The nine things a local service website needs, and what most are missing
A local service website has one job: turn somebody who found you into somebody who contacts you. Nine things do almost all of that work, and when we measured 300 Chicago small-business sites the two most important were the two most commonly missing. Fifty-five per cent had no tappable phone number and 57% had no form of any kind.
Most advice about website features is a list of things to buy. This is a list of things that decide whether the phone rings, in the order they matter, with numbers from the 300 local sites we measured attached to the ones businesses most often get wrong.
1. A phone number you can tap
55% of the sites we measured had no tappable phone link on the homepage.
Not no phone number, no tappable one. The digits were often there as plain text, which means a visitor on a phone has to memorise them, leave your site, open the keypad, and type. Some will. Many will not, and you will never know which.
This is one line of HTML, it is the single highest-return change available to a local service business, and more than half of your competitors have not made it. If you do nothing else on this list, do this.
2. A way to get in touch that is not the phone
57% had no form at all.
Plenty of people will not ring a business they have not dealt with before, particularly outside working hours, and particularly for anything they find mildly embarrassing. A short form is how you capture them. It does not need to be clever: name, contact, and what they need.
The thing that matters more than the form is that submissions actually arrive. Test it yourself every few months. A silently broken form is indistinguishable from a quiet month, and businesses have run for a year in that state.
3. What you do, in the first sentence
A visitor decides in a couple of seconds whether they are in the right place. That decision is made on your first heading, and a surprising number of local sites open with a slogan rather than a service.
“Serving families since 1998” tells somebody nothing about whether you fix boilers. Put the service and the area in the first line, then be as characterful as you like underneath.
4. Your actual service area
Somebody’s first real question is usually whether you come to them. Name the towns or neighbourhoods you serve, and be honest about it. A page claiming the whole metro from a one-van operation produces calls you have to turn down, which costs you twice.
This is also what makes a location page legitimate rather than a doorway. We only build them for places genuinely served, which is the same rule applied to our own site.
5. Prices, or at least a range
The most common objection to publishing prices is that the work varies. It does, and a range still helps. “Most kitchens run £X to £Y depending on the units” removes the fear that stops somebody calling, and it filters out the people who were never going to buy.
The businesses that publish nothing are usually competing with somebody who publishes a range, and the visitor with two tabs open calls the one who told them something.
6. Proof that a stranger can check
Testimonials on your own site are the weakest kind of proof, because you chose them. They still help. What helps more is anything checkable: a link to your Google reviews, photographs of actual work rather than stock imagery, a named project.
The rule we apply to ourselves is that proof should be clickable. If somebody can go and verify it, it counts. If they have to take your word for it, it is decoration.
7. Hours, and whether they are true
Hours appear on the site, on the Google listing, and often on a directory somebody set up years ago. When those disagree, the visitor believes whichever one loses you the job.
Holiday hours are where this bites hardest, because that is precisely when somebody is checking whether you are open.
8. Pages that work with a keyboard and at readable contrast
Half the sites we measured fail colour contrast, and 9% actively block pinch-zoom.
That second one is a deliberate setting somebody switched on, and it stops a visitor enlarging your text. It is a WCAG failure and it reads as a designer protecting a layout from the people trying to use it. The accessibility piece covers the legal side; the commercial side is simply that a large, solvent share of your market has imperfect eyesight.
9. Being findable in the first place
A site nobody arrives at has no features worth discussing. The parts that matter here are a correct Google Business Profile, consistent details everywhere they appear, and pages that actually answer what people type.
We put this last deliberately. Traffic to a site that cannot convert is money spent filling a leaking bucket, and the eight things above are the bucket.
What is not on this list
A chat widget. Fine if somebody answers it. A widget that promises an instant reply and delivers nothing is worse than no widget.
A blog, for most local service businesses. Unless somebody will genuinely write it, an abandoned blog with three posts from 2023 is a signal about how current the rest of the business is.
An app. Almost nobody needs one. Your customers will not install software to book a plumber.
A video background. It costs load time and says nothing. If you have a video worth watching, let people choose to watch it.
What these nine actually cost
Worth stating, because the list reads like a project and mostly is not.
Six of the nine cost nothing but somebody’s attention: the tappable number, the opening sentence, the service area, the hours, publishing a price range, and linking to reviews you already have. On a site you can edit, that is an afternoon. On a site you cannot edit, the fact that it is an afternoon’s work and you still cannot do it is the more important finding.
Two of them cost a little. A working enquiry form needs somewhere for the messages to go and needs testing occasionally. Fixing contrast is usually a handful of colour values, though on a site built from a rigid theme it can mean fighting the theme.
Only the last one, being findable, is genuinely ongoing work rather than a fix. It is also the one most businesses start with, which is the wrong order: sending more visitors to a page that cannot convert them is the most expensive mistake on this page.
If you are choosing where to spend, spend on the eight that are nearly free first, then judge whether the ninth is worth buying.
The two-minute version
Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data rather than your wifi, and try to do what a customer would do. Can you tap the number. Can you find out whether you cover their street. Can you tell what it costs. Can you send a message without ringing.
Most local businesses fail at least two of those, and none of the four is expensive to fix. The web design service page sets out how we handle them in a build, and what a website costs covers what that is worth paying for.