item on the list is something they can bill for. This is the shorter, less profitable version.
The genuine essentials
1. It says what you do and where, immediately
The first screen should make the trade and the location unambiguous. Not 'Welcome to our website'. Not a slogan. The plain fact: what kind of work, for whom, in what area. A visitor who has to scroll or infer has already been given a reason to go back to the results page.
2. Contact is one tap away, everywhere
A tappable phone number in the header of every page. A text option next to it if you will staff one. Not hidden behind a Contact tab. This single change moves more business than any redesign, and it is free.
3. It loads fast on a phone on a bad connection
Most of your traffic is mobile, frequently on cellular. Speed is not an engineering nicety here; it is the difference between being considered and never being seen. It is also a ranking factor, so slowness costs you twice.
4. Real pages for the services that matter
Each significant service needs a page with genuine substance: what it involves, how you approach it, how long it takes, what it roughly costs, what the guarantee is. A bullet on a shared services page cannot rank and cannot persuade.
5. Specifics that a competitor could not copy
Real photos of your premises, your team and your work. Named staff. Actual warranty terms. Your real process. Anything generic is invisible; anything specific is evidence.
6. Hours, area served, and how payment works
Boring, constantly omitted, constantly searched for. Include holiday hours. Include whether you charge a callout or diagnostic fee. Answering an awkward question honestly builds more trust than any testimonial.
7. Something that proves other people trusted you
Reviews, before-and-afters, a client list, years in operation — whatever is true. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be real and verifiable.
Seven things. If a proposal spends more on anything outside this list than on these, ask why.
The decoration
Homepage sliders and carousels
A rotating banner is a way of avoiding a decision about what matters most. Visitors overwhelmingly act on the first slide and rarely wait for the rest, so slides two through five are weight and complexity with no audience. Pick the strongest message and commit to it.
A blog you will not write
Content marketing works, and it works because of consistency and genuine usefulness. A blog with four posts from 2021 is worse than no blog: it advertises abandonment on a page a prospect might land on. Either commit properly or leave it out.
Live chat nobody is watching
A chat widget promises an instant human. If it is actually a bot that collects an email, it converts worse than the phone number it is covering up — and it usually sits directly on top of that number on mobile.
Long autoplaying video headers
Heavy, frequently muted and skipped, and often the single largest contributor to a slow first load. A well-chosen still photograph does the same job at a fraction of the cost.
Elaborate scroll animations on every element
One or two deliberate moments of motion can make a site feel considered. Fading in every paragraph makes the site feel slow and makes text arrive later than it needs to. Motion should be an accent, not a system.
Customer portals and logins for a five-person shop
This gets sold on the promise of efficiency. In practice adoption is close to zero, because customers who interact with you twice a year will not create an account. It adds cost, maintenance burden and security exposure for a feature that will sit unused.
Twelve pages of thin location content
Pages for every surrounding town, each a copy of the last with a swapped place name. Search engines identified this pattern long ago and it can actively harm you. Cover the areas you genuinely serve, and only where you can say something real about serving them.
The genuinely arguable middle
Some things depend entirely on the business, and anyone who gives you a universal answer is guessing.
- Online booking — transformative for salons, barbershops and anything appointment-driven; often noise for a shop that has to see the vehicle before it can schedule anything.
- Published pricing — powerful when the work is standardised, misleading when it is not. A range with an explanation usually beats both silence and a fake precise number.
- A gallery — essential where the result is visual (body work, hair, remodels), filler where it is not.
- Multilingual pages — obvious in the right neighbourhood, wasted effort in the wrong one. Look at who is actually walking through the door.
What to do with the money you save
Strip the decoration and there is usually budget left. The highest-return uses of it are unfashionable: professional photography of your real premises and real work; copy written by someone who interviewed you properly rather than pulled from a template; and making the whole thing genuinely fast.
A small, fast, specific site beats a large, slow, generic one on every metric a business owner cares about. It also costs less to build and less to maintain — which is precisely why so few people are incentivised to recommend it.