What to Put on a Consulting Website (And What Order to Put It In)
Most advice on this question gives you a list of sections. Services, about, testimonials, contact. Fine as far as it goes, and it skips the part that actually decides whether the page works.
A visitor evaluating you asks a fixed sequence of questions, and each one has to clear before the next matters. If your page answers question five before question two, the visitor never gets to five, because they left at two. Order is not styling. Order is the argument.
Here is the sequence I recommend, with the question each position answers.
Is your site converting as well as it could be?
Get a CRO Audit - $99| # | Section | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Intro: what you do, for whom, a price anchor, and a call to action | "Is this for my problem?" Plus one number so cost never becomes a mystery |
| 2 | Credential byline: photo, name, one line of qualification, availability | "Is a real, qualified person behind this?" |
| 3 | Examples of the work | "Is the work any good?" |
| 4 | Services and pricing in full | "What does it cost?" Now judged against work they have seen |
| 5 | Process and turnaround times | "How does this run, and will it land before my deadline?" |
| 6 | Who trusts you: testimonials, affiliations, references | "Has anyone else already taken this risk?" |
| 7 | Full background: credentials, methodology, CV | Verification material for someone nearly decided |
| 8 | Contact: a real form, plus working phone and email links | "How do I start?" |
Why position two is the one people get wrong
Almost every consulting site buries the human being. Identity goes on a separate About page, reachable from the nav, visited by a small fraction of people.
Whether that's a mistake depends entirely on where your traffic comes from, and this is the single most useful thing on this page.
If people find you through search, they arrived already believing you exist. They typed a problem, Google offered you, and that's a form of endorsement. You can leave identity until later and lead with the problem.
If people arrive from cold outreach or a link you sent them, their first question is not about your service at all. It's whether the person who emailed them is real and worth answering. Until that clears, nothing below it gets read. On those sites the credential byline belongs at position two, right under the intro, and moving it up is often the single highest-value change available.
Most solo practices are in the second bucket and have built for the first.
Why proof goes before price
Put your rate card above your work samples and the number gets judged in a vacuum. The visitor has nothing to weigh it against, so it can only look like a lot.
Put the same number after they've studied an example of your work and it gets judged against demonstrated value. Same number, different verdict.
There's one exception worth knowing. If your pricing is unusually low or unusually transparent for your category, it's a positive surprise, and positive surprises are worth spending early. The fix is not to move the whole rate card up. It's to put a single anchor line in the intro, something like "engagements start at $X," and keep the full pricing at position four. You get the benefit of early pricing without spending your strongest asset to buy it.
Why contact goes last, and also everywhere
Position eight is the dedicated contact section. That does not mean the only way to reach you is at the bottom of the page.
You want a call to action in the intro, a closing call to action at the end of every page, and on mobile a tappable phone number in the header. A visitor convinced at position three should not have to scroll to position eight to act. The dedicated section is for the person who read everything and is ready. The scattered CTAs are for everyone who decided early.
What you should not do is end pages by dropping straight into the footer. It's the most common structural mistake I find, and it means every page quietly stops asking.
The sections most people include and shouldn't
A few things earn their place less often than people think.
A long origin story. Your path into the work is interesting to you and to nobody deciding whether to hire you this week. One line of narrative is plenty at position two. Save the rest for position seven, where the nearly-decided reader will actually enjoy it.
A blog nobody updates. Three posts from 2023 signal an abandoned practice more strongly than no blog at all.
A list of tools and technologies. Clients buy outcomes. Your toolset belongs in the methodology section for the reader who wants to verify rigor, not in the pitch.
Stock photography of people in a meeting. One real photograph of you outperforms the entire genre.
The test
Read your homepage top to bottom and write down, for each section, which of the eight questions it answers. If two sections answer the same question, one is redundant. If a question is never answered, that's the gap. And if the answers arrive out of order, move them.
Most sites I audit are missing two or three of the eight entirely, and have the rest in roughly the wrong sequence. Fixing the order costs nothing but an afternoon, and it doesn't require writing a single new word.
For a worked example of this on a real site, here's the full audit I delivered to an expert witness practice, including the structure I recommended and the reasoning behind two departures from the standard order. If you want the same for yours, the audit is $99.