Business Website: 10 Things a Company Website Can't Work Without

You open your website and see it the way an owner does: a familiar logo, photos from the office party, an “About us” section that took three weeks to write. Someone arriving from search sees something else. They have a few seconds to work out where they’ve landed, whether it fits what they need and what to do next. If the page doesn’t answer that, they go back to the results, where nine other companies are waiting right next to you.

A study summarised by Nielsen Norman Group found that people often leave a page within 10-20 seconds, and that to hold their attention for a few minutes you need to get your value across in about 10 seconds (NN/g, 2011). The study is many years old, but the logic hasn’t changed: the first seconds decide whether a person reads on.

First, a word on terms, because in search they live side by side. In this article, “business website”, “company website” and “corporate website” all mean the same thing: a public website that represents a company, its services or products, and is meant to bring in enquiries. Not an internal portal for staff and not a social media page. Design trends change every year, but the ten traits below change very slowly, because they rest not on fashion but on how people search and decide.

Each trait is framed as a check: a question to ask about your own site, an example of what bad and good look like, and what to do. To keep the examples consistent, one fictional company runs through the whole article: the translation agency “Slovnyk” (Ukrainian for “dictionary”), which translates contracts, tender documents and technical documentation for companies that work with European partners. Its clients are B2B, decisions take more than a minute, and a mistake in a contract translation costs more than the translation itself.

It’s not enough for you to know what your site is for. Someone who has never heard of your business has to get it too. On the first screen of the homepage they’re looking for two answers: what’s on offer here and what next step is expected of them (write, request a quote, call, go to the catalogue).

Bad: “Slovnyk: your reliable partner in the world of words. Quality, experience, professionalism.” It sounds nice, but you can’t tell whether this is an agency, a school, a publisher or an online dictionary.

Good: “Legal and technical translation for companies: contracts, tender documents, manuals. English, German, Polish. A quote within one working day.” Below that, one prominent button: “Send a document for a quote”.

How to check: show the homepage to a friend who doesn’t know your business for 10 seconds, then close it. Ask: what does this company sell, to whom, and what do you have to do to order? If they hesitate on even one question, rewrite the first screen. Empty words like “quality”, “reliability” or “tailored approach” don’t help here: everyone uses them, so they don’t set anyone apart.

The common advice about a simple URL usually boils down to a domain with the company name. That’s true, but it’s only half the truth. A website address has two parts, and both have to make sense to a person.

Domain. Short, without extra hyphens and numbers, with a brand name that’s easy to spell out over the phone. Compare:

Separately, check who the domain is registered to. It often turns out that a developer once registered it in their own name “to save time”, and a few years later the company can’t even renew it without them. How to get your domain, hosting and site access back is covered in our article “Your contractor disappeared. Who controls your website now?”.

Page URLs. Google recommends using readable words in URLs rather than long IDs, separating words with hyphens rather than underscores, and removing unnecessary parameters (Google Search Central).

• Bad: slovnyk.com.ua/index.php?page=37&cat=2
• Bad: slovnyk.com.ua/pereklad_dogovoriv_TEST_final
• Good: slovnyk.com.ua/pereklad-dohovoriv/
• Good: slovnyk.com.ua/tekhnichnyi-pereklad/nimetska/

Google also says the words in a URL should be in your audience’s language, that transliteration is fine too, and that non-ASCII characters in links get percent-encoded. In practice, a URL in a non-Latin script such as Cyrillic, pasted into a messenger, often turns into a string like %D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80..., and the person no longer knows where you’re sending them. That’s why Slovnyk uses transliterated Ukrainian in its URLs, and the same applies to any language with characters outside the basic Latin alphabet. One more detail from the same document: to Google, /Pereklad and /pereklad are different URLs, so pick one case (lowercase) and stick to it.

If your site has lived for years with URLs like ?page=37, don’t rush to change everything over a weekend: changing URLs without redirects kills the search traffic you’ve built up. Treat it as a site migration, with a map of old and new URLs.

Branding on a website goes beyond the logo. It’s colours, fonts, photos, the tone of the copy, the design of your documents, your email signature. People see your company in several places: in search, on the website, in a sales proposal, in your maps listing. If it looks different everywhere, it’s hard to believe it’s one and the same organisation.

Bad: a logo with blurry edges because someone pulled it out of an old PDF. Three fonts on the homepage, a fourth in the menu. Team photos from different years in different quality, and next to them a stock photo of a woman in a headset who is supposedly “translating”. The proposal a sales manager sends after an enquiry is designed in a style that appears nowhere on the website.

Good: a vector logo, one or two fonts, a limited palette where the accent colour is reserved for buttons and what matters. Real photos: the team, the work process, examples of finished documents (with client data removed). The website, the proposal and the email signature look like parts of one whole.

