10 pages every small business website needs

A small business website needs surprisingly few pages to do its job well — the hard part is knowing which ones actually matter and which ones are just filler a template shipped with. Ten pages cover almost every small business, in almost every industry, in this order.

Skip one of the load-bearing pages below and visitors quietly leave to check a competitor instead. Add pages beyond this list before you have the content to fill them properly, and you dilute the ones that matter. Here's the full set, and what each one is actually for.

1. Home — the pitch you have one screen to make

The homepage has to answer three questions before a visitor scrolls: what do you do, who is it for, and what should I do next. A single clear call-to-action beats three competing ones. Save the full story for the About page — the homepage's job is to earn the next click, not explain the company.

2. About — the page that turns a stranger into a lead

Visitors who reach the About page are already interested; they're checking whether to trust you before they commit. Nielsen Norman Group's research on About pages found that users judge sites that answer basic questions quickly as transparent, and sites that bury the same information as evasive [1]. A real name, a real photo, and a plain answer to "why should I choose you" outperform a stock mission statement every time.

3. Services or products — one page per thing you sell, not one page for everything

A single "Services" page that lists six offerings in one paragraph each reads like a menu nobody can order from. Give each real service or product line its own page with what it costs, who it's for, and what happens after someone books or buys. Internally link between related services so a visitor exploring one naturally finds the next — see our own website development and business systems pages for the pattern.

4. Individual case-study pages — proof, not just claims

A single portfolio grid with logos proves nothing on its own. One dedicated page per case study — the brief, the build, and a real result — does the convincing that a homepage testimonial slider can't. See how we lay these out on our own work page: real projects, real client names, real before-and-after detail.

5. Pricing or FAQ — the page that stops people emailing to ask what everyone else already asks

Even a rough price range or a published starting rate filters out mismatched inquiries before they reach your inbox. If you genuinely can't quote a number, a straight FAQ answering "how much does this cost," "how long does it take," and "what do I need to provide" does almost the same job. We publish ours on our pricing page for exactly this reason.

6. Contact — fewer fields, more ways in

A contact form with twelve required fields loses people who would have booked a call. Ask for the minimum you need to reply usefully, and give at least one alternative — a phone number, a booking link, a WhatsApp or Messenger button — for the visitor who'd rather not fill out a form at all.

7. Testimonials or reviews — third-party proof, given real estate of its own

A carousel of three quotes buried in the homepage footer gets scrolled past. A dedicated reviews page, or at minimum full-length testimonials attached to the case studies that earned them, gets read — trust signals are one of the levers behind checkout abandonment averaging 70.22% across the 50 studies Baymard has compiled [2], and the same hesitation shows up before a service inquiry gets sent, not just before a cart gets paid for.

8. A blog or insights section — the page that keeps working after launch

Every other page on this list is static; a blog is the one part of the site that keeps generating new pages to rank for new searches long after launch. Before you write anything, check Search Console's performance report — it shows the exact queries already bringing people to your site, several of which you're probably not the top result for yet [3]. A handful of genuinely useful articles, each answering one real question a customer asks before hiring you, outperforms an abandoned blog with one post from three years ago.

9. Legal pages — the two that protect you, not just the visitor

A privacy policy and terms of use aren't just a compliance checkbox; they're what a lawyer or a payment processor looks for first if a dispute ever comes up. The FTC's own small-business guidance covers exactly this ground — how you're expected to handle customers' personal information once you're collecting it through a form [4]. If your site touches logins, payments, or health or finance topics, treat this page as load-bearing, not boilerplate. We cover the wider picture in our security basics guide.

10. A 404 and search — the pages you hope nobody needs, built anyway

Every site eventually serves a broken or renamed link — from an old ad, a typed URL, or a page you retired. A 404 page that redirects people back into the site, rather than just "Not Found" and a dead end, keeps a mistake from costing you the visit entirely. If you're changing URLs during a redesign, Google's own migration guidance is specific about using permanent redirects rather than letting old links 404 [5].

Ten pages, each earning its place, beats twenty pages built because a template included them. If you already have a site and aren't sure which of these it's missing, run through our fuller launch checklist next — it covers the surrounding decisions this list doesn't, like mobile speed and analytics. Organizing these ten well matters as much as having them: Google's own SEO guidance recommends grouping topically similar pages so both visitors and search engines can find their way around [6].