What to Put in a Website Footer: A Small Business Checklist
The footer is the bit of a website nobody designs on purpose. The home page gets the attention, the photos get argued over, and then somebody notices a strip of empty space at the bottom and types ”© 2019” into it. Five years later it still says 2019, the phone number is the old one, and the company number the law says has to be on the site is nowhere.
That’s a shame, because the footer is where people go when they’ve decided to act. They’ve read the page, they’re interested, and they scroll down looking for a number, an address, a way to check you’re real. What they find either confirms the decision or quietly undoes it. Here’s what to put in a website footer for a UK small business, what each bit is for, and what to leave out.
What a website footer is for
A footer is the block that repeats at the bottom of every page, so it’s the one place a visitor can always find the essentials without hunting through the menu. That’s the whole job: be findable, be consistent, be true.
It is not a second home page. The best small business footers are short: three or four columns on a desktop, stacking into one neat list on a phone, where more than half your visitors will be reading it. If you’re not sure your site handles that, our guide to mobile-friendly websites covers what to check.
The checklist
| Item | Who needs it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Everyone | The name you trade under, matching your signage and your Google listing |
| Phone number | Everyone | Tappable on phones, written as people dial it |
| Email address | Everyone | A business address rather than a personal one, if you can |
| Postal address or service area | Everyone | Address if people visit; towns covered if you travel to them |
| Opening hours | Anyone with hours | Exactly as shown on your Google Business Profile |
| Registered company details | Limited companies | Full name, company number, place of registration, registered office |
| VAT number | VAT-registered businesses | Required on the site, not just on invoices |
| Regulator or scheme number | Regulated trades | Gas Safe, NICEIC, FCA and the like |
| Privacy policy link | Nearly everyone | Anyone with a contact form or analytics |
| Copyright line | Everyone | See below for what it does and doesn’t do |
| Social links | If you post | Only the profiles you actually keep up |
Now the detail, because the table hides the bits people get wrong.
Contact details that match everywhere else
The most valuable thing a footer does is confirm who you are and how to reach you. The name, address and phone number here should be identical, character for character, to the ones on your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page and every directory you’re listed in. Google reads that consistency as a sign of a real, stable business. Local search people call it NAP, for name, address, phone, and we’ve explained why it matters in local SEO for small businesses.
The practical point: “Unit 4, Riverside Trading Estate” on your website and “4 Riverside Ind Est” on your Google listing are two different addresses as far as a machine is concerned. Pick one format and use it everywhere.
Make the phone number a real link, so a tap on a mobile dials it, and do the same for the email address. If your inbox is still a Gmail one, read whether you need a business email address before printing it at the bottom of every page.
If you work from home and don’t want your house published, you don’t have to. Put the towns you cover instead: “Covering Maidstone, Ashford and the surrounding villages” tells customers what they need and tells Google where you work.
The legal lines
This is the part most small business websites miss, and the footer is the conventional place for it.
If you’re a limited company, UK company law says your website must show your full registered name including “Ltd”, your company registration number, where you’re registered (usually England and Wales) and your registered office address. A sole trader or partnership trading under a business name needs the owner’s name and an address where correspondence can be sent. If you’re VAT registered, the VAT number goes on too. One short line in small type does it:
Riverside Joinery Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 12345678. Registered office: 4 Riverside Trading Estate, Maidstone ME15 6XX. VAT number GB 123 4567 89.
The fuller picture, including privacy notices and when you need a cookie banner, is in our guide to website legal requirements in the UK. The footer is also the natural home for the link to your privacy policy, which almost every site with a contact form needs.
The copyright line, and what it actually does
”© 2026 Riverside Joinery Ltd” is on nearly every website, and nearly nobody knows what it’s for.
In the UK, copyright in your text and photographs exists automatically the moment you create them. You don’t register anything and you don’t have to display the symbol, so the line doesn’t create a right you wouldn’t otherwise have. What it does is state plainly who owns the content and that it isn’t free to copy, which is useful if you ever challenge someone who has lifted your photos. The sensible form is the symbol, the year and the name of the business that owns the content.
Two cautions. Only claim what’s yours: a copyright notice doesn’t make stock photographs yours, and if a photographer shot your premises, check what the agreement says. And keep the year current. A footer that says 2021 signals that nobody has looked at the site since. A well-built site updates the year automatically, so ask for that.
Navigation, but not all of it
A short set of links is helpful: Home, Services, About, Contact, Privacy. Repeating every page of your menu, plus every service, plus every town you cover, turns the footer into a wall of blue text that nobody reads and that looks to Google like what it is, which is keyword stuffing. If you serve several towns and have a page for each, one “Areas we cover” link is cleaner than thirty links in the footer.
Social links, if you use them
Link only to the profiles you actually post on. A Facebook page last updated at Christmas does you no favours, and an icon leading to an empty Instagram account is worse than no icon at all. If Facebook is your only live channel, one icon is fine. Our guide to setting up a Facebook page for business covers getting that one in good order first.
What to leave out
- A second contact form. One good form on the contact page beats a cramped one in the footer. We’ve written about what a contact form should ask, and the answer is “less than you think”.
- A newsletter box you’ll never send to. If you don’t have a newsletter, don’t collect addresses for one.
- Generic “trusted” badges. A trade body you’re genuinely a member of is worth showing. A row of stock badges is not.
- Paragraphs of text. The footer is for facts, not a mission statement.
Putting it together
Written out, a good small business footer looks like this:
Riverside Joinery · 01622 000000 · hello@riversidejoinery.co.uk 4 Riverside Trading Estate, Maidstone ME15 6XX · Mon to Fri 8am to 5pm Home · Services · About · Contact · Privacy Riverside Joinery Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 12345678. VAT GB 123 4567 89. © 2026 Riverside Joinery Ltd
Nothing clever, everything true, and the same on every page.
Here’s where we declare our interest, because this is what we do. When our team designs and builds a site from your Google Business Profile, the footer comes with your contact details matched to the profile, the legal line written for your actual business type, a privacy page and a copyright year that updates itself. It’s built on a free .co.uk domain and live within 48 hours of the domain being registered, with hosting at £24 a month including VAT and no build cost. If that sounds useful, you can claim a free website and we’ll take it from there.
Whatever you do, open your own site now and scroll to the bottom. If the year is wrong, the number is old or the company number is missing, that’s ten minutes of work that will quietly pay for itself.