Small business website: what it actually needs

When a restaurant owner says "I need a website", they usually picture something beautiful. But the customer googling you at 8:40 pm is not looking for beautiful — they want to know whether you are open, where you are, and how to book. A small business website is essentially a digital shop window plus a phone. Everything else is decoration.

Five things that must be visible without scrolling

• What you do and where — "Milena Bakery, Vračar, Belgrade" in the first line. Not "Welcome to our website".
• A clickable phone number — <a href="tel:+381...">. On mobile that is one tap instead of copying digits.
• Opening hours — including weekends and holidays. This is the single most requested piece of information on local business sites.
• Address with a map — as text too, not only as an image. Google reads text, not pixels.
• One primary action — "Book a table", "Request an appointment", "Order now". One button, one colour, repeated at the bottom of the page.

What differs by industry

Restaurant: put the menu in HTML, not in a 4 MB PDF. The PDF menu is the classic mistake — slow to open on mobile, poorly indexed by Google, and every price change means calling your designer. Use photos of your actual food; the conversion difference against stock imagery is measurable.

Clinic: list services with indicative prices, publish practitioner bios with licence numbers, and keep the booking form to name, phone and preferred time. Every extra field costs roughly 5–10% of completed submissions.

Salon: a price list per service, a gallery of real work, and online booking. If you have no booking system, a WhatsApp button does the job — a simple solution that works beats a complex one nobody maintains.

The technical minimum

The page has to load in under 2.5 seconds on a mobile connection. Over 60% of visits to local businesses come from phones, often on 4G while walking. If your page takes six seconds, half the visitors leave before they ever see your number.

Three things drive this most: hosting on NVMe drives (database queries answer in milliseconds instead of tens of them), a CDN that serves images from the nearest location, and images converted to WebP. A food photo straight off a phone is 4 MB; the same image as WebP at 1200 px wide is 150 KB and looks identical on screen.

Add an SSL certificate — without it Chrome writes "Not secure" next to your salon''s name — and daily backups, because a site you maintain yourself will eventually break. All of that is included in our hosting plans, starting at €4.20 per month.

What you do not need

A hero slider cycling through five photos — it slows the site and nobody waits for the second slide. An autoplaying intro video. A chatbot on a site with 40 visits a day. A blog you started and abandoned after two posts — an empty blog looks worse than no blog.

The order I would work in

Google Business Profile first, because for local searches it generates more calls than the website itself. Then a simple four-page site: home, services or menu, about, contact. Then speed and mobile. Only after that think about blogging and ads. Skip the first three and everything else is water into a leaking bucket.

For a WordPress install with all of this configured up front, see WordPress hosting — there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can test it without risk.