This post is about deleting most of your website.
I have spent the last few months going through roofing contractor sites across Alberta for a lead generation project. Hundreds of them. The pattern is so consistent it stopped being funny around site forty.
Here is a typical one. Home, About, Services, Residential, Commercial, Repairs, Maintenance, Gallery, Blog, News, Careers, FAQ, Privacy, Contact. Fourteen pages. The blog has two posts, both from 2021, one of them titled "Welcome to our new website!" The Careers page lists no jobs. The Gallery is nineteen photos of shingles.
None of it is bad, exactly. It is just bloated. Every one of those pages exists because a template had a slot and somebody filled it. And every page you add is a page you have to maintain, a place a customer can get lost, and one more reason to never finish.
The fix is not a redesign. The fix is subtraction.
Below are the five pages that actually work, in the order you should build them, with the templates I use. Fill them in and you have a working site by Sunday night. Everything else is optional forever.
One disclaimer. This is what I have found and what I build. It is not gospel. If you have a page that reliably makes you money and it is not on this list, keep it and ignore me.
Before you build a page, make it earn its spot.
One question. Not "is this useful?" Everything is arguably useful.
Careers fails. News fails. Your blog, honestly, fails for the first year. The five below pass, and they pass for the same reason: each one moves a stranger exactly one step closer to paying you.
That is the whole job. A website is not a brochure. It is a hallway with five doors, and every door opens toward your phone ringing.
The landing page
Job: make a stranger say "yes, these people" in under eight seconds
Your home page is not a home. Nobody comes to your website to be welcomed. They come with a problem and a stopwatch running in their head.
So the part visible before anyone scrolls carries exactly four things:
- What you do, in the customer's words. Not "premium exterior solutions." Roofs.
- Who it is for and where. Specificity is credibility. "Homeowners in Canmore and Banff" beats "clients nationwide."
- One button. One. Two buttons is a quiz, and people fail quizzes by leaving.
- One piece of proof. A number, a logo row, one sentence from a real customer.
[What you do] for [who] in [where].
[The specific outcome], usually within [timeframe]. [The thing they are afraid of], we handle that part.
[ Get a quote in 24 hours ]
[Number] jobs completed in [town] since [year].
Filled in, that reads: "Roof repairs and replacements for homeowners in the Bow Valley. Most repairs done in a day, and we deal with your insurance company so you do not have to. → Get a quote in 24 hours. 340 roofs in the Bow Valley since 2011."
Word count for the whole hero: under 60. If it is over 60, you are explaining. Explaining happens on page two.
Most common missA headline that describes the company instead of the customer. "Family owned since 1998" is a fact about you. "We deal with your insurance company" is a fact about their Tuesday.
The offer page
Job: answer "what exactly do I get, and what does it cost?"
Most Services pages are a list of nouns. Roofing. Siding. Gutters. A list of nouns tells a customer nothing except that you own a keyboard.
An offer page tells them what happens, in what order, for how much. Three to five offers maximum, each with the same five line structure so they are scannable and comparable.
[Plain English name]
For: [the situation they are in when they need this]
You get: [three concrete deliverables]
Timeline: [X days] · Starts at: [$X]
[ Book this ]
Now the part everyone fights me on. Put a number on the page.
The objection is always the same: every job is different, I cannot quote without seeing it. True. Irrelevant. You are not publishing a quote. You are publishing a floor, so the wrong customers disqualify themselves before they eat an hour of your day.
"Starts at $4,800" does three things at once. It filters out the person with a $900 budget. It signals that you are not hiding anything. And it makes the calls you do get dramatically better, because everyone who calls has already agreed to the range.
I do this on my own pricing page for exactly that reason. $200 a month or $4,000 once, published, before you ever talk to me. You already know whether you are in or out, and neither of us burned a call finding out.
Most common missPricing hidden behind "contact us for a quote." That phrase costs you the customers who were ready to buy and keeps the ones who never were.
The proof page
Job: convince a skeptical stranger that you have done this before, successfully
This is the page nobody builds and everybody needs. Not a gallery. A gallery is a wall of photos that all look identical to someone who does not know roofs. Proof is a photo plus a story with a number in it.
Six to ten of these is a full page, and each one takes about ten minutes to write.
[Customer type], [neighbourhood], [the problem in five words]
The situation: [what was wrong and what it was costing them]
What we did: [the work, in one or two sentences]
Result: [the number: days, dollars, degrees, percent]
"[One line, their words, unpolished]" [first name, last initial]
Keep it ugly. The best testimonial I have ever read had a typo in it and the phrase "I was honestly kind of a nightmare about the timeline." Both should stay in. Polished testimonials read as fake because most polished testimonials are fake, and your customers have been trained by a decade of the internet to know it.
