A small business website checklist for the Central Coast
The pages, details and technical basics a Central Coast business site needs before it can compete, written as a checklist you can work through yourself.
The Central Coast runs from Woy Woy up to Wyong, and the businesses in it are wildly different, cafés in Terrigal, trades out of Erina, clinics in Bateau Bay, product brands shipping from home garages. The website checklist, though, is mostly the same.
Work through this on your current site. Anything you can't tick is a real, fixable gap.
1. The first screen answers three things
Within two seconds of landing, a visitor should know:
- What you do, in plain words, not a slogan
- Where you do it, the suburbs or region, stated
- How to start, a phone number or a single button
If your hero says "Elevating experiences since 2014", that's zero out of three.
2. One page per service
Not one "Services" page with a list. If you do five things, that's five pages, each with its own heading, photos and price guidance. This is the single biggest structural difference between sites that pick up local search traffic and sites that don't.
3. Prices, or at least ranges
You don't have to publish a full price list. You do have to stop people bouncing to a competitor who gives them something. "Most kitchen jobs land between $12k and $25k depending on cabinetry" filters out the wrong enquiries and builds trust with the right ones.
4. Proof that looks like your actual work
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| Stock photos | Your last six jobs, phone photos are fine |
| "Trusted by locals" | Three reviews with first names and suburbs |
| Logos with no context | One short case note: problem, what you did, result |
5. The technical basics
- Under two seconds on mobile. Compress images to WebP or AVIF, lazy-load anything below the fold.
- One H1 per page, then H2s and H3s that describe what's actually under them, this helps screen readers and search engines equally.
- Descriptive page titles. "Kitchen Renovations Terrigal, [Business Name]", not "Home".
- LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, hours and area served.
- A sitemap and clean robots.txt so crawlers can find everything.
- Analytics and Search Console connected, so you can see which searches you appear for.
You can get a real score for most of this in under a minute with a free website speed and SEO audit rather than guessing.
6. Contact that takes 30 seconds
Three fields. Name, phone, what you need. Every extra field costs you enquiries. Keep tap-to-call visible on mobile at all times, and make sure form submissions actually arrive, test it from a phone on mobile data, not just from your desk.
7. Somebody can edit it without a developer
If changing your opening hours requires a support ticket, the hours will eventually be wrong. Make sure text, photos and hours are editable by someone in the business.
8. It still works when it's ugly
Turn off images in your head. Does the page still make sense in order, what you do, proof, price, how to contact? If the structure only works because of the design, the structure isn't done.
That's the whole list. If you'd rather hand it over, here's web design on the Central Coast, or what's included in Website Development. Nearby: Gosford and Tuggerah.