What to do: put your logo in all its versions, your colours with their codes, your fonts and two or three example photos you consider “yours” on a single page. That’s a minimal style guide, and it’s enough to stop the next contractor from reinventing your style. If you have no guide at all, put that in the brief before development starts: how to describe it is covered in our article on writing a website brief.

The type of menu (dropdown, sidebar, hamburger) doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a person finds the right page from the menu item’s name, without guessing. We went through structure, menu labels and common myths, including the “three-click rule”, in a separate article on website navigation. Here is just a quick check.

Bad: “Home, About us, Activities, Solutions, Areas, Portfolio, News, Contacts”. “Activities”, “Solutions” and “Areas” sound like the same thing, and someone looking for “contract translation” doesn’t know where to click.

Good: “Services (with sub-items by translation type), Languages, Prices, Work samples, About the agency, Contacts”. The menu labels match the words clients use to describe their task.

How to check: give three people one task each (“find out how much technical translation into German costs”, “find out how to send a document”) and silently watch where they click. For reference, the main menu on grandma.agency has six items: Services, Cases, Why us, About us, Blog, Contacts. On a phone it hides behind a hamburger button.

A company spends money on ads and SEO to get someone to the website, and then that person can’t find a phone number. This is probably the most expensive small thing on a business website.

Bad: contacts only on a separate page, the phone number as an image (you can’t copy it or tap it on a phone), a form with twelve required fields, and an email address like slovnyk.office.2017@gmail.com.

Good:

• phone and email in the header or footer of every page, with a tappable phone number;
• a separate contact page with an address (if there’s an office people can visit), opening hours, a map and company details;
• email on your own domain: office@slovnyk.com.ua;
• several ways to get in touch: phone, email, form, messenger, if you really do answer there;
• a short form that asks only for what you can’t do without at the first step.

For comparison, the enquiry form on our contact page has three fields for a person to fill in: name, email and message, plus consent to data processing. For a translation agency it makes sense to add a file upload at most, because you can’t quote without the document.

One more thing: say how quickly you reply, and keep to it. “We’ll reply within one working day” takes away part of the worry. A promise of “within 15 minutes” that nobody keeps does more harm than no promise at all.

This trait continues the first one. Once the purpose of the site is clear, you still need to tell people what to do right now and what they’ll get out of it. A call to action (CTA) has two parts: the action and the benefit.

Where to put it: on the first screen, at the end of every service page and next to the blocks after which people are usually ready to act (prices, work samples, reviews). Different pages can have different main calls to action: on the pricing page “calculate my price” makes sense, while a blog article can go softer with “check your document”.

What not to do: don’t turn your website into a funfair. A popup after two seconds, a “discount expires in 04:59” timer, a chat that opens by itself and three different buttons on one screen irritate people and push them away, especially in B2B, where they want to understand things first. One main call to action per screen and, if needed, one secondary one.

Responsive design, meaning a site that adapts to the screen width, has long been the minimum rather than an advantage. The bigger point is this: Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking (Google Search Central). In other words, for search your site is first and foremost what it is on a phone.

Bad: the prices block and work samples are hidden on mobile “to avoid clutter”. The languages table runs off the screen. The buttons are so small they’re hard to hit with a finger. The form opens, but the keyboard covers the “Send” button.

Good: the same main content on mobile as on desktop (Google explicitly recommends keeping it the same, because it sees less from a trimmed-down version). The phone number calls with one tap, the form is easy to fill in with one hand, and the first screen shows what kind of company this is, not just a giant photo.

How to check: go through your client’s main path on your own phone over mobile data: from the homepage to a submitted enquiry. Not on a laptop with a narrowed window, but on an actual phone. There’s a separate article on mobile speed and the Core Web Vitals metrics you can fix without a developer: Core Web Vitals: what to fix without a developer.

People come to a website for an answer to their problem. Copy about how wonderful the company is rarely gets read. Copy that explains how the work will be organised and how much it will cost gets read and forwarded to colleagues.

Bad: a “Technical translation” service page made of three paragraphs about “many years of experience” and “a team of professionals”. Not a word about which documents they take, how the price is calculated, who checks the terminology, or how confidential data is protected.

Good: a separate page for each type of service that covers:

• who it’s for and what documents they work with;
• how the price is set (per page, per word, for urgency) and what affects it;
• how the work goes: from the file you send to the finished translation;
• answers to the typical questions the sales manager hears every week;
• an example of the result, if it can be shown.

A useful source of topics for these pages and for blog articles sits in the sales team’s email and messengers: the questions clients ask before ordering and the reasons they give for saying no. In its guidance on helpful content, Google offers a simple test: will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough to achieve their goal, and does the content show first-hand experience (Google Search Central). Copy that could sit on any competitor’s site once you swap the name doesn’t pass that test.

