What this is, and who it is for
Most advice treats a contact page as two problems in tension. Make it useful, which means publishing more, and protect your privacy, which means publishing less. Pick a point on the slider.
That framing is wrong, and it is why so many contact pages end up both unhelpful and over-exposed at the same time. The details that make a contact page useful are almost never the details that put you at risk. Publishing your home address does not help a customer reach you. Publishing your personal mobile does not make you easier to book. The genuinely useful contact page is also the safe one, and once you see that, most of the agonising goes away.
This is for anyone building or fixing that page, and especially for the large number of people who run a business from the place they live.
What a stranger is actually trying to do on this page
Nobody lands on a contact page for pleasure. They arrive with one of a small number of jobs, and the page succeeds or fails at those jobs specifically.
They want to ask a question before committing. They want to check something they could not find elsewhere, usually price, availability or whether you cover their area. They want to buy or book and cannot see how. They want to complain. Or they want to confirm you are a real operating business before they part with money, which is a different job from all of the above and is often the real one.
Each of those needs a route to a person and a reason to believe the route works. Notice what is not on that list: nobody arrived wanting to know your postcode.
That last job is worth dwelling on, because it explains a lot of otherwise strange visitor behaviour. Someone reading a contact page closely without contacting anyone is usually deciding whether you exist. What reassures them is evidence of a real operation attending to messages, not a longer set of personal details.
The one thing every contact page needs
One method of contact that reaches a human and that you actually watch.
That is the whole requirement. One working route, monitored. Everything else on the page is optional and some of it is harmful.
The word "watch" is doing as much work as the word "reaches". A page listing four channels where nobody answers any of them is worse than a page listing one that works, because the visitor has now tried you several times and concluded you ignore people. If a channel is dead, take it off the page. Removing it is an improvement, not a loss, and it takes a minute.
This is also item two of the seven-item floor, and it is the item where failure is most expensive, because it hits the people who had already decided to proceed.
Email, form, phone: what each signals and what each costs you
Three common routes. None is correct in general.
A published email address. Highest trust of the three, because the visitor can see exactly where the message goes, keeps their own copy of it, and can follow up. It costs you spam, which is real, and it must be a business address rather than a personal one. If you have had the same personal address since school, it is not the one that goes on your website.
A contact form. Legitimate, and worth being honest about the cost. The visitor cannot see where the message went, has no record of sending it, and cannot tell whether the form works. Plenty of forms silently do not. If you use a form only, you can offset a lot of that by confirming visibly on screen that the message was sent, saying who will read it, and stating when they will reply. A form that says "thanks" and nothing else leaves the visitor with nothing.
A phone number. Highest confidence for the visitor and the highest ongoing cost for you, because it interrupts your work and cannot be batched. It should be a business line rather than your personal mobile. If you do not want unscheduled calls, do not publish a number: publishing one and not answering it is worse than not publishing one at all.
Choose on what you can actually sustain. A monitored form beats an unmonitored inbox every time.
Response expectations, and why stating one helps you
Put a line on the page saying when you reply. "We answer enquiries within two working days." "Messages are read on Mondays and Thursdays."
This looks like a courtesy to the visitor. It is mostly a benefit to you.
It sets the clock. Without a stated window, the visitor invents one, and the one they invent is shorter than yours. At the point their invented deadline passes, you become a business that ignores people, and you never find out.
It buys you working patterns. If you check messages twice a week, saying so converts a slow reply into an expected reply. Nobody is annoyed by a two-day wait they were told about in advance.
It reduces duplicate enquiries. People who have not heard back send the message again through another channel, then ring, then give up. A stated window prevents most of that.
Two rules. Make it a window you will actually hit on a bad week rather than a good one, and be plain about the times you will not hit it. A holiday note on the contact page is a small thing that prevents a specific and avoidable annoyance.
What should never go on a contact page
This list is not a preference and it is not risk-balancing. These are things to keep off a public page.
- A residential address. Including the case where your home is the registered address of your business, and including the case where it is your trading address. Once published it is copied, scraped and cached, and it does not come back. We will not publish one about a business either, at any time, at any request.
- A personal mobile number. A business line can be changed, diverted or switched off. A personal number follows you for years and is attached to a great deal else about you.
