What a local business actually needs from a website

A contractor called me in December wanting a redesign. His site was four years old and he had been told it looked dated. I asked him what a new one would do that the old one did not. Long pause.

Here is the whole list of what a local service business needs from a website.

It has to load. Not "load fast." Load at all, on a phone, on the shoulder of a road, on two bars. Most small business sites are three megabytes of slider and tracking script.

It has to say what you do and where. In text. In the first sentence. Not in a logo, not in an image, not in a video that autoplays.

The phone number has to be tappable. A phone number typed into a graphic is a phone number nobody calls.

Somebody has to answer that phone. This is not a website problem and it is the single biggest source of lost jobs in the trades. You can have the best site in the county and lose every lead to voicemail.

It has to exist as pages, not as one page. One page for one service is how you show up when somebody searches for that service. A single scrolling page with everything on it ranks for nothing.

You have to own it. Domain in your name, host in your account, files you can take somewhere else on a Tuesday afternoon.

That is it. That is the list.

What gets sold instead is a redesign, on a monthly plan, on a platform you rent, where the files are not yours and the traffic never moves because none of the six things above changed. The site looks newer. The phone rings the same amount.

I told the contractor his site was fine. I told him to fix the phone. He hired me to do that instead, and it cost him less than the redesign, and his revenue moved.