Words first
How to write website copy for a small shop
Most small shop websites fail on the words, not the design. They read like a brochure written for nobody in particular, when what a visitor wants is the answer to the question that made them look you up. This page turns the phone calls you already take into the outline of the site, then works through six steps in order: the question list, the three sentences at the top, services and prices written without flinching, captions that say something, one clear action, and a read-aloud pass that catches what your eye skips.
About ninety minutes for a first draft if your prices and hours are already settled, then half an hour a few days later for a second reading, because the sentences you cannot defend are the ones you notice the second time through.
Have these ready before you write a word.
- Two weeks of real questions. Scroll back through your messages, your call log and your social replies, and copy down what people actually asked, in their own words rather than what you wish they had asked. Ten to twenty of them is plenty, and the repeats are the point.
- The prices you actually charge, with what each one includes, what it excludes, and roughly how long the job takes. Ranges are fine. Guesses are not, because you are about to publish these somewhere a customer can hold you to them.
- Somewhere plain to write: a notes app, a text file, a sheet of paper. Draft the words before you open any editor, because a blank text file asks you what you want to say and a design tool asks you which colour you want.
Write down the five questions customers ask most
Open your message history and your call log for the last two weeks and list what people actually asked, word for word: do you open Sundays, how much for a wash and cut, is there parking, do you deliver out to the industrial park, can I bring a dog. Then count which ones repeat. The five that come up most are the outline of your site — one section each, ordered by how often they are asked, with the most common one at the top. That is the whole method: a small shop's website is not a company profile, it is the answer sheet for the calls you are tired of taking. If you have not opened yet and have no call log, borrow the questions instead. Ask five people who look like your future customers what they would need to know before walking in, and write down their questions rather than your answers.
Write the three sentences that go above the fold
The top of the home page, before anybody scrolls, holds three sentences and nothing else. First, what you are and where you are: "Family-run taqueria on Third Street, two blocks from the Metro." Second, one checkable fact that separates you from the shop down the street: "Twelve tables, everything cooked to order, last orders at eight." Third, what to do now: "Open 11am–2pm and 5–9pm, closed Tuesdays. Call (555) 555-0142 to hold a table." Then run the swap test: if the shop across the road could paste your three sentences onto their own site without changing a word, the sentences are not about you. That is where "quality service, customer first, professional team" dies — every competitor can write it, so it tells a visitor nothing. Name the street, name what you do, and put a number in.
Write services and prices you can say out loud
For each service write three things: what it is in the words a customer would use, what it costs, and what is not included. Hiding the price feels safer and is not — "contact us for a quote" loses more enquiries than any number does, because the visitor reads it as expensive. When the price genuinely varies, there are three honest shapes. A from-price with its condition attached: "From $450 a room, for a standard repaint of a room up to 150 sq ft with sound walls." A range with the reason for each end: "$800–$2,000, depending on whether the old tiles have to come out." Or a fixed price for the common job plus one plain sentence saying anything else is quoted after a look. Then list what costs extra — call-out fee, materials, weekend rate, parking — because a surprise at the till costs more trust than the number ever would. Date the section: "prices as of March 2026". That line is what lets you raise them later without looking shifty. Never write "cheap" or "affordable"; write the figure.
Give every photo a line that says something
A photo of a plate of tacos is decoration. "Beef birria tacos, $14. The broth goes on at six in the morning" is content. Caption every photo with the name of the thing, the price or the duration if it has one, and one fact you would say if the customer were standing in front of it. Before-and-after pictures need the job named and the time it took: "Bathroom regrout, one day, $600." Captions like "our work" or "delicious food" should be deleted rather than improved. Then fill in the image description field — the alt text — with the same plain sentence. It is what someone using a screen reader hears, it is what appears when the image fails to load, and a search engine reads it too. Describe the picture; do not stack keywords inside it.
