Do you need a website as a sole trader? What a small business really needs

"I'm on Facebook already — do I even need a website?" I hear that a lot, and the answer is almost always yes. Social media is a shop window; your website is the shop. It is the one place online that is genuinely yours, where the rules aren't set by an algorithm and where customers find you through Google. So let's go through what a small business actually needs — with nothing padded on top.

One note on wording first. In Slovenia a one-person business is usually registered as an s.p. — samostojni podjetnik, the local equivalent of a sole trader. Everything below applies to any small business wherever it is based; the two or three points that follow from Slovenian law are marked as Slovenian, because they are the ones that catch people out here.

Why a website pays off even for the smallest business

• Credibility. A customer who doesn't know you will look you up online before they call. A tidy site builds trust; no site at all plants a doubt.
• Google. People look for services in a search engine — "joiner near Kranj", "accountant for sole traders". Without a site, you simply are not in the place that matters most.
• It works for you 24/7. The site answers the basic questions (what you do, where, how to reach you) even while you sleep — and the people who then call you are already warmed up.

What it has to contain (the basics are enough)

1. Who you are and what you do — in one sentence at the top of the front page. A visitor has to understand within three seconds whether they are in the right place.
2. Your services — clearly listed, ideally with indicative prices, or at the very least an explanation of how someone gets a quote.
3. References or examples of your work — photos of products, of finished jobs, customer reviews. This sells better than anything else on the site.
4. Contact details — phone, email, a form, and where it makes sense a map and your opening hours. Somewhere visible, not buried in the footer.
5. Your business details — the full registered name, the registered address, the company registration number and the tax number. In Slovenia, publishing these on your website is a legal requirement for registered businesses. If you are based elsewhere, check what your own country asks for.

The technical basics you can't do without

• Your own domain (yourbusiness.si) — it looks serious and it stays yours, even if you change developer later on.
• Reliable hosting with an SSL certificate — the padlock in the browser is taken for granted now; without it browsers label the site "not secure".
• A proper mobile layout. Most visits come from phones. A site that falls apart on a phone loses most of its customers.
• Speed. A slow site drives visitors away and ranks worse in Google (more on that in the article on speed).

The legal duties people tend to forget

Besides your business details, sort out a cookie notice (if the site uses cookies — in Slovenia this follows from ZEKom-2, the electronic communications act, and from the GDPR across the EU) and data protection on your contact form: tell the visitor what you will use their details for. None of this is complicated, but it does have to be in place — the fines are real, and being in order builds trust anyway.

The most common mistakes I see

• Out-of-date content — "news" from 2021 tells people you might not be around any more.
• No clear call to action — the visitor doesn't know what to do next: call? write? turn up?
• A thin site with no real content — Google has nothing to rank and the customer doesn't learn enough.
• The site isn't registered in Google Search Console — Google doesn't even know it exists, and without that there is no traffic from search.
• The domain and hosting are in the developer's name — if you fall out, you are left with nothing. The domain should be yours.

How to start

You don't need a big project. A good one-page site with a clear offer, contact details and the right technical groundwork is plenty to begin with — you can build on it step by step. It matters more that the site exists, that it is fast and that Google can find it, than that it is perfect.