- A personal email address. For the same reason. An address you have used for a decade is connected to accounts and identities that have nothing to do with your business.
- The names of household members. Partners, children, parents, anyone who lives with you. They did not open a business and their names are not part of yours.
- Anything that reveals when a home is empty. This is the one people miss. Holiday closure notices on a home-run business, "back on the 14th", a photograph showing the front of the house, a delivery instruction, a note about the school run. Individually harmless. Together they are a schedule.
That last point is why the closure notice advice differs for a home-run business: say you are unavailable and when you return to work, without confirming that a specific building is unoccupied.
If any of this is already published about your business somewhere and you want it gone from here, request removal is free, fast and honoured. The wider list of what we will never publish about a physical business is at what we won't publish about a shop.
We are deliberately not saying anything here about whether an address is legally required to appear anywhere. That question is real, it depends on your legal form, your sector and your jurisdiction, and it is handled in the post that names sources for it rather than guessed at in a privacy section.
Running a business from home: your options
A very large number of small businesses run out of the place someone lives. The advice written for businesses with premises does not transfer, and the gap is where people get hurt.
Start by separating two questions that get muddled.
What a visitor needs. They need to know whether you can serve them. A town, a region or a service radius does that completely. "Based in the north of the county, working across the whole of it" answers the visitor's question without answering any other question.
What a register, a regulator or a payment provider may require. A different question with different answers, and the answer varies by where you are and what you do. It is not one this post will resolve. What your site has to say about who you are is where that goes, and it names primary sources per jurisdiction rather than asserting a rule.
Options people use, described without recommending any particular supplier of any of them:
- A service address or business address arranged through a provider, so correspondence goes somewhere that is not your front door. Availability, cost and acceptability vary by jurisdiction, and whether such an address satisfies any given requirement is exactly the question to take to a primary source rather than to a blog post.
- A shared workspace or studio that provides an address.
- An accountant or similar professional who offers an address to clients.
- Publishing an area rather than an address, where nothing requires more.
We are not naming a provider for any of these. Naming one would be a recommendation we cannot support and a commercial position we do not want, and the market changes faster than a post can.
The tension is genuine and we are not going to pretend it away. If something does require you to publish an address and your only address is your home, that is a real bind, and the right person to resolve it is someone qualified in your jurisdiction. Trading address, registered address, service address explains what the three terms mean, which is where most of the confusion starts.
If you are listed with us and there is nowhere to put an address that is not your home, we verify differently, and where we cannot verify without publishing something we should not, we decline to list rather than publish it. Our own commitments are at our privacy policy and the physical-business rules are at local and physical.
Contact pages for people who cannot answer quickly
Some people cannot reply fast. One person, on site all day, phone in a bag. Somebody working around care or health. A workshop where answering means stopping.
The mistake is to hide, because hiding reads as absence. Better moves:
Say the truth about your rhythm. "I am on site most days and read messages in the evening" tells a visitor everything they need.
Offer one asynchronous route and mean it. Better one channel answered on Thursdays than three answered never.
Answer the common questions before they are asked. Every question you answer on the page is a message you do not have to reply to. Price bands, area covered, what you do not do, lead times. This shrinks your inbox and improves the page at the same time.
Say what an urgent case should do. If there is no fast route, say there is no fast route. That is far kinder than silence.
The raw material for most of this is the same set of facts you would write down once and reuse everywhere. That is what the fact sheet that feeds this page is for: it sets out each field, what it is for, and which of them should never appear in public.
In Plain English
A contact page needs one route to a person that you actually watch, and a line saying when you reply. That is the useful part, and it is short.
The dangerous part is separate: never publish a home address, a personal mobile, a personal email, the names of people you live with, or anything that tells a stranger when your house is empty. That holds even when your home is the registered or trading address of the business.
None of those things would have helped a customer anyway. Nobody needed your postcode to ask you a question. That is the point of this post: privacy and usefulness are not opposed here, because the risky details are not the useful ones.
If a rule somewhere does require you to publish an address, take that to a primary source for your jurisdiction. It is not a question a website can answer for you, and we will not try.
Get the fact sheet template at free templates, or read the rest of this section at shopfront basics.