The standard advice is fifteen pages. Home, about, services, a page per service, a page per town, blog, testimonials, contact.
For most one and two truck operations that is the wrong project. A single page that does its job properly outperforms a large site that does not, and it can exist by the end of the week rather than the end of the quarter.
What a stranger is actually asking
Somebody has arrived on your site from a search or a recommendation. They have four questions and roughly ten seconds of patience.
Do you do the thing I need. Do you work where I live. Are you real and reasonably good at this. How do I reach you.
That is the entire brief. Every element on the page either answers one of those or is decoration.
The page, in order
The top, visible without scrolling. What you do, where you do it, and your phone number. "Emergency plumbing and drain service across Marion County. Call 555-0134." That single line answers questions one, two and four before anyone has moved a thumb.
The number should be tappable, large, and repeated at the bottom. Do not make somebody hunt for it.
Three or four photographs of actual work. Before and after, your van, your face. This answers "are you real" faster than any amount of writing, and it is the thing most local sites get wrong by using stock imagery instead.
What you actually do, as a plain list. Not a paragraph about your commitment to excellence. A list somebody can scan to find their specific problem. Water heater replacement. Drain clearing. Burst pipes. Repiping.
Where you work, named. The towns, not a radius. Somebody in Millfield wants to see the word Millfield.
Rough pricing, or at minimum your service call fee. Roughly two thirds of homeowners are more likely to call a business that publishes pricing, and only about a third of contractors do. Even one line stating your diagnostic fee puts you ahead of most competitors and filters the people who were never going to hire you.
Reviews, shown rather than claimed. Three or four real quotes with first names, or an embedded rating. "We pride ourselves on service" is worth nothing. Somebody else saying it is worth a great deal.
What happens next. One sentence about how it goes. You call, we usually answer, we come out, you get a written price before any work starts. This removes more hesitation than anything else on the page, because the thing people are actually nervous about is the process rather than the price.
The phone number again. At the bottom, in the same size as at the top.
What to leave off
An About Us page in essay form. Nobody arriving with a leaking pipe wants your founding story. One or two sentences about who you are belongs on the same page, not on its own.
Stock photography. The hard hat and clipboard genre is instantly recognisable, and recognising it prompts the question of what else here is generic.
A blog you will not maintain. Three posts from two years ago is worse than none, because it signals abandonment.
A contact form as the only route. Forms are fine as an addition. As the sole option they are a barrier, and a large share of local service enquiries want to phone.
Anything that delays the page loading. Which brings us to the argument that makes all of this easier.
The one page is faster, and that is not incidental
A page with a handful of photographs and some text loads quickly on a phone on a poor connection in somebody's driveway.
A fifteen page site with a slider, a video header, three tracking scripts and a chat widget does not. And page speed is one of the few technical factors that genuinely affects both ranking and whether somebody waits.
You do not have to optimise a fast site. It is fast because there is nothing on it.
When you actually do need more pages
Two cases, and both come later, driven by evidence rather than by advice.
Service area pages, once your invoices show which towns pay. Not every town on your map. The three or four that repeatedly produce work, each carrying something true that could not be copied to another page.
Individual service pages, once you know which services convert. If half your revenue is water heaters, that deserves its own page with detail, pricing, and photographs. The other six services can stay as list items until they earn more.
Both are additions to a working page, not replacements for it. And both are informed by data you will only have after a few months of recording where work comes from.
Why this order matters
The fifteen page site is not wrong in principle. It is wrong as a starting point, because it front-loads a large amount of work into a moment when you know least about what your customers actually search for and which services actually pay.
A business that spends three months building a large site has three months of no site. A business that publishes one good page on Thursday has something working while it learns what to add.
And most of what makes a local business findable is not on the website at all. It is the Google Business Profile, the reviews, and answering the phone. The site's job is to confirm that somebody who already found you is worth calling.
One page can do that. Fifteen mediocre ones frequently cannot.