A five-page website is all a local business needs

Your website has one job. Turn a stranger who's already looking for what you do into a phone call. That's it. Not "build your brand," not "tell your story," not "establish thought leadership." Make the phone ring.

Most local business websites fail at that one job because they were built to impress the owner instead of the customer. You can build a better one this weekend for about the cost of a decent dinner out.

Start with the domain. A .com runs somewhere around twelve to twenty dollars a year at Namecheap or Cloudflare. Buy your business name if it's free. If it isn't, buy the name plus the city: kellerplumbingtulsa.com works fine and nobody has ever refused to hire a man over a hyphen.

The five pages, and nothing else

Home. Above the fold, before anybody scrolls, three things: what you do, where you do it, and a phone number big enough to tap with a thumb. "Licensed electrician serving Waco and McLennan County. Call 254-555-0134." That's your headline. Not "Powering Possibilities Since 2016."

Services. One line each, plain language, the words customers actually type. Panel upgrades. Ceiling fan installation. Generator hookups. If you don't do it, don't list it. Every service you list that you hate doing will generate exactly the calls you hate.

About. Your face. Your real face, one photo, not a stock image of a man in a hard hat giving a thumbs-up. Two paragraphs: how long you've been doing this, where you learned it, that you live here too. People hiring someone to come inside their house want to know who's coming.

Reviews. Pull five or six real ones off Google and paste them with first names and the town.

Contact. Phone, email, service area, hours. A form is optional. A phone number isn't.

That's the site. If you're tempted to add a sixth page, the question is whether it helps somebody decide to call in the next ninety seconds. Usually the answer is no.

Build it on something boring

Squarespace runs about sixteen to twenty-three dollars a month depending on the plan and gets you hosting, a template and an SSL certificate without a single decision about plugins. WordPress is more flexible and more work, and if you don't want to be a part-time system administrator, skip it. There's no prize for using the hard one.

Pick the plainest template on the list. White background, dark text, big buttons. Every custom font and animated scroll effect you add is a half-second of load time, and phone users bail.

Two hours of layout, one hour of writing, an hour fighting with the photo sizes. Call it a Saturday.

The thing that actually brings the customers

Your website isn't your local marketing. Your Google Business Profile is your local marketing, and the website is where people land after they've already found you there.

Think about how it really happens. It's 9:40 on a Tuesday night, a guy's water heater just let go in the garage, and he's standing in an inch of water typing "water heater repair near me" into his phone. He gets a map with three pins and a list. He's not visiting seven websites. He's calling the top one with good reviews that looks like it's open.

So claim the profile. Verify it. Fill in every field, including the hours and the service area and the categories. Add real photos of real jobs, not renders. And then get reviews, which is the part everybody skips.

Ask for them in person, at the end of the job, while you're still standing in the driveway and they're happy. "If you've got thirty seconds, a Google review helps me more than anything else." Then text them the link before you pull out. Asking three days later by email is asking into the void.

Five good reviews puts you in the conversation. Twenty puts you ahead of the guy who's been in business twice as long and never asked.

Write like the customer searches

The words on your services page should match the words in people's heads. Homeowners don't search for "hydro-jetting remediation." They search for "drain keeps backing up." Use both, but lead with theirs.

Name your towns in the actual text. "We serve Cedar Park, Leander, Liberty Hill and north Austin" does more than a keyword plugin ever will.

What doesn't work is the spam version of this. Forty near-identical pages, one per zip code, with the town name swapped in. Google's been wise to that for years, and even when it ranks it converts badly, because a customer who lands on a page that reads like a mail merge can feel it. One honest service-area page beats forty fake ones.

Test it on your phone, not your laptop

Most of your visitors are on a phone. Load your own site on cell data, not office wifi, and time it. If you're waiting more than three seconds, the culprit is almost always photos. Export them at around 1600 pixels wide and under 300KB each. Your camera is shooting 5MB files and dumping all of them onto your home page.

Then check the phone number is a tap-to-call link. Then get somebody who isn't you to find your number without help. If your wife has to scroll twice, it's buried.

The part nobody tells you

A website by itself often brings in nothing. Plenty of guys pay an agency four to six thousand dollars, get a nice-looking site, and fifteen months later they've booked one job from it. The site wasn't the problem. Nothing was pointing at it.

Websites earn traffic from three places: your Google profile, other sites mentioning you, and people typing your name after they saw your truck or heard about you from a neighbor. Build the first, ask for the second by listing with the local chamber and the supplier directories and the youth league you sponsor, and earn the third by doing good work and putting your name on the door.

A site with no reviews, no Google profile and no mentions anywhere is a business card in a drawer.

Know whether it's working

Track one number: calls that mention the website. Just ask. "How'd you find me?" takes two seconds and beats any analytics dashboard you'll actually look at. Write the answers in a notebook for ninety days. You'll learn more about your marketing from thirty tally marks than from a heat map.

If nobody says "your website" after three months, the site isn't the weak link. Go fix the Google profile and go get ten more reviews.

Build the plain version this weekend. Get it up, ugly and honest, with your face and your number on it. You can make it prettier in year three, when you're turning down work and you've forgotten you were ever nervous about the About page.