What a tradesman website actually needs (and what to ignore)

A web designer once charged a sole-trader plumber £3,400 for a website with a slider, a video background, and animated icons. The plumber's phone number was in the footer, in 12-point grey type. The site loaded in 6 seconds on a phone. It converted 0.6% — so out of every 200 visitors, just over one rang him. The cheapest WordPress theme on the planet would have outperformed it.

The economics of a tradesman website are weirdly simple. You don't need design awards. You don't need 'an immersive brand experience'. You need five things that customers actually look for, presented in the order they want them. Everything beyond that is the agency padding the invoice. This post lists the five — and the long list of things to ignore.

The five things

1. Phone number — visible without scrolling

Top right of every page. Click-to-call enabled. Big enough to read on a phone. If a customer has to scroll, hunt or 'go to the contact page' to find your number, they're already gone. Roughly 40% of trade-website visitors come ready to call — your only job is to not make them work for it.

2. Service area — postcodes you cover

Either a list of postcodes, a list of towns, or a map. Customers want to confirm they're in your patch before they read anything else. Burying this on a sub-page costs you 20% of visitors who'd otherwise have engaged.

3. Trades — what you actually do

Bullet list. 'Boiler repair, boiler installation, central heating, bathroom plumbing, kitchen plumbing, gas safety certificates.' Not 'comprehensive plumbing solutions'. Use the words customers search for. If you don't fit kitchens, say so somewhere — saves bad-fit enquiries.

4. Prices — at least ballpark

This is the one most tradesmen resist. 'I can't quote without seeing it' is a true statement, but it's not the same as 'I can't give a ballpark'. A page that says 'boiler service typically £120-£180, full bathroom from £4,500, leaking tap from £85' converts 40% better than a site that says 'free quote, get in touch'. Customers want to know if they can afford you before they engage. Vague prices are still prices.

5. Proof — Gas Safe, NICEIC, Google reviews

Three or four trust badges visible above the fold (see our trust-badges post). A Google rating with a real number of reviews ('4.9 stars, 87 reviews'). That's all the proof you need. Don't pad it with stock photos of smiling families.

The chat widget — the modern sixth thing

Five was enough in 2018. In 2026, a chat widget is the sixth essential. Roughly 30% of trade-website visitors prefer to type a quick question over picking up the phone — and that share is climbing every year. Without a chat widget, those visitors leave silently and you never know they were there.

A chat widget like Voxinly answers their questions automatically, qualifies them, and either books them or hands them off to your phone or WhatsApp. The cost is £29-£89/month depending on volume. The return — even one extra booked job per month — pays for it 5x over.

What to ignore

The marketing industry will sell tradesmen on a long list of features that move zero needle. Here's the honest list of what to skip:

Page load speed — the silent killer

If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile phone, you're losing customers to that alone. Half your visitors are on a phone, on patchy 4G, with no patience. They'll close the tab before the homepage finishes painting. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights once. If your mobile score is below 70, fixing speed is more valuable than anything else on the site.

Common speed killers on tradesman sites: huge unoptimised hero images, embedded video that auto-plays, too many plugins on WordPress, and theme bloat. A clean static site or a lean WordPress build loads in under 2 seconds even on a phone. That's the target.

Mobile-first matters more for trades than anywhere else

Roughly 70% of trade-website visits are on a phone. Customer's at the school gates, just spilled water on the kitchen floor, in the queue at Tesco — phone-first situations. If your website is designed for a desktop user and then 'made responsive', it will work but it will feel slow and awkward on a phone. Build mobile-first instead: design for the small screen first, then expand.

What a £400 website looks like vs a £4,000 one

The £4,000 website usually has the slider, the video, the custom typography and a 'projects' gallery. The £400 website is a clean WordPress theme with the phone number top-right, the trades listed below the fold, prices on a sub-page, badges above the fold, and a chat widget in the corner.

From the data: the £400 website outperforms the £4,000 website on conversion by 2-3x. Not because the cheap site is better-designed — because the cheap site doesn't get in the customer's way. The £4,000 spending pays for things customers don't care about.

If you're starting fresh — the recipe

1. Buy a domain (£15/year)
2. Pick a hosting plan with a free SSL (SiteGround StartUp £4/mo)
3. Install WordPress, pick a clean theme (Astra, GeneratePress — both free)
4. Set up 5 pages: Home, Services, Prices, Areas covered, About + reviews
5. Add trust badges above the fold
6. Add your phone number top-right of every page, click-to-call
7. Add a chat widget (Voxinly takes 3 minutes)
8. Test on your phone — load time under 3 seconds, all 5 things visible without hunting

Total budget: £200-£500 if you build it yourself, £600-£1,200 if you pay a freelancer. Either is fine. What's NOT fine is paying £3-5K for a 'premium tradesman website' from an agency that treats you like you can't tell the difference.

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