Content isn’t a one-off job. Prices change, new languages and services appear, and a three-year-old “We’re open!” news item on the homepage says loud and clear that nobody is looking after the site.

Before contacting an unfamiliar company, people look for proof that it has already helped others. Reviews, client logos (with their consent) and write-ups of completed projects do exactly that job.

You often hear that fake reviews are “easy to spot”. In reality, not always, and that’s exactly why they’re dangerous: they aren’t exposed right away, and when they are, trust in everything on the site goes with them. On top of that, Google explicitly prohibits fake engagement on Maps: reviews written by one person from several accounts, bought reviews or rewards for reviews, and it equally prohibits selectively asking only satisfied customers for reviews. Such content is removed, and for repeated violations the account can be restricted or closed (Google Maps User Contributed Content Policy).

Bad: five reviews in the same style from “Olena K.”, “Ihor M.” and “A satisfied client”, with no dates and no companies. Or a star widget that can’t be verified anywhere.

Good: a review with a name, job title and company (with the person’s permission), a concrete result (“they translated a full set of tender documents in four days, and the client accepted it without comments”) and a date. A link to the company’s Google profile, where reviews live independently of you.

One more nuance for anyone counting on stars in search. Google doesn’t show review stars for reviews a company publishes about itself on its own website, even if they’re embedded through a third-party widget (Google Search Central). You still need reviews on the site, but for people, not for the snippet. What structured data actually gets you a rich result in search is covered in our article on Schema.org and rich snippets.

What to do: after every completed project, ask all clients for a review, not just the ones who said “thank you”. Give them a direct link to your Google profile. Reply to reviews, especially critical ones: a calm, to-the-point reply convinces a reader more than a perfect five stars.

The advice “install Google Analytics” is outdated in the literal sense. The old version, Universal Analytics, stopped processing data on July 1, 2023 (Google Analytics Help). GA4 is what runs now, and a tracking tag on the site doesn’t tell you much by itself. It shows visits, but the business question is different: how many people did what the site exists for, and where did they come from?

That’s what key events in GA4 are for. Google defines a key event as an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business. They used to be called conversions, and Google now uses the word “conversion” for an action used to evaluate ad campaigns (Google Analytics Help). Any event GA4 collects can be marked as a key event in the Admin section.

Bad: the tag is installed, the report says “1,200 users this month”, and nobody knows how many of them sent an enquiry. Form submissions aren’t tracked, or they’re tracked as a “thank-you page view”, a page some people simply never see.

Good: for the Slovnyk agency, a few events are set up and exactly those are marked as key events:

The generate_lead event is on Google’s list of recommended events for forms and information requests (Google Analytics Help). Using the recommended names is convenient because reports and integrations understand them.

How to check: send a test enquiry from your own site and see whether the event shows up in the Realtime report. Then compare the number of key events for the month with the number of enquiries that actually reached the sales team. If the numbers are far apart, something is breaking: either the tracking or the delivery of enquiries itself. How to set up the basic events step by step is covered in the article GA4 for small business.

Go through the list honestly, on your phone, as a new client would.

1. Purpose. Someone seeing the homepage for the first time can say within 10 seconds what you sell, to whom and what to do next.
2. Address. The domain is short, carries the brand name and is registered to the company. Page URLs are readable, with hyphens, in lowercase and without unnecessary parameters.
3. Branding. The logo is sharp, there are one or two fonts, the photos are real, and the website and the sales proposal look the same.
4. Navigation. Menu labels match the client’s words, and three people with tasks find what they need without help.
5. Contacts. Phone and email on every page, the phone number is tappable, email is on your own domain, the form is short.
6. Calls to action. On the first screen and at the end of every service page there’s one prominent button with an action and a benefit.
7. Mobile version. The path from the homepage to a submitted enquiry on a phone over mobile data works without problems, and the content is the same as on desktop.
8. Content. Every service has its own page with pricing, process and answers to typical questions.
9. Reviews. Only genuine ones, with a name, company, date and specifics, plus a link to your Google profile.
10. GA4. Form submissions and clicks on the phone number and email are tracked and marked as key events, and a test enquiry shows up in the report.

If you’d like someone from outside to look at your site, there’s a free website check: SEO, visibility in AI search and trust signals.

A company website doesn’t have to be trendy or complicated. It has to answer a few simple questions from someone who sees you for the first time: who you are, whether they can trust you, how much it costs and how to get started. The ten traits above are about exactly that, and most of them can be checked in an evening without a developer.

If your checklist adds up to more than three “no” answers, patching them one by one often costs more than rebuilding the site with the right structure. You can see how we approach this kind of work on our website and online store development page. And if you just want to talk through where to start in your case, write to us.