Must-Haves for Small Business Website Design

In the small business world, it is best to keep your website design simple. Clean, well-balanced, judicious use of color. However, many small business sites we come across are missing a few of the fundamentals. Incorporate these elements into your website and you will have your bases covered.

Hero Section Branding

Branding throughout your website—in terms of color and style—are important.

But the Hero section is your first impression, and for many visitors, your only chance to keep them on-page.

Your Hero section should have:

• a clear description of what you do
• an interesting visual
• brand association

Consider this Hero section:

The company name is in bold and a short, clear description is below.

There’s a rustic background image that takes up the entire screen.

Finally, between the color and logo on the navigation bar and the font in the Hero section, you have a taste of the company’s brand and style.

Contact Information

You would think “how can my users reach me” is a question that is top-of-mind for business owners as they build their site.

Based on the number of small business websites I’ve had to crawl through to find a relevant phone number or email address, that assumption would be wrong.

Please, make sure your customers know how to reach you.

A great place to pin your contact information is on the navigation bar.

Not only are the phone number, email address, and location always visible on this website…clicking any of the icons will open FaceTime, send an email, or open Google Maps, respectively.

As soon as the user feels ready to reach out, the means to do so are within easy reach.

Contact Form

In addition to contact information, it is helpful to have a page with a dedicated contact form.

Here is the form on our website.

This allows customers to reach out and ask for a call, an estimate, or whatever else your small business offers.

View it live to see how the form won’t send without the required fields.

On the backend, we filter out spam and forward the form results as an email to the business owner.

A contact form is so valuable that we include for free on all Cedar Rapids small business websites we design.

We also use it as a “call-to-action” throughout our own website.

As soon as you visit our page, you will see two CTAs in our primary color, each leading you to fill out our contact form the moment you decide you want a site for your small business.

Clear CTA

As with contact information, you want to give your users a crystal clear call-to-action. We discuss this at length in our post—10 Principles of Good Website Design.

If you want a customer to call your phone, your CTA is:

If you want a customer to purchase a product, your CTA is:

Don’t do something cheesy like:

If I click this button and it unexpectedly tries to collect my credit card information, I am leaving and never coming back.

Social Proof

Reviews are one of the most powerful conversion tools for a small business. So much so that Google considers reviews on your Google Business Profile as a key ranking metric for local search.

Try to get as many of these as possible and include the nicest ones on your website.

Lizzy Dvorsky

CR Facepainting

Incredible results, speedy, and my website is already performing well on Google. I love the detail that they put into the website design and that they took the time to make sure everything I wanted was on there, and added in some awesome ideas that I wouldn't have even come up with. The website is easy to navigate and both functional and attractive. 10/10 would absolutely recommend!!

Madison Robertson

The Hair Lounge

Cedar Studios made having a website for my small business so easy and seamless! I would highly recommend Cedar Studios for your small biz website needs!

Fast Page Speed

50% of users will leave your page if it doesn’t load in under 3 seconds.

Given that the majority of internet users are now on mobile (slower network connection than desktop), this makes page speed even more important for your small business website.

One of the biggest drags on page speed is images. Here’s how to fix them.

Use a modern format. Use .webp or .avif. Make sure to include a fallback (.jpeg) for older browsers that don’t support modern formats.

Compression. Compress images when you can—without distorting them. We use Astro as a web development framework, which includes a plugin to do this automatically.

Responsive Images. Read this (technical, but very informative) guide on how to use the <picture> element and srcset to automatically serve small images to your mobile users and large images to your desktop users.

You can learn more about how Cedar Studios develops faster websites for Cedar Rapids small businesses here.

Conclusion

Small business website design is fairly straightforward. Keep your brand and your customer in mind at all times. Make it dead simple to get in contact with your business. If you follow the rules in this guide, you will be off to a great start.