Guide · Content
What belongs on
the front page.
We have opened several thousand small business home pages across the GTA. The good ones do the same six things and the bad ones make the same four mistakes, almost without exception.
Published 2026-09-08 · Formory Group
1. What you do and where, in the first screen.
Not a slogan. A sentence a stranger can read in two seconds: what the business does and which area it covers. If a visitor has to scroll to learn whether you serve their city, a proportion of them will not.
2. A reason to choose you that is not "quality service".
Years in business, a guarantee that costs you something, a specialism, an unusual availability, a named person who does the work. Anything a competitor could not paste onto their own page unchanged. Most home pages fail here and it is the difference between the ones that convert and the ones that do not.
3. Proof.
Photographs of your own work, not stock. Reviews with names attached. A number that is checkable. For trades, a before-and-after does more than three paragraphs.
4. Two ways to make contact, both above the fold.
A phone number that is tappable on a phone and a short form. 12,024 of the 34,180 GTA sites we opened have no enquiry form at all — every visitor who will not phone a stranger is lost, and that is a large share of people under forty.
5. Prices, or the reason there are none.
A range, a starting point, or an honest explanation of what the price depends on. "Contact us for a quote" with nothing else is the most common way to lose someone who was ready to buy.
6. Links to the pages that do the selling.
The home page is a routing decision, not the whole argument. Each service page makes the case for that service; the home page gets people to the right one quickly.
And four things to remove.
The stock photograph of a handshake. The carousel — visitors do not wait for slide two. The "Welcome to our website" paragraph. And the long history of the company, which belongs on an About page where the small number of people who want it can find it.
Questions
What people ask us.
How long should the home page be?
Long enough to do the six things above and no longer. For most service businesses that is one screen of answer plus three or four short sections.
Do I need a video?
Only if it shows work that photographs cannot. An autoplaying background video that delays the page is a cost with no return.
Should the phone number be in the header?
Yes, on every page, and tappable. It is the single most-clicked element on most local business sites.
Your turn
Same check,
run on your site.
The check behind this page is the one we ran on every business above. Put your own address in and it will load your site on a phone screen, look at the certificate and the page age, and tell you what a visitor meets. No email, nothing stored.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.