What a barber shop website actually needs, and what it doesn’t

What happens before a first haircut

Someone gets a recommendation, or walks past your shop, or sees a fade on Instagram. Then they do what everyone does: they type your name into their phone. 76 percent of people check a business online before visiting. If what comes back is a bare map listing with someone else’s photo, that first haircut is now a coin flip. If it is a page with your prices, your chairs and your reviews, the decision is already made.

The six things, in order

1. Prices, without calling. “How much is a fade” is the single most common question. Answer it on the page and the phone calls you do get are bookings, not price checks.
2. Hours, kept honest. Including the holiday Mondays. An hours section that is wrong is worse than none.
3. Address, parking and directions. One tap to a map. If parking is tricky on your block, one sentence about it saves walkouts.
4. Real photos. Your cuts, your chairs, your room. This is what separates you from every other listing, and it cannot be faked with stock.
5. Your reviews, pulled onto the page. You already earned them on Google. Put the best ones where a first timer will read them.
6. One booking button. Book, call or text, big enough to hit with a thumb. Everything on the page exists to get this tapped.

Keep the booking tool you already have

If you run bookings through Setmore, Square, Fresha or Booksy, keep it. The website links to it or embeds it, and the tool keeps doing the scheduling. At the time of writing, Setmore’s free plan covers 4 staff and about 200 bookings a month, and Square Appointments is free for a single chair. Building a booking system into the website itself means a database and monthly software, which is the bill we promise you will not have. The website’s job is to get the tap; the tool’s job is the calendar.

What you can skip

A blog. Gift card systems. Member logins. Online product sales, unless retail is genuinely part of the business, in which case that is store software with its own monthly fee and worth a separate conversation. Every one of these adds cost and upkeep, and none of them cuts hair. Four to six pages does the whole job.

What it costs

With us: $499 one time for the website. $699 and we come to your shop, usually on a weekend, and shoot the photos properly. $999 adds video. No monthly fees, the domain is registered in your name, and the photos are yours, which in Canada is not the default. Most sites are live within one week. We build for shops anywhere in Canada and shoot across Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, Coquitlam, Langley and Abbotsford. The full price breakdown is in the price guide.

Common questions from barbers

Sources

• Visual Objects survey: 76% of consumers look at online presence before visiting
• Setmore vs Square Appointments, free plan comparison
• BrightLocal, local SEO statistics

Keep reading: why your shop isn’t showing on Google Maps · what business photos cost