A barber's website is mostly hours and photographs

For your trade 6 min read

Two things decide whether a stranger walks through your door. Everything else on a barber's website is decoration, and most of it gets in the way.

A man standing on the sidewalk outside your shop, or sitting in a car two streets away, is deciding two things. Are you open, and can you cut hair like his. That is the entire brief. A barber's website that answers those two well and nothing else is a good website, and most of what gets added on top makes both answers harder to find.

One page is usually the right size

There is a persistent idea that a small business needs five or six pages in a menu across the top. For a barber shop that is mostly furniture. An About page kept separate just puts the photographs one tap further away.

One page, scrolled: hours at the top, photographs under them, address and map, price for a cut, phone number. A stranger gets the whole shop in fifteen seconds of thumb.

If you later want a page for something specific, add it then. Starting with six empty pages just gives you six things to keep current, and the thing that will not stay current is your hours.

Hours are the first screen, and most of the point

Put them at the top, written out day by day as text, rather than in the footer, in an image or behind a tab.

Then add the two lines that a plain table cannot say. What time you stop taking the last cut, which is often half an hour before you lock the door, and whether that changes on a Saturday. Somebody arriving at ten to five to find you finished at 4:30 leaves annoyed, and it was avoidable with one sentence.

If you have a day where only one chair is working, say so. "Tuesdays it is just me, so expect a wait" is the kind of sentence that makes people plan around you instead of giving up on you.

The hours that matter are the awkward ones

Normal weeks look after themselves. What loses trade is the public holiday, the week you are away, the afternoon you shut for a funeral, and the two weeks around Christmas where nobody in town can work out which days you are on.

Those are the days people search hardest and the days a website is most likely to be wrong. Make the exceptions easy to add. A single line at the top of the page saying "Closed Monday 25th, open as normal from Tuesday" is worth more than the rest of the site that week.

The other awkward one is a change of hours that sticks. If you have moved to opening at eight, the site, the listing and the sign on the door all have to move at once, or the version people trust will be whichever one is wrong.

Keep one set of hours in three places

Your hours exist in at least three: the website, your Google listing, and the card taped inside the window. They drift apart without anybody noticing, and the one people mostly read is the Google listing, because that is what comes up on a phone.

Pick a habit and keep it. Whenever the hours change, change all three the same afternoon. It takes about four minutes and it is the highest-value maintenance a barber shop has, because being wrongly listed as closed is indistinguishable from being closed.

If keeping three things in step is the sort of task that never happens between customers, that is what a maintenance arrangement is for. Website Care is $149 a month and this is the kind of change it exists to absorb.

Photographs answer the only skill question there is

Nobody can tell from words whether you are any good. They can tell from twenty photographs of heads.

That is what the second half of your page is for. Real cuts, done by you, on people who actually came in. A skin fade, a scissor cut, a beard shaped up, a flat top, a kid's first cut, an older gentleman's short back and sides. A stranger scrolling is looking for one photograph of hair like theirs, and when they find it they stop looking.

Do not use stock photographs of models. They are recognizable as stock, and the shop in them is not your shop, which makes the whole page feel like it belongs to somebody else.

How to take them without hiring anyone

A phone is fine. The things that make barber photographs work are boring and physical.

Stand the client near the window and use daylight rather than the strip light, which goes green. Take the back of the head as well as the front, because the back is what the client cannot see and what their buddy will comment on. Keep the background plain, so the eye goes to the hair rather than the mess on the counter. Take three, keep the best one, delete the rest.

Ask before you post, every time. Most people say yes and are pleased to be asked. Some will say yes to the back of their head and no to their face, and that photograph is still perfectly good.

A handful of new ones a month keeps the page looking like a shop that is open rather than a shop that was open in 2019.

Say whether to walk in or book

Some shops are walk-in only. Some take appointments. Plenty do both and never say which is which.

Write the actual rule. "Walk in any time, but Saturday mornings you will wait about an hour" is honest and useful. So is "appointments only, call or text the number below". The failure is silence, because a man who cannot tell whether he needs an appointment usually goes to the shop where he knows.

If you take bookings through an app, put the button next to the hours, not at the bottom of the page.

What a barber's site does not need

A blog. A slideshow that moves. A video that plays on loading. A chat widget that nobody is free to answer with clippers in hand. A page of testimonials, when the photographs do that job better and the reviews already sit on your listing.

None of these are crimes. They are weight on a page that had two jobs, and each one puts your hours further down the screen.

A short checklist

• Hours written as text at the very top, day by day
• The last appointment or last walk-in time, said separately
• Holiday and closure notice as a line at the top of the page
• The same hours on the site, the Google listing and the window
• Twenty photographs of your own cuts, front and back
• New photographs added a few times a month
• A plain sentence saying walk in, book, or both
• Address, map link and a tap-to-call number on the same page

Questions people ask

How many pages should a barber's website have

One, in most cases. Anything you would put on a second page is usually better as a section further down the first.

Where should opening hours go on the page

At the top, above everything, as readable text. If they are in an image or a PDF, phones and search engines both struggle with them.

Do I need to update my Google listing as well as my website

Yes, and if you only have time for one, do the listing. It is what most people see first when they search on a phone.

How many photographs of haircuts do I need

Twenty real ones is plenty. What matters is variety, so that most people find something close to their own hair rather than the same fade twenty times.

Do I need permission to post a photo of a customer

Ask them, every time. A photograph of the back of a head is usually an easy yes and is just as useful as one with a face in it.

Should I put my prices on the site

Yes, and keep it short. A cut, a beard trim, a kid's cut, a senior price if you do one. It is four lines and it saves a phone call a day.