What a local service website actually needs on it
Not a design question. A question of whether a stranger can decide about you in forty seconds.
Most advice about websites is written for companies that sell online. A local service business is a different machine: nobody buys on the page, they decide whether to make contact. Everything on the site either helps that decision or gets in its way.
The six things that have to be there
- What you do, in the customer's words, above the fold. "Mobile car valeting in Durham" beats "Welcome to our website" by a distance that is hard to overstate.
- The areas you cover, written out. Towns, villages, postcode districts. This is the single most common missing piece, and it quietly stops people who were otherwise ready to ring.
- Your services, each with a sentence or two. Enough that someone knows whether their job is the sort of job you take.
- Photographs of your own work. Ten real ones beat a hundred stock images. Before and after shots do more work than anything else on the page.
- Two ways to contact you, repeated down the page. A tappable number for the people who ring, and a form or message button for the people who will not.
- Something that makes you a person. A name, a face, how long you have been doing this. People hire a person, especially for work in their home.
The things that help if you have them
- Prices, or at least a starting point. "From £X" filters out the people who were never going to book and reassures the ones who were.
- Reviews, with the customer's first name and town. Only real ones. Invented reviews are obvious more often than people think, and they are the fastest way to lose someone who was nearly convinced.
- What happens next. One short line: you message, I reply the same day, I give you a price, we book a date. It removes the fear of starting a process you cannot see the end of.
- Insurance, qualifications, memberships. If you have them, say so plainly, with the number. If you do not, say nothing rather than implying.
What you can leave off
None of this is rude about your business. It is simply not what the visitor came for.
- A long "About us" history. Two sentences will do.
- A mission statement.
- A slideshow of stock photos.
- A newsletter signup, unless you genuinely send one.
- Social icons in the header, which mostly send people off your site and into a feed.
Every element on the page is either helping someone decide to contact you, or it is taking up space on a phone screen that only holds a postcard at a time.
A page order that works
- What you do and where, with a contact button.
- Services, briefly.
- Photographs of real work.
- Reviews, if you have them.
- Who you are, in two sentences and a photo.
- Areas covered, written out.
- Contact, again, in full.
That order works whether it is one page or ten. On a one page site you scroll through it. On a bigger site each of those becomes its own page, and the home page carries a shortened version of all seven.