Unless your quote says otherwise in writing, you do. That single sentence is the reason more small-business websites sit unfinished than any technical problem ever causes.
The design gets approved in week two. Then the project stops, for a month, because nobody has sent the text for the services page.
Why does the copy land back on your desk?
Because you are the only person who knows what you actually sell.
A designer can lay out a page. A developer can build it. Neither of them knows that you do not take jobs under a certain size, that half your work comes from one town, or that the thing customers always ask on the phone is whether you do weekends. That knowledge lives with you, and it is the only part of the website that cannot be sourced anywhere else.
Some studios include copywriting. Many do not, and the line item is missing rather than marked as excluded, which is not the same as it being free. When you are comparing web design quotes, ask the question directly: who writes the text, and is a revision round included. The answer changes the price and it changes your calendar.
This is the same trap as photography. A build waits on assets, and text and images are the two that only you can supply. The photo side of it is in what photos your website needs.
Which pages actually need writing?
Fewer than you think. A small business site is usually five pages of real content, and two of them are short.
Home. What you do, who for, where, and what to do next. That is it. The homepage is not a summary of the whole site, it is a signpost.
Services. One page per thing you sell, if you sell more than one distinct thing. This is where the actual words live, and it is where most sites go thin.
About. Shorter than you expect. Who runs the business, how long, and one reason to trust you that is not "we are passionate about quality".
Contact. Address or service area, hours, how fast you reply. Three lines and a form.
Proof. Reviews, past work, before and after. Mostly not writing at all, mostly collecting.
Everything else can wait. A blog you will not maintain is worse than no blog. Launch with five good pages.
How do you write a page without staring at a blank screen?
Do not write. Answer.
Open a voice memo and talk for four minutes as if a customer just called and asked what you do. Then transcribe it, cut the throat-clearing, and you have a first draft that sounds like you. Almost every good small-business page started as somebody talking.
If you want structure, use this for a services page and fill in the blanks in your own words:
- What the service is, in the words your customers use for it, not the industry term
- Who it is for, and who it is not for
- What happens step by step, from the first call to the finished job
- What it costs, or the range, or at minimum what the price depends on
- The two questions you get asked every single time, answered
- What to do next
That order works because it matches the order the questions arrive in someone's head. Sites that skip the price question entirely lose the people who were ready to buy, which is a large part of why some sites get traffic but no leads.
One more rule that saves rewrites later. Write about what you do, not about the internet. "We install and service furnaces in Kitchener and Waterloo, usually within two days" beats any sentence containing the phrase "solutions provider".
Should you let AI write it?
To get unstuck, yes. To publish untouched, no.
Used as a way out of a blank page, a language model is genuinely useful. Paste your four-minute transcript in and ask it to organise it into sections. Ask it to list the questions a customer would still have. That is a good use, and it costs you nothing.
What does not work is asking it to write the page from the business name alone. You get text that is fluent, generic, and describes a business that could be anyone. It also invents things. If it writes that you offer 24-hour emergency service and you do not, that sentence is now a promise on your website, and you will hear about it.
On the search side, Google's spam policies do not treat AI-written content as automatically spam. The stated criterion is purpose: scaled content abuse is defined as "many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users" (Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search). One genuinely useful services page written with AI help is not the thing that policy is aimed at. Forty auto-generated town pages that differ only by place name is.
So use it as an editor and a prompt, not as the author. Then read the result out loud. If you would not say it to a customer standing in front of you, cut it.
What about the French version?
Decide before you write, not after.
If you need French, machine-translating the English at the end is the worst option, because the English will contain idioms and jokes that survive translation badly and a price structure that may need different wording. Write the English knowing it will be translated, keep sentences short, and budget for a human pass. The full picture on doing this properly for Ontario is in bilingual websites for Ontario.
When is it worth paying somebody to write it?
Three situations, and only three.
When you genuinely cannot get it done. Three months of a stalled build costs more than the copy would have. If two deadlines have passed, stop negotiating with yourself and hand it over.
When the words are the product. Coaches, consultants, lawyers, anyone whose service is judged entirely by how they explain it. Here the copy is not packaging, it is the sample.
When there are a lot of pages. Ten service-area pages that each need to be genuinely different is a real writing job, not an afternoon.
Otherwise, write it yourself and have someone edit it. Editing your rough honest draft is faster and cheaper than commissioning polished text that then has to be corrected because it does not match how you actually work.
Where to start this week
Pick your single most profitable service. Record the four-minute voice memo. Turn it into the six blanks above. That is one real page, and it is the page most likely to bring in work.
Then do the same for the next service, and stop when you have covered what you sell. You now hold the part of the project that nobody else could have done, and the build has nothing left to wait on. Our site work runs from $1,200 to $8,000 depending on scope, and what that includes is set out on web design, with the full ranges on pricing.
If you would rather know what your current pages are missing before you rewrite anything, send us your URL for a free teardown. We will read your site the way a customer does, tell you which page is doing the least work and what it needs to say instead, whether or not you work with us.