What Should Be on a Tradesman's Website?

Most trade websites have the same problem, and it is not the design. It is that they are built around what the business wants to say rather than what the customer needs to know before they will pick up the phone.

This is the checklist we work from. Not a design brief, a list of the things that decide whether a visitor rings you or goes back to the search results.

Above the fold: four things in eight seconds

You get about eight seconds before somebody decides whether to stay. In that time the top of the page has to answer four questions without them scrolling.

1. What you do. In plain words. Not quality solutions for your home, but bathroom fitting in Eastleigh and Southampton.
2. Where you do it. The single most common reason a good lead leaves is not being sure you come out to them.
3. Why you. One line. Years doing it, a qualification, insured, whatever is true and specific.
4. How to reach you. A tappable phone number, visible, not in the footer.

Everything below that is for people who are already interested. Everything above it is doing the work.

A page for each service, not a list

A single page listing eight services in bullets gives thirty words to each and ranks for none of them. Each real service deserves its own page: what the job involves, roughly what it costs, what people commonly get wrong, what you would need to know before quoting.

This is the difference between a website that exists and a website that gets found, and it is mostly writing rather than design.

Photographs of your actual work

Twenty photographs from your phone beat anything bought from a stock library, and customers can tell the difference instantly. Before and after pairs work best because they show the problem you solve rather than the tidiness you leave behind.

One picture of you, or you and the van, belongs on there too. People are deciding whether to let a stranger into their house.

Something about price

Most trades resist this and the resistance costs them work. You are not publishing a fixed price list, you are stopping the assumption that silence means expensive.

• A from price for your most common job.
• A typical range for the bigger ones, with what moves it up or down.
• Whether quotes and call outs are free.
• How you take payment.

It also saves you time, because the calls you do get are from people who already know roughly what they are in for.

Proof that is checkable

Reviews in the customer's own words, with a first name and a town. A link to your Google listing so people can see the unfiltered version. Trade body membership or qualifications if you have them. Insurance, stated plainly.

What we do not put on a site we build is a star rating or review count written into the page code as a claim. Search engines treat that as a factual assertion about the business, and we only publish things we can stand behind. Real quotes, yes. A number we cannot evidence, no.

The areas you cover, said out loud

A sentence, a list, or a map. It does not matter which, only that somebody two towns over can tell in a second whether you come to them. For trades that travel, a short page per town you genuinely work in is worth having, as long as each one is real and written rather than the same paragraph with the name changed.

Contact, made easy in both directions

Tappable phone number in the header of every page. A form with four fields, name, number, postcode and what needs doing. Your email, because some people still want it. Hours, so nobody wonders whether ringing at seven is reasonable.

If you promise to come back to people within a certain time, only promise what you will actually do. We say on our own contact page that we reply within 24 hours because we do, and a promise you miss is worse than no promise.

Fast, and right on a phone

Most of your visitors are on a phone, frequently on poor signal in somebody's garden. If the site takes five seconds to appear, a good share of them have gone before it does. Keep it light, size the images properly, and check it on a real phone rather than a laptop window made narrow.

What you can leave out

• A sliding banner. Nobody reads past the first slide and it slows the page.
• A mission statement. A tradesman with a mission statement reads as a business trying to sound bigger than it is.
• Stock photographs of people in hard hats. They actively cost you credibility.
• A blog you will not keep up. Two posts from two years ago says closed.
• Anything that moves for the sake of moving.

What this looks like built

The sites we have live follow this list fairly closely. Shakeshaft and Jones leads on the work and the area. Thelwall Carpentry in Sale is built around photographs of actual joinery. PK Removals is structured around the one question removals customers always ask first.

Everything we have live is on our work page, and concept builds there are labelled as concepts.

If you build nothing else

A single page that says what you do, where you do it, shows ten photographs of your own work, states a from price and has a tappable phone number will outperform most trade websites in the country. Everything else on this list is improvement on that. The order matters more than the length.

Builds are £395, £650 or £1,200 and you own the result. If you would rather see it than read about it, we build a real working preview in 48 hours and you owe nothing if you do not want it.

Common questions

Written by Harry Taylor, co-founder of SH Studios. He designs the sites and works with the businesses that use them.