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What a Small Business Website Needs to Bring in Clients (and What It Costs)

What a small business website needs to bring in clients: five pages, real proof, speed on a phone, one way to book, and what it costs in 2026.

About forty Instagram messages a day and next to nothing through the site: that was the problem a kitesurfing instructor in La Ciotat brought me last June, along with the login for her small business website. I counted, and in three years the contact form had sent her eleven messages. The site had no prices on it, the form had nine fields, and the menu had a page called Our Philosophy that I don't think anyone had ever opened.

We rebuilt it in three weeks for 1 900 € HT (about $2,200). The new one is the five pages I'd give almost any small business website (home, services with prices, reviews, about, contact), with the services page split in two because she sells two kinds of lesson, so six pages in all. It loads in 1.8 seconds on my test phone over 4G, against 9 seconds before. Every page ends with the same booking calendar, and in its first month the calendar took 60 bookings.

That's roughly what I think a business website needs to bring in clients. Here is how each piece got done, and what the alternatives cost.

Five pages, in the order people read them

Most of her visitors arrive on the home page, from Google or from the link in her Instagram bio. The Nielsen Norman Group summarized a Microsoft Research study of 205,873 web pages in which the first 10 seconds decided whether people stayed or left, so her home page opens with one line: "Kitesurf lessons for beginners, La Ciotat beach, April to October, from €85." You don't have to scroll to find the booking button. It sits right under a photo of a student on the board.

The old site had one Services page with six icons. The new one has two service pages, one for the beginner course (three sessions, €255) and one for private lessons (€95 an hour), with board rental at the bottom of the second. The minimum age is on each page, with the price, the length of a session and what to bring, and the photos are hers, taken on her beach.

In the first two months the beginner course page got more visits from Google than the home page did.

The about page has her photo, the year she started teaching (2014) and her instructor qualification. Most of her students are teenagers whose parents do the booking, so it's no surprise the about page is the third most visited on the site. Contact was the cheapest page to fix. Her number had been plain gray text that you couldn't tap, so people had to copy it by hand. Now one tap calls her. We cut the form from nine fields to three and moved her email off Gmail onto her own domain, a ten-minute job.

Proof beats adjectives

The old home page said "passionate" twice and didn't have a single review on it. Now there's a proof page with 38 of her Google reviews. She also wrote one line for the top of that page herself: "412 students since 2019 and nobody has ended up in the hospital." I like that line a lot more than anything about safety being a priority.

People do read reviews.

Of the 1,026 US adults in BrightLocal's 2025 survey, just 4% said never, and only 7% said they don't expect a reply from the owner. So she replies to all her reviews now, within a week, the two bad ones included, two or three sentences each.

Her Google Business Profile had 3 photos and no opening hours, which is pretty typical. We added 25 photos, the hours, her services and the link to the site in an afternoon.

Google's help page claims people are 70% more likely to visit a business with a complete profile and 2.7 times more likely to think it's reputable. Google doesn't say when or how it measured that, so take the exact numbers with a grain of salt.

And we cut a lot of text. Back in 1997 the Nielsen Norman Group found 79% of test users scanned a new page instead of reading it word by word, and a version that was concise, scannable and objective scored 124% better on usability than the promotional one. Her Our Philosophy page ran to about 600 words. It's gone, and the space went to prices and opening hours.

Fast on a phone

Most people will look at your site on a phone, so that's where I test it.

Her old home page took 9 seconds on my test phone, a cheap Android on 4G. Google said in 2017 that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes over three seconds to load, and its web.dev guidance now treats a page as good when the largest element appears in 2.5 seconds or less for 75% of visits.

The page was 15 MB in total. An autoplaying video of the bay took 14 MB of it, and the rest was mostly four fonts from three servers and a 600 KB chat widget. The new home page weighs 800 KB with one photo, and it loads in under 2 seconds on the same phone. Most of the work of making a site fast is deciding what not to put on it. On the last four sites I've built the home page has been under 1 MB including the main image, and that accounts for most of the speed.

One way to book

Her old site had three ways to get in touch (a form, an email address and a phone number) and no way to actually book anything. So the new site has a booking calendar, and the button for it shows up at the top of every page, after the reviews and at the bottom. For a plumber I'd do the same thing with the phone number, and for a restaurant with the reservation link.

