What makes a good plumber's website
Most trade websites fail at the same three things. The ones that work get the boring parts right before they get anywhere near a redesign.
3 min read · trades, conversion
There is a particular kind of website that every plumber in the country seems to have. A stock photograph of a smiling man holding a wrench. A carousel nobody asked for. A contact form with eleven fields, one of which is “How did you hear about us?”
It is worth asking what these sites are actually for. Somebody’s boiler has failed. It is half past seven in the evening. They have found three local firms and they are deciding, in about forty seconds, which one to call.
The three things that matter
Almost everything good about a trade website comes down to answering three questions faster than the competition.
Do you cover my area? Not a list of forty town names in the footer. A map, or a postcode checker, or a single sentence at the top of the page. The best version of this we have seen puts the service radius in the hero, above everything else.
What will it cost? Publishing a call-out rate feels risky and almost nobody does it. That is exactly why it works. A firm that says “£85 call-out, first hour included” has already won against three competitors who say “contact us for a quote”.
Can I reach you now? An emergency number that is visible without scrolling, on every page, at every screen size. This sounds obvious. It is absent from most of the sites we look at.
What to cut
The about page can go. So can the mission statement, the value propositions, and the section explaining what plumbing is.
What replaces them is evidence. Photographs of actual completed work, taken on a phone, are worth more than any stock library. Registration numbers in plain text beat a row of unreadable accreditation badges. A handful of reviews with real names beats a five-star graphic with no source.
A note on speed
Trade websites are frequently loaded on a phone, in a hallway, on a bad connection, by someone who is already annoyed. A site that takes six seconds to render has lost before it has said anything.
The fastest sites in our gallery are mostly static, mostly text, and rarely weigh more than a couple of hundred kilobytes. None of them look cheap. Speed and craft are not in tension here — the same restraint produces both.
The pattern
The good ones are not more designed than the bad ones. They are less designed, and more decided. Someone sat down and worked out what a person in trouble needs to know, put that at the top, and deleted the rest.
That is the whole method. It is not complicated, which is probably why so few people bother.
