This article is not a description of what a good trades website looks like. It is a fault-finding exercise on the site you already run. Pick up your phone, open your own website, and work through the six points in order. Each one takes under a minute to check, and none of them requires you to hire anybody.
The reason for that order: in the trades, a website rarely fails because of its styling. It fails on some small detail in the sequence between being found and being called. If you notice the symptom in the business, you can usually find the cause on the site yourself — provided you know where to look.
Start with the symptom, not the cause
Do not begin with the website. Begin with what you notice day to day: a quiet phone despite visitors, enquiries from places you never travel to, prospects asking for references before you have even quoted. The table below starts from those observations and names the place where the problem almost always sits.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Immediate action |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors arrive, the phone stays quiet | The number is not tappable, or sits only at the very bottom | Put the number in the header of every page as a phone link |
| Enquiries arrive late or not at all | The form sends nothing, or the mail lands in the spam folder | Send yourself a test enquiry and check the spam folder |
| Calls from towns you do not travel to | The service area is never stated in the text | Write out the towns and the radius on the home page |
| Prospects ask for references before you quote | The site shows bought photography instead of your own work | Put up ten phone photographs of completed jobs |
| Visitors leave again straight away | The page is too slow over a mobile connection | Shrink large image files, remove the home page slider |
| You do not appear in the map panel | No Google Business Profile, or an abandoned one | Claim the profile, add hours and services |
| Customers quote an old number or address | Website, Google profile and directories contradict each other | Settle on one spelling and align it everywhere |
The right-hand column is deliberately chosen so that it can be done without an agency. Whatever is still open after that is a case for a rebuild — not the other way round.
Mistake 1: The number is there, but nobody can call it
The symptom is easy to miss: the website gets visits and the phone still stays quiet. The most common reason is mundane. The number sits right at the bottom in the footer, or it is part of a graphic in the header. On a phone that means: swipe repeatedly, read the number off, switch apps, type it in. Somebody who already knows you will do those four steps. Somebody with three businesses open side by side will not.
Check it in five seconds: on your phone, tap your own number. If the dialler does not open, it