Websites for local businesses in Toronto
Five shapes of website, and the technical work under all five. Read this before you buy a website from anyone, including me. Half of it is the work nobody quotes for, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Five kinds of website
Find yourself in this list
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The one page site
Starter
A business whose whole web presence is a Google listing or a Facebook page.
Carries: Who you are, what you sell, where you are, and how to reach you, in one scroll.
Watch for: It stops working the moment you have more than a handful of services to explain.
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The local service and trades site
Starter or Standard
Plumbers, roofers, electricians, cleaners, landscapers, movers, anyone dispatched to an address.
Carries: Service areas, a quote request form, and a phone number reachable from any scroll position.
Watch for: Most of this traffic is someone standing in a problem. Speed and tap to call beat beauty.
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The restaurant, cafe, and food site
Standard
Anywhere people check the menu on a phone before deciding to walk in.
Carries: Menu as readable text rather than a PDF, hours, directions, reservation and ordering links.
Watch for: A menu locked inside a PDF or a photo is invisible to search and painful on a phone.
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The appointment site
Standard or Premium
Salons, barbers, dentists, clinics, studios, tutors, anyone whose sale is a booking.
Carries: Treatments or services with real prices, and a booking system wired in properly.
Watch for: The booking tool you already pay for usually decides how this gets built, so name it early.
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The rebuild
Standard or Premium
A site that is slow, years stale, or held by someone you no longer work with.
Carries: A new build with the old addresses redirected so your search rankings survive the move.
Watch for: Getting your domain and accounts back into your name is sometimes the hardest part.
Five, deliberately. These are the shapes local businesses actually need, and building the same five kinds of site repeatedly is why the prices are what they are. Selling online is quoted separately, from $1,900, so ask if that is you. Not on this list at all: mobile apps, software products, and anything needing user accounts and a database.
What is under a website
The work that does not show up in a screenshot
A website is not a design, it is a design plus about forty small technical decisions. When a quote is suspiciously cheap, this is the list that got skipped. Everything below is either included in your build or a decision I will walk you through before launch.
Ownership and infrastructure
- Domain registration or transfer, in your name, on your card
- DNS records, and the redirect so both the bare domain and the www version work
- Hosting and deployment, set up on your account so nothing is hostage to mine
- SSL certificate and forced HTTPS
- Business email at your domain, and the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records that stop it landing in spam
Build quality
- Mobile first, because most of your traffic is a phone on a weak connection
- A performance budget: compressed and correctly sized images, restrained fonts, minimal JavaScript
- Core Web Vitals checked on a real phone, not just a desktop score
- Tested across current Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, and down to small phones
- Semantic markup, so search engines and screen readers read the same page a person does
Being found
- Page titles and meta descriptions written per page, not generated
- Sitemap and robots file, submitted to Google Search Console
- Structured data for local business, restaurant, service, or product, as it applies
- Google Business Profile claimed, filled in, and matching the site exactly
- Link previews for social and messaging apps, so a shared link does not look broken
- Redirects from every old address if there was a previous site
Turning visitors into calls
- Contact and quote forms with spam protection and confirmed inbox delivery
- Tap to call, directions, and hours reachable from any point on the page
- Analytics, with form submissions and phone taps counted as conversions rather than raw visits
- Booking, ordering, reservation, or payment tools connected where the business uses them
Obligations most quotes leave out
- Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA: contrast, keyboard access, focus states, alt text, form labels
- Ontario businesses with fifty or more employees are already required to meet WCAG under AODA
- A privacy policy that reflects what the site actually collects, under PIPEDA
- Cookie and consent handling, kept to what the site genuinely needs
- A CASL compliant footer on anything that sends marketing email
- Image and font licensing, so nothing on the site is borrowed from someone who can invoice you for it
After launch
- Backups, uptime monitoring, and security updates
- A written handover: what everything is, where it lives, and how to log in
- A content editor, if you want to change text yourself
- Domain renewal, which is yours to keep and yours to lose
None of this is optional in the sense of being nice to have. A site with no structured data does not appear in local results. A site with no consent handling is a liability. A site you do not own is a subscription you cannot cancel.
Common questions
What do you build it with?
Hand built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, deployed as static files to a global network. No WordPress unless you specifically want it, because a static site has nothing to hack, nothing to update weekly, and loads faster than anything running a database on every visit. If you need to edit the text yourself, I add an editor on top.
Will I be able to change things myself?
On Starter and Standard, small text changes come back to me and are usually done the same day. If editing it yourself matters, say so at the start and it becomes a Custom build with a content editor.
Do I need to buy hosting?
At the size of a small business site, no. Static hosting on a modern network is free at this traffic level, and I set it up on your own account. The only thing you pay for annually is the domain, directly to the registrar, in your name.
What do you need from me to start?
Whatever you already have: your services or menu, hours, address, phone, and any photos you own the rights to. Missing pieces are normal, and writing is included on the Local Business tier.
Can you take over a site someone else built?
Usually. The first job is getting your domain and accounts back into your name, which I will help with even if you decide not to rebuild.
Show me what you are working with.
Send your current site, or just your business name if there is no site yet. I will reply with which shape fits, what I would build, and the exact price.