Five pages cover almost every service business. A home page that says what you do, for whom, and what to do next, within about ten seconds of arriving. A page describing what you actually offer, with enough specificity that somebody recognises their own situation. A page about you, which matters more than owners expect because people hire people. A contact page with more than one way to reach you. And a privacy policy, which is not optional once you collect anything, including through a contact form or analytics.

Pricing deserves its own page if you can answer the question honestly, and this is the page most businesses avoid and the one with the highest intent. A range with an explanation of what moves it beats saying nothing, because somebody who leaves over the number was not going to buy and you have saved a conversation. If your pricing genuinely varies, publish the factors that determine it rather than a figure.

What you can skip at launch: a blog with no posts, a portfolio with one item, a team page listing one person, a frequently asked questions page assembled from questions nobody has asked yet, and anything described as coming soon. Each of those signals a business earlier in its life than it wants to appear.

Add pages as you accumulate reasons. A specific service page when you sell that thing repeatedly. A case study when you have a result worth describing. Content when you have something to say. The site should grow behind the business rather than ahead of it.

Write the copy before designing any of it, in plain text, with no formatting. If the words are not persuasive as a paragraph, no amount of layout rescues them, and designing first means writing copy to fit boxes rather than building around what needs saying. It also exposes how little you actually have to say when the page is empty, which is uncomfortable and useful at exactly this stage.

Whatever you build, make the contact route obvious from every page rather than only from one, since somebody deciding to get in touch will do so from wherever they happen to be reading. A visible phone number or a button in the header removes the step of navigating to a contact page, and that step is where a proportion of interested people are lost.