The sixty-second answer
Both, but one should lead. Emergency and urgent trades lead with a tappable phone number; considered purchases lead with a form. A form is a legal commitment — it collects personal information under PIPEDA — and an operational one, because somebody has to answer it.
The decision in one question
Ask yourself when your customer is most likely to be looking at your site. If they are standing in a flooded basement at seven in the morning, the answer is a phone number, in large text, at the top, tappable. If they are on the couch at eleven at night comparing three landscapers for a spring quote, the answer is a form, because they are not going to call a stranger at that hour and by morning they will have forgotten you.
Most small businesses have both kinds of customer, which is why the answer is both. The question is only which one leads. Get that wrong and you lose the calls you most wanted, quietly, without ever knowing.
This is a widespread problem rather than a niche one: as of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small businesses [6]; in New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 employer businesses are small [6]. Almost all of them are contact-driven. The contact path is the product.
The case for leading with the phone
Phone-first suits plumbing, heating, electrical, towing, locksmithing, veterinary, restaurants, and anything where the customer's problem has a clock on it. It also suits any business whose customers skew older or who are calling from a truck.
Three details decide whether it works:
It must be text, not a picture. A number inside an image cannot be tapped on a phone, cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, and cannot be quoted by an answer engine describing your business. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [3] — and the same habit that satisfies that direction is the one that makes you machine-readable. See what are the website accessibility requirements in Canada?.
It must be marked up. The Schema.org LocalBusiness type describes a particular physical business or branch and carries properties for telephone, address, email, openingHours, areaServed, geo and priceRange [4]. Marking up the number you already show removes any doubt about which number is yours.
It must be answered, or say when it is not. Publishing hours you do not keep is worse than publishing none. If calls go to voicemail after five, say so.
The case for leading with the form
Form-first suits consultants, contractors quoting large jobs, photographers, accountants, anyone whose first conversation needs details, and anyone who genuinely cannot answer the phone during the working day. A form captures the enquiry at the moment of interest, and it captures the information you need to give a real answer instead of "it depends".
But a form is a promise, and it is the promise most often broken. An unanswered form is worse than no form, because the customer believes they have contacted you. If nobody will watch it, publish a monitored email address instead and be honest about response times.
There is a third option that suits more businesses than admit it: publish a monitored email address as plain text alongside the form. Some people simply will not fill in a form, and a visible address lets them forward a photo, a floor plan or a previous invoice without fighting an upload field. The usual objection is address harvesting, and it is real, but for most small businesses a good spam filter costs less than the enquiries lost by hiding behind a form nobody trusts.
What a form obliges you to do
The moment your form collects a name and an email, you are collecting personal information. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires that purposes be identified before or at the time of collection (Principle 2), that you have the individual's knowledge and consent (Principle 3), that the information not be used or disclosed for other purposes without consent (Principle 5), that information no longer required be destroyed, erased or made anonymous (clause 4.5.3), that your policies be readily available (Principle 8), and that individuals be able, on request, to learn what you hold and challenge its accuracy (Principle 9) [1].
In practice this is small. One line under the form saying what happens to the message, a short privacy page it links to, and a habit of not keeping enquiry emails forever. What it is not is an add-on product to be sold to you at build time. We set out the whole thing in does my small business website need a privacy policy?.
One trap worth naming: a quote request is not a newsletter subscription. Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation prohibits sending a commercial electronic message unless the recipient has consented, expressly or by implication, and requires the message to comply with the prescribed identifying and contact information requirements [2]. If you want the option to mail people later, add a separate, unchecked, plainly worded consent box — at build time, not after the list exists. See what does CASL require on a signup form?.
The details that actually change results
Fewer fields. Name, one contact method, message. Add a town or postal code only if travel changes your price. Every required field loses submissions, and collecting data you will never use is hard to square with PIPEDA's purpose requirement [1].
Say what happens next. "We reply within one business day" beats "Thanks!". But treat it as a claim you have to keep: section 74.01 of the Competition Act reaches representations to the public that are false or misleading in a material respect, and a performance claim must rest on an adequate and proper test with the burden of proof on whoever made it [5]. Promise the response time you actually hit. More in what can I legally claim on my website?.
Put contact details in the footer of every page. Nobody should have to find the contact page. Phone, email, service area, hours, on every page.
Give a fallback. Show the phone number on the thank-you screen. Forms fail silently more often than anyone admits, and a customer who never hears back assumes you did not want the work.
Test it monthly. Submit your own form. Confirm it arrives, in the right inbox, not in spam. This is the single most common undetected fault on a small business website.
What about live chat and messaging apps?
They work when there is somebody there and fail badly when there is not, which for a two-person business means most of the day. A chat widget that nobody answers reads exactly like a shop with the lights on and the door locked. If you want the immediacy, the more honest version for a small operation is a clearly labelled text-message number, because a text can be answered between jobs and nobody expects an instant reply to one. Whatever you choose, apply the same rule as everywhere else on the contact path: if you advertise a channel, monitor it, and if you stop monitoring it, take it down that week rather than at the next redesign.
Where we sit
A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; beyond that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. Turnaround is 48 hours from brief to live.
We build the contact path as text — real phone number, real email, labelled form fields — with the structured markup and a plain privacy statement included, because those take minutes at build time and are expensive to bolt on later. Which one leads is a decision we will ask you to make, in the brief, in one sentence.
If you take one thing from this: the contact section is not the bottom of your website. For a small business it is the website. Everything above it exists to get someone there.