The sixty-second answer
Five: home, services, about, contact and privacy. Many small businesses can compress the first four into two. The privacy page is the one owners skip and most sites need, because a contact form collects personal information. Anything beyond these five should earn its place.
The list, and why it is short
A small business website has one job: let a stranger decide, quickly, whether to contact you. Every page that helps with that decision belongs. Every page that does not is a maintenance liability wearing a costume.
That is a deliberately unromantic framing, and it fits who is buying. 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 [1]; in New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 employer businesses are small [1]. These are owner-operators. Every extra page is another thing to keep true while running the actual business.
When five pages become two
The five are roles, not files. A sole-trader electrician does not need an about page and a services page and a contact page as separate documents; one long home page with clear headings for each role, plus a privacy page, is a complete and defensible website. The reason to split them apart is when a section grows long enough that a visitor has to scroll past what they came for, or when a section needs its own link you can hand out — a printable service list, a booking page, a page you want to point an insurer or a supplier at.
So build the roles first and split later. Splitting a long page into four is fifteen minutes of work. Writing four thin pages because a template had four slots is how sites end up with a page reading "We are passionate about service" and nothing else.
1. The home page
The home page has to answer four questions above the point where a phone screen cuts off: what you do, where you do it, who it is for, and how to reach you. If a stranger cannot answer those four in ten seconds, no amount of design further down will rescue it.
The most common failure here is a headline that says nothing — "Quality you can trust", "Your partner in comfort" — where the business name and the trade should be. Write "Heat pump installation and service in Moncton and the Southeast" and you have simultaneously helped a human, a search engine and an AI assistant trying to decide whether to name you.
2. The services page
List what you sell in plain words, in the order that matters commercially. If one service pays the bills and three are occasional, say so with the layout. Two things make this page work harder than any design decision:
Scope boundaries. What you do not do saves you the calls you do not want. "We do not do new construction" is a feature.
Prices, or an honest reason there are none. If you publish prices, they have to be attainable: subsection 74.01(1.3) of the Competition Act treats a price that cannot be paid because of fixed obligatory charges or fees as a false or misleading representation, excepting only charges imposed under an Act of Parliament or a provincial legislature [4]. And say whether tax is included — the Canada Revenue Agency is explicit that the rate depends on the place of supply, illustrating with a Vancouver store charging 13% HST on delivery to Toronto [5]. If you genuinely cannot publish a price, publish the shape: "most repairs run between a and b, quoted before we start". Detail in how should I display prices with GST/HST?.
Also watch your adjectives here. Under paragraph 74.01(1)(b), a performance or efficacy claim must be based on an adequate and proper test, and the burden of proving the test lies on whoever made the claim [4]. "Fastest in the region" is a claim; "we usually get there same day" is a description. See what can I legally claim on my website?.
3. The about page
Buyers read this page to decide whether you are real. Give them: how long you have been operating, who does the work, any licence, certification or trade ticket that matters, insurance if it is relevant, and where you are based. Skip the mission statement. A photograph of you is worth more than four paragraphs about passion.
4. The contact page
Phone number as tappable text, email as text, service area, hours, and a form if you want one. Never lock these facts inside an image: a number baked into a graphic cannot be tapped, cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, and cannot be quoted by an answer engine.
This is also the page where structured data pays. The Schema.org LocalBusiness type describes a particular physical business or branch, with properties including address, telephone, email, openingHours, areaServed, geo and priceRange [6] — a machine-readable restatement of what the visitor already sees. Whether to lead with a form or a phone number is its own decision, which we work through in contact form or phone number?.
5. The privacy page
The page nobody wants and most sites need. The moment your form collects a name and an email, you are collecting personal information, and PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires that the purposes be identified before or at the time of collection (Principle 2), that you have knowledge and consent (Principle 3), 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 can, on request, be told what you hold and challenge its accuracy (Principle 9) [2].
In practice that is four honest sentences: what you collect, why, how long you keep it, and how to reach you about it. If you also intend to email people later, Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation requires consent before commercial electronic messages and requires each message to carry prescribed identifying and contact information [3] — solve it with an unchecked consent box on the form itself, at build time. See does my small business website need a privacy policy? and what does CASL require on a signup form?.
Pages that can wait, and pages that can go
Worth adding later: an FAQ page written in the words customers actually use, which is the single most quotable thing a small site can carry; a gallery, once you have real photographs of your own work; a booking page, if your availability is real and maintained.
Usually not worth it: a team page for two people, a blog nobody will feed — we make that case in does my business website need a blog? — a testimonials page with three unattributed quotes, and a page for every town within an hour's drive.
The test is simple. Would you defend this page's existence in twelve months, when it has drifted out of date and you have to choose between fixing it and deleting it? If the honest answer is no, do not build it now.
The order to write them in
Write the contact page first. It is the only page whose content you already know for certain, it is the one every other page points at, and getting the phone number, hours and service area exactly right is the highest-value ten minutes in the whole build. Then the services page, because it is the page a buyer actually reads. Then the home page, which is easiest to write once you know what it has to summarise. Then about, then privacy. Owners who start with the home page usually spend a week on a headline and never finish; owners who start with contact details are live inside two days.
Where we sit
A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work. Twenty thousand characters is comfortably the five pages above written properly. Past 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, and photos can be added at any time afterwards. We treat the privacy page and the structured data as part of the build rather than as upsells, because they are an hour of work and the alternative is quietly handing you the risk.
If you can tell us what you sell, where you sell it, and how you want to be contacted, you have already written most of these five pages. What to have ready is in what do I need ready before someone builds my website?.