What a business website must include: 2026 checklist

The first screen: what you do, who for, what the visitor should do

Visitors decide on the first screen whether they stay. They have no time to hunt for what you sell – either they see it immediately, or they close the tab. The first screen is therefore not the place for a slogan, but for one sentence naming the service, the region and who it is for.

On mobile the first screen is shorter still than on a desktop: it fits a headline, one sentence and one button. Everything else is already scrolling, and the visitor has to decide to do it.

• An H1 headline that names both the service and the city or region – "Apartment renovations in Bratislava", not "Welcome to our website". Google then uses that same headline as the main signal of what the page is about.
• One primary call to action, not five equally prominent buttons. Pick the one that actually brings you enquiries: a non-binding quote, a site visit booking or an appointment.
• A phone number and WhatsApp in the header itself, as clickable links. On mobile the customer should call with one tap – retyping a number from an image is the fastest way to lose the call.
• At least one piece of proof visible without scrolling: your Google rating, the logo of your best-known client or the number of jobs completed. A website builds trust from the first second, not on a references subpage.

Trust: references, reviews, company details

A business website has a job nobody else will do for it: convince a stranger that they can send you money or let your tradespeople into their flat. Adjectives do not achieve that; verifiable facts do.

One simple rule applies: anything a visitor can verify elsewhere carries more weight than anything you write about yourself.

• Your Google review rating together with a link to the business profile. A number without a link looks invented; the link turns it into a verifiable fact.
• Photos of real work with a short description of the brief. For construction and service trades, a before-and-after pair of photos works better than any amount of copy.
• Company registration number, tax ID, billing address and a photo of the premises or the office. You have to publish these details anyway – and they are the cheapest proof that a real company stands behind the website.
• An about page with the names, faces and roles of the people the customer will deal with. A stock photo here achieves the exact opposite of what you intended.

Content: services, prices, FAQ

Content is the one part of a website that Google and AI assistants actually read. If your services are hidden in a single bullet on the home page, they have nothing to work with – and neither do you, when a customer asks for detail.

That is why every service gets its own subpage with its own headline, a description of how the work runs and a "from" price. A "from" price is not a binding offer; it is a filter that saves you calls with people outside your budget range. You can see what such a pricing page looks like on our site through the link in the questions below.

• A separate subpage for every service you genuinely sell. A single page listing ten bullets has no chance of ranking for any one of them.
• A price, or at least a price range, next to every service. If you leave the price out, the customer will estimate it themselves – and usually less favourably than you would like.
• An FAQ built from the 10–20 questions customers actually ask you on the phone. Do not invent them: a week of writing down what people ask is enough.
• Copy written in the customer's words, not internal terminology. If your team says "job execution" while the customer searches for "bathroom renovation", the customer wins.

Contact and conversion

Contact is where a visit turns into an enquiry – and also where websites lose the most people. A form with ten mandatory fields is as effective as a locked door.

• A contact form with a minimum of fields and spam protection that does not burden the person filling it in. A name, a contact and a message are enough; the rest you agree on the phone.
• A map, the address of your premises and your opening hours in one place, written as text and not only inside an image. Keep the same details in your Google business profile – if the two differ, both lose credibility.
• A confirmation after the form is sent and a clear statement of when you will get back to them. Write a deadline you can meet, then meet it; a broken promise about response speed does more harm than no promise at all.

Speed and mobile

Speed is not cosmetic – it is the first thing a visitor experiences on the site, before the design and before the copy. And they experience it on a phone, often over mobile data and away from wi-fi, so judging the site on an office monitor and a fast connection is misleading.

• Images in a modern format, resized to the dimensions they are actually displayed at. A photo straight out of a camera is several times heavier on a website than it needs to be.
• A website without a heavy all-purpose template and without dozens of plugins. Every extra add-on is extra code, an extra update and one more thing that can break.
• A stable layout while loading: nothing jumps around, and the main content appears before the advertising and analytics scripts. This is exactly what Google measures in Core Web Vitals and takes into account when assessing the page.

SEO and visibility in AI

Visibility has split in two: classic search results and the answers AI assistants generate. The same work prepares you for both – clearly stated facts in the right place, not keywords poured into the footer.

• Its own title and description for every subpage, plus LocalBusiness structured data with the address, opening hours and contact. That way the search engine does not have to guess.
• The answer in the very first paragraph of the subpage, in full sentences and with concrete details. AI assistants quote sentences that still make sense out of context – if your answer is scattered across five paragraphs, there is nothing to quote.

Legal essentials and the admin panel

The last area is not about marketing but about the website not costing you needless money and time. These are the two points that get postponed most often and hurt the most afterwards.

• A privacy policy, a note on how form data is processed and a cookie consent bar that genuinely controls what fires. Measurement and advertising code should run after consent, not before it.
• An admin panel in which you change the copy, photos, services, references and articles yourself. A website that needs an e-mail to a developer for every price change is one you will stop updating within six months.

What the ITgale price covers

The checklist has 22 points across seven areas. The table shows how many of them a custom business website from ITgale covers at its fixed price (from €490), and what costs extra.

22 points in total. The price is fixed and you get it after the clickable demo; the only recurring cost is hosting.

How to check this on your own website

You can audit your own website yourself, in one afternoon and without paid tools. Work through it in this order and note down where you got stuck.

• Open your home page on a phone and let someone who does not know your company read it. Ask them what you sell and to whom – if they hesitate, the problem is on the first screen.
• List the services you actually invoice and look for a separate subpage for each of them. The missing subpages are your task list for the coming month.
• Try to order through the website the way a customer does: find the number, tap it, submit the form. Note how many steps it took and whether a confirmation arrived.
• Search for your company name and then for your main service plus the city, and look at what Google shows about you. Ask an AI assistant the same question and compare whether it can quote your website at all.
• Go through the 22 points in this article and mark the ones missing from your website. If more than ten are missing, a new website is worth considering instead of patching.

FAQ