Websites for tradesmen: the complete UK guide

A tradesman website has one job: turn someone who has just searched "plumber near me" into a phone call, a WhatsApp message or a quote request. Everything else is decoration.

That sounds obvious, but most tradesmen websites are built the other way round. They look fine on a desktop in the designer's office and fall apart on a customer's phone at 7am with a leaking pipe. The number is buried, the page takes an age to load, and there's nothing to tell the customer you cover their town.

So when you judge a website for your trade, ask three questions:

• Can Google find it for the jobs and towns you want?
• Does it make people trust you in the first five seconds?
• Is it easy to contact you from any page, one-handed, on a phone?

If the answer to any of those is no, it doesn't matter how good it looks.

You don't need fifty pages. You need the right ones, each aimed at something a customer searches for.

A home page that says what, where and how to call

The first screen should say what you do, where you do it and how to get hold of you. "Emergency plumber in Croydon, Sutton and Purley. Call 07…" beats any slogan.

One page per service

Boiler repair, bathroom fitting and blocked drains are three different searches. One page each lets Google match you to each search, and lets you talk about prices, timings and certificates for that job.

Area pages for the towns you cover

If you want work in five towns, a page per town (written properly, not copy-pasted) gives Google a reason to show you there. This is the backbone of local SEO.

Proof: reviews, photos and accreditations

Real photos of your own jobs, your Google reviews and logos like Gas Safe, NICEIC or TrustMark do more selling than any paragraph you'll write.

A contact page that works in one tap

Click-to-call, WhatsApp and a short form (name, number, postcode, job) that lands on your phone. No 12-field forms.

Prices in the UK run from free DIY builders to five-figure agency projects. For a proper trade site, expect roughly:

• Template or DIY builder: low monthly fee, but you do the work and it rarely ranks.
• Monthly subscription: no upfront cost, a fixed fee every month for as long as you want the site.
• One-off build: you pay once and own it, with optional care from a monthly plan.

Our own builds are fixed-price: £950 for a five-page Starter site, £1,500 for the ten-page Lead Generator and £2,500 for Full Local SEO with a page per town. The full breakdown is on our pricing page, and there's a longer comparison in should you rent or own your website?

Before you sign anything, ask one question: if I stop paying, what do I keep?

With a lot of trade website subscriptions the answer is nothing. The design, the pages and sometimes even the domain stay with the provider. Years of reviews, content and rankings built on that site walk out of the door with them.

That isn't automatically bad (a subscription can be good value if you'd never pay upfront) but you should know which one you're buying. With every WebWise build you own the domain, the code and the content outright. If you ever leave, you take the lot.

A website nobody finds is a business card in a drawer. For trades, Google has two places that matter:

• The map pack: the three businesses shown on a map. Driven mostly by your Google Business Profile, your reviews and how close you are.
• The normal results below: driven by your website's pages, speed and how well they answer the search.

The good news: most trades in any town do very little of this well, so steady basics win. We've written the full playbook in how to rank on Google as a tradesman and how to rank higher on Google Maps.

Most of your customers find you on a phone, often on mobile data. A slow page doesn't just annoy them; they hit back and ring the next trade on the list.

Google measures this with its Core Web Vitals. The targets are for the main content to appear within 2.5 seconds, the page to respond to taps within 200 milliseconds, and nothing to jump around while it loads. Our sites are built to pass all three on mobile, and you can check any site yourself for free with Google's PageSpeed Insights.

Plenty of enquiries arrive while you're up a ladder or under a floor. If nobody answers, most people don't leave a voicemail; they try someone else.

A modern trade website can fix that: a missed-call text back, a WhatsApp button, and an AI assistant that takes the details and sends them to your phone. See how to stop missing calls as a tradesman.

Whoever you go with, ask these before you pay a deposit:

1. Can I see live sites you've built for trades, and are they still ranking?
2. Is the price fixed and in writing?
3. Who owns the domain, the site and the content?
4. What happens, and what does it cost, if I leave?
5. Will I get a page for each service and each town I cover?
6. How will I know it's working: calls, forms, rankings?

If the answers are vague, walk away. You can see our answers on real trade builds, or find the page for plumbers, electricians, builders and roofers.