Your small business website can’t do everything at once, and nor should it. It needs to be right for your brand and provide your audience with the information and services that they need. When you own a small business, you don’t have an endless budget for building your site, so you need to define what your site needs and how to serve your visitors. Your website is the main marketing tool you have online, so it should show your brand identity and sell your products or services. There are some key elements that every small business website should have, so check out the essentials below.

1. Clear Contact Details

When people visit your site, they need to be able to get in touch with you. You should provide clear contact details to make it simple for them to contact you. A contact page might include your phone number, email address, and mailing address. Additionally, you can include a map, especially if you have a brick-and-mortar business or office. Along with your contact details, it’s also a good idea to provide opening hours or contact hours when you’re available. You could also put contact details in the header or footer of your site so that it’s easily accessible.

2. Images That Represent Your Business

Making your website look visually pleasing is an important part of its design. The images that you use don’t just need to look nice, but also represent your brand and the products or services that you sell. You should choose your images carefully because you don’t want to clutter up your site with unnecessary images that could slow it down or be distracting. Focus on using images that are useful to your website visitors, such as product images. If you’re using purely decorative images, consider how they can help with branding.

3. An About Page

Telling people about your business can help to build trust and ensure they understand what you do. While your homepage might give key information about what you sell, your about page can provide more information on the business itself. You can use this page to outline your history, how the business came to be and why, what your values are, and what the company mission is. Use your about page to tell a story about your brand and form a connection with your customers. It’s a chance to build on your brand identity and differentiate your business from others.

4. Testimonials, Reviews, or Case Studies

Including words from your customers is a great thing to do on your small business website. It shows that you have satisfied customers who trust your brand. You can collect some testimonials from your customers to put front and center on your homepage. You could also have reviews on your product or service pages. Sourcing reviews from independent review sites can make them more credible. Case studies are also a good choice for your site. They allow you to go more in-depth about services that you have provided for previous and current clients, and what you can do for your customers.

5. Social Media Links

Connecting your website with social media platforms provides a couple of benefits. You can link to your social media profiles so that people can follow you and interact with you. You can also add social media buttons to your site for easy social sharing. Social widgets could also be a good addition to your site. A small business web design expert can help you to make sure you integrate social media links and sharing buttons into the design of your site. Seeing your social media profiles can make your brand more trustworthy to visitors and gives them another point of contact too.

6. A Newsletter/Mailing List Signup

Having a newsletter and mailing list is a great way to engage with customers and visitors to your site. Email marketing is highly effective and can be used in different ways to bring in new business. Including a newsletter signup for your site makes it easy for people to add their email to your list and get all of the latest updates and offers. You might have a pop-up window to encourage signups or perhaps a signup field in the footer of your site. You can also use landing pages to collect leads.

7. Responsive Design

If you want your small business to have a modern website, it needs to work on different devices. More people now use smartphones and tablets than ever before, so your site needs a responsive design that works on these mobile devices. Your site needs to adapt to different screen sizes and browsers. It should also work for people using touch screens or a mouse and keyboard. If you hire a website designer who is up to date on the latest best practices, you can be sure they will make your website responsive and suitable for all devices.

8. Pages for Your Products or Services

Adding in pages for your products or services gives visitors to your site essential information. Not everyone will choose to have individual pages, but they can be very helpful for SEO, as well as for informing people. Of course, if you run an online store, it’s essential to have individual pages for each of your products. Use these pages to go in-depth about what each product or service can do for your customers. You can be more detailed than you might be on other pages, providing a description of the product or service, who it’s for, and how it’s going to benefit your customers.

9. A Blog

SEO and content marketing are important ways to market your business, and a blog helps you with both of these things. Running a blog on your site ensures you can regularly publish new content, keeping your site up to date. Include a blog on your small business website so you can provide useful content for your audience.

10. Security Measures

It is crucial to implement robust security measures on websites to protect user data and prevent cyberattacks. Using strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, SSL certificates, captcha, sanitizing inputs, restricting access, regular updates, backups, firewalls, antivirus software, encryption, monitoring, penetration testing, and educating users on risks are essential to securing websites and databases against threats like data breaches and DDoS attacks. Consider investing in Cloud security posture management if you plan to expand into the cloud.

Include these elements in your small business website to get some of the basics into your design. But don’t forget that there are more things you can include on your site.