Guide
What a trade website actually needs
Most advice about trade websites is written by people selling website features. This is the opposite list: the handful of things that decide whether the phone rings, and the things you can safely ignore no matter who is trying to sell them to you.
It has to load before they give up
Everything else is downstream of this. A page that takes five seconds on a poor signal has lost a share of its visitors before they have read a word, and no amount of good design further down the page can win them back. Under a second is achievable and is mostly a matter of not loading things you do not need.
One obvious next action, on every page
Ring, or send a photo. Not both competing, not a menu of six options. For emergency work it is the phone; for planned work like bathrooms, rewires or re-roofs a form that lets somebody send a picture at eleven at night is often better, because that is when people actually get round to it.
A page for each thing people search
Nobody searches "plumbing services". They search "boiler not firing up", "EICR certificate", "flat roof leaking". A page per service, in those words, is the difference between turning up and not. The same goes for towns: a page for each place you cover, naming real streets and real housing, because "and surrounding areas" ranks for nothing and tells the reader nothing.
Proof appropriate to your trade
This differs more than people expect. A plumbing customer wants to know you can come now and roughly what it costs. An electrical customer wants your registration number and wants to know the paperwork will be right. A roofing customer, choosing between three quotes for thousands of pounds, wants to see finished work. The same site layout cannot serve all three well.
Your own photographs
Phone photographs of your own jobs, even imperfect ones, beat professional stock images every single time. Stock says nothing except that you bought a template. A before-and-after of a back boiler swap says everything, and it costs you the two seconds it took to take it.
Prices, or at least ranges
Most trade sites refuse to mention money, which means every enquiry starts with the customer nervous and you doing free estimating over the phone. Honest ranges with a note that a visit sets the real figure filter out the people who were never going to book and warm up the ones who were.
What you can ignore
- A blog nobody reads. Two useful pages beat forty thin ones.
- Live chat. You are on a roof. It will sit unanswered, which is worse than not having it.
- Animations and sliders on the homepage. They slow the page down and nobody has ever booked a plumber because of a carousel.
- Stock photographs of smiling people in clean overalls. Everyone recognises them, and they quietly signal that there was nothing real to show.
- Anything that needs a customer to make an account.
The one thing that must never be wrong
Your registration number. Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, OFTEC, whichever applies. It should be on the page in plain text so it can be checked, and it should be correct. A number that is invented, borrowed or simply out of date is a regulatory problem rather than a marketing one, and it is the fastest way to turn a website into a liability.
If any of that landed uncomfortably close to home, a fifteen-minute call costs nothing and there is no pitch deck. If a new site won't make you money, you'll get told that on the call.