The Spanli team
What a small business homepage actually needs
Most homepages fail in the first five seconds, and not for the reasons people worry about. Here is the short list of what has to be there.
Someone lands on your homepage. They give it about five seconds before deciding whether to stay. In those five seconds they are answering three questions, and if your page does not answer them, they leave and you never know they came.
The questions are: what is this, is it for me, and what do I do next.
Everything below is in service of those three.
The top of the page: who you are, in plain words
The first thing on the page should say what you do and who you do it for, in the language your customers use rather than the language your industry uses. "Family dentist in Leeds, taking new patients" beats "comprehensive oral healthcare solutions" in every way that matters.
This is the single most common thing to get wrong. People put a mood up there instead of a fact, and a visitor who has to scroll to find out what the business is has already half decided to go back.
One clear thing to do
Directly under that, one action. Book, call, message, order, visit.
One, not five. A row of equally weighted buttons is a page that has not decided what it wants, and the visitor will not decide for you. If there is a second thing, make it visibly the second thing.
What you offer
Then the list. Your services, your treatments, your dishes, your work. Enough detail that someone can tell whether you do the specific thing they came looking for, which is usually more detail than you think.
Prices, if you can. A page that will not say what anything costs sends a good number of people straight to a competitor who will. If prices genuinely vary, say what they vary with and give a starting figure.
Something that proves you exist
Photographs of your actual work, your actual room, your actual food. Not stock pictures of strangers in an office nobody has ever worked in. The photograph does not need to be professional. It needs to be yours, because the thing it proves is that there is a real business here.
If you have nothing yet, that is survivable. You can upload your own pictures as you take them, or search a library of free photography from inside your project and use those in the meantime.
The practical facts
Where you are. When you are open. What area you cover. How to reach you. Whether there is parking. Whether you take card.
This is the least glamorous part of a homepage and often the part that actually converts, because it is what someone checks last before they commit. Do not bury it in a separate page nobody clicks.
A way to get in touch that is not just your email address
Your site comes with the form it needs, and everything sent through it is collected the moment it is sent. Spanli emails you when messages arrive, marks the unread ones in your dashboard, and you can download the lot as a spreadsheet.
The form matters more than it looks. A phone number alone loses everyone who is browsing at eleven at night, and a plain email address on the page is an invitation to every scraper on the internet.
What you can leave off
A long history of the business at the top. A rotating slider that nobody waits for. A mission statement. A welcome message. The word "welcome" at all. A page of jargon that could describe nine other companies in your trade.
None of these answer the three questions, and each one pushes the answers further down.
And then check it on a phone
Most people will see your site on a phone, usually one handed, often outdoors. A homepage that reads beautifully on a laptop and needs pinching to read on a phone is a homepage that fails for the majority of its visitors.
Every build in Spanli is looked at on a laptop screen and at the width of an ordinary phone, and checked against accessibility rules. Serious problems on your homepage have to be fixed before the build is allowed to finish, which is a deliberately awkward rule that exists because "we will sort the mobile version later" has never once happened.
The honest summary
A good small business homepage is mostly information, arranged in the order someone needs it, with one obvious thing to do. It is not a design exercise. The design's job is to keep out of the way of the five seconds.
If you want to see what that looks like for your business, describing it takes about two minutes and building and previewing are free. Build free.