Get them at the right moment. Not three months later over email. The day the job finishes, standing in the driveway, while the relief is still fresh: "Would you mind if I recorded twenty seconds of you saying what that was like? It is for the website." Almost nobody says no. Almost nobody says yes to an email two months later.
And if you have no proof yet, say so plainly, on the page. That is what I do here. It costs less credibility than you think, and a lot less than getting caught.
Most common missPhotos with no words. A before and after with no dollar figure, no timeline and no name is a gallery wearing a costume.
The human page
Job: be the reason they pick you over the identical company down the road
Call it About if you want, but understand what it is for, because most About pages get this exactly backwards.
An About page is not your résumé. Nobody chooses a contractor based on your 2009 expansion into the commercial sector. They are on this page for one reason: they are about to let a stranger into their house or their bank account, and they want to know who that stranger is.
Hi, I am [name]. I have been [doing the thing] in [place] since [year].
[One paragraph: how you got into this. The honest version, including the boring part.]
[One paragraph: what you refuse to do, and why. This is the most important paragraph on the page.]
[Two sentences of a life outside the work. Dog. Mountain. Kid's hockey team. Something true.]
[ Talk to me directly ]
That third paragraph is the whole page. Tell people what you will not do. "We do not do cedar shakes, we are not good at them, and I will send you to someone who is." "We do not take jobs under $600 because we cannot do them properly at that price."
It feels insane to write. It is the highest trust move available to you, because everyone else on page one of Google claims to do everything for everyone, and a stranger reading five identical websites is desperate for one signal that a real person is behind one of them.
Most common missWriting about yourself in third person. "Mathew brings over a decade of experience," written by Mathew, alone, at his kitchen table. Everyone knows. Use "I."
The next step page
Job: remove the last excuse between them and a booked job
Here is where most small businesses lose the money the other four pages earned. The customer is convinced. They scroll to Contact. They find a form with nine fields, a generic inbox address, and no idea what happens after they hit send.
So they close the tab and mean to come back. They do not come back.
- Three fields. Name, phone or email, and one open box. That is it.
- Say what happens next, with a number. "You will hear from me within one business day, usually the same afternoon." Now they know what waiting looks like.
- Give the direct line. A real phone number and a real email, both clickable, both monitored. Half your best customers will never touch the form.
- Let them skip you. A booking link converts the people who would rather do anything than talk to a human, and that is more of them every year.
- Say when you are actually around. "I am on roofs until 4pm most days, so evenings are best." That one line prevents the "they never called me back" story.
Tell me about the job.
Name · Phone or email · What is going on?
[ Send it ]
What happens next: I read every one of these myself. You will hear back within [one business day] with either a ballpark number or a time to come look. No sales sequence, no drip campaign, nobody else calling you.
Rather skip the form? [phone] · [email] · [Grab a time on my calendar →]
Most common miss"We will get back to you as soon as possible." That sentence has never reassured a single human being. Put a number on it or leave it out.
Build them backwards from the money.
Most people build Home first, burn out on design decisions, and never finish
Total: one weekend. Not one weekend to perfect. One weekend to live. The version that is up on Monday beats the version that is beautiful in November, because the Monday version starts collecting the only data that matters, which is which sentence makes strangers call you.
Pick the page you are worst at. It is the offer page.
It is always the offer page, because it is the only one that requires you to decide something.
Put a "starts at" number on it before Sunday night. Not a quote. A floor. Then watch what happens to the quality of your next ten calls.
Next up I am publishing the full teardown of one of those roofing sites, with all fourteen pages mapped against these five and exactly what I would cut. If you think a page belongs on this list that is not here, tell me and I will argue with you about it properly.
Want me to do this to your site?
Send me your URL and I will tell you which of your pages are pulling their weight and which ones are just costing you maintenance. Thirty minutes, free, no sales script. If the answer is "your site is fine," I will say that too.
Get a free lead leak reviewOr write me directly: mat.steenwinkel@benchdigital.ca
Quick answers before you go.
What are the five pages every small business website needs?
A landing page that hooks the right visitor, an offer page that sells your money service, a proof page that shows results, a human page that shows who they are hiring, and a next step page that makes contacting you effortless. Each one exists to move a visitor toward one action.
Do I have to delete all my other pages?
Not the information, just the dead weight. Galleries, empty careers pages and stale news sections rarely convert anyone. Fold the genuinely useful parts into the five pages and let the rest go.
What if my business offers several services?
That is the one fair exception. Give each money service its own offer page so it can target its own search and its own action. The rest of the structure stays the same.
Which page should I build first?
Work backwards from the money. Start with the next step page so every visitor always has somewhere to go, then pour your effort into the offer page, because it is the one most businesses are worst at.
How long does it take to rebuild a site around these five pages?
At Bench Digital a standard five page build launches in 2 to 4 weeks from the day content arrives, tuned against Google PageSpeed before it goes live.