Ask for one thing, and say what happens next
Take the single action you chose in step one — call, book, order, come in before six — and let every page end at it. Write the button as the thing the customer does, not as a category: "Call to book: (555) 555-0142" beats "Contact us", and "See today's menu" beats "Learn more". Put the phone number in as text so a thumb can tap it, never baked into an image. Then answer the question the visitor is really asking, which is what happens after they press it: "We answer the phone between 11am and 8pm", or "Messages get a reply the same working day." Repeat the action in three places — under the three sentences at the top, at the end of the price section, and in the footer — and resist putting four equal buttons in a row, because a reader handed four equal choices picks none of them.
Read the whole thing out loud before you publish
Stand up and read every page aloud at speaking pace. A sentence you stumble over is not a reading failure; it is the sentence being wrong, so cut it or split it in two. Listen for four things: words you would never use at the counter, sentences longer than one breath, promises you cannot keep in a busy week, and paragraphs where you say "we" more often than the customer would say "I". Then hand your phone to somebody who does not know the business. Without letting them scroll, ask what the shop does and where it is; then ask them to find the price and the phone number, and count the seconds. Over ten and those two things are in the wrong place. Finish on the facts, one at a time, against reality: dial the number from another phone, read the address against the door, and check the hours against the sign in the window.
Four things to do once it is live.
- Keep the list running. For the next month, every time somebody phones with a question the site should have answered, write it down. Those notes are your next edit, and they beat any rewrite you could invent sitting at a desk.
- Answer in their words, not yours. When you add the answer, reuse the phrasing the caller used, because people search and skim with the words they speak. "Can you do it same day?" becomes a line that says same day, not "expedited service options".
- Make the facts agree everywhere. Your map listing, the sign on the door, the receipt and your social bio all state hours and a phone number. Pick the site as the master copy and correct the others to match it, because the customer who believes the wrong one arrives at a shuttered door.
- Put a date on re-checking prices and hours — at least once a quarter, and again before any long holiday — then edit and publish again, because a saved draft does not change the live page. While you are in there, delete one sentence no customer has ever asked about. Pages get longer on their own; they only get shorter on purpose.
Questions that come up
How long should the home page be?
Long enough to answer the five questions and not a line longer. In practice that is three sentences at the top, five short sections, and the same action repeated three times. Length is not what makes people leave; an unanswered question is. Someone will happily scroll through a whole section about what the parking is like, and abandon a much shorter page halfway through a paragraph about your passion for quality. When you cannot decide whether a paragraph stays, go back to your question list: if no customer has ever asked about it, it goes.
Should I write it myself or pay someone?
Write the first version yourself, because you are the only person who has heard the questions. Paying a writer is worth it when you have more to say than you can put in order, when the copy has to work in a language you do not write well, or when you honestly will not get to it — but a good one will open by asking you exactly what step one asks. If you do hire someone, hand over the question list and the real price list on day one. A writer without those two things can only produce adjectives, and adjectives are the part you did not need.
Can I use AI to write the copy?
For tidying, yes. For inventing, no. It does not know your prices, your hours, the day you close, or the question you are asked most, and anything it produces that you cannot verify — a number, a founding year, an award — has to come out before you publish. Its failure mode is fluent copy that would fit any shop in the country, which is the exact failure this page exists to prevent. The safe use is narrow: paste in a sentence you already wrote and ask for it shorter, or ask it to turn your question list into headings. Then read the result out loud, as in step six. It is the same reason our 40 starting points are designed working sites rather than generated ones: the structure is already right, so the only thing left is the part only you can write.
Do I need to put keywords in for search engines?
Write for the person and you get most of this for free, because the words a customer would type are the words they would say: what you do and the town or city you are in, in plain text, near the top of the page. Nobody can promise you a position, and anybody who does is selling you something. What sits on your side of the line: one page for each service you genuinely offer rather than one page listing thirty, real text instead of words baked into an image, an honest page title, and the same name, address, phone number and hours everywhere you appear. Repeating a phrase twelve times makes the page worse to read and does not buy a rank.
Naratake starts from 40 industry templates, and each one already carries the sections this page asks you to write: the three sentences at the top, a services or menu block with room for prices, a photo section with captions, a contact block. The template decides where the words go; you still have to write them, and that is the part worth an afternoon. There are 111 components for adding or removing a section, 15 design styles and 66 colour presets, so the look can change without touching a sentence. The free tools at /tools need no account. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.
See plans and pricing