An online store needs your address to ship you a parcel, and even there Baymard Institute found 11.3 form fields in the average 2024 checkout when 8 would be enough for most sites. Booking a lesson needs three: a name, a phone number and a date. It took the calendar 13 days to beat the nine-field form's three-year total of eleven messages.

Our own contact page is clumsier than hers, I'll admit. You pick one of four 15-minute slots (Paris time) on one of the next ten working days, copy it with a button and paste it into the form yourself, because the form tool we use can't be filled in from the page.

What a small business website costs in 2026

There are four ways to pay for a site, and I don't think of them as four levels of quality so much as four ways of spreading the bill over time. There's more detail in my post on what a website costs.

You can build it yourself. Wix runs $17.77 to $159.77 a month on a yearly plan and Squarespace $19 to $99, so five years on a mid-range plan comes to roughly $1,800 to $2,400, plus your evenings.

Clutch surveyed 406 US small business owners in August 2025 and found 83% had a website, up from 64% in 2018, and 41% had built it on a no-code builder like these. Of the 17% with no site, 34% said it wasn't relevant to their industry and only 16% said cost.

A freelancer is the second option. Going by the quotes clients forward me, five to ten pages usually come in between €2,000 and €5,500, and the bigger difference shows up in year two, since a WordPress site with 20 plugins needs updating every month. That's the thing I'd look at first when deciding between WordPress, Wix or a custom website.

Third, an agency. The agency quotes people have shown me for five or six pages mostly fell between €5,000 and €15,000, and I'd guess a third of that is the project manager and the meetings. Clutch found 45% of the businesses it surveyed used an agency, so plenty of owners think it's worth it, and some of the time they're right. If you go that way, my notes on choosing a web development agency list the questions to ask.

The fourth is a small studio like mine, in the south of France. A site designed from scratch starts at 1 900 € HT for five to seven pages. The domain and the hosting are in your name from day one, and so is the code. There's no monthly maintenance fee because a static site has nothing to update.

Copywriting and photos aren't included, and the quote says so on line one. The portfolio has examples.

Two to four weeks, if the photos are ready

Three weeks, start to finish.

In week one I drew a mockup of the six pages and she said yes to it by email on the Thursday. I built it over the next two weeks. My neighbor lent me her iPhone for the testing, which took two days along with the domain and the analytics. Then half a day with her at the beach hut, showing her where to find her visitor numbers and how to email me a new price or photo. A static site has no editor of its own; if she ever wants to make those changes herself, a small one can be added in a few extra days, quoted separately.

Honestly the only reason it went that quickly is that she sent me twenty photos from the beach and all her prices in the first week. Of my last four sites, two had everything ready on day one and took three weeks. The other two got their text halfway through and took six.

She still gets Instagram messages, just not as many, and she still answers them from the beach between lessons. The difference is that most of them now end with a link to the calendar instead of twenty messages back and forth about dates.

If you've already got a site that isn't bringing anyone in, have a look at when a redesign is worth it before you pay for a new one. Or book a 15-minute call and I'll tell you what I'd change.

FAQ

What should a small business website include?

Five kinds of page are enough for most of the businesses I work with: home, one page per service with a price on it, reviews, about, and a contact page where the phone number can be tapped. Google's bar for a good page is 2.5 seconds to show the main content, and I'd want every page to end with the same button.

How much does a small business website cost?

On Wix it's $17.77 to $159.77 a month, but you're doing the work. The freelance quotes I see usually come in around €2,000 to €5,500 for five to ten pages, and agencies more like €5,000 to €15,000. Mine start at 1 900 € HT (around $2,200) for five to seven pages, without copywriting or photos.

How many pages does a small business website need?

Five kinds of page cover most trades, shops and schools, with one service page per thing you sell, so six or seven pages in practice. Once you're past ten, think about who's actually going to read them and who's going to keep them current, since a page with last year's prices does more damage than a missing page.

Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile and Instagram?

I think so, if you want people to find you by name, see your prices and book without a platform in between that can change its rules whenever it wants. The profile gets people to you, and the site is where they make up their mind. It's free, so set up the profile first.

How long does it take to build a small business website?

My last four sites took between three and six weeks, and the difference was always when the photos and text arrived. The agency quotes my clients have shown me said two to four months, mostly because of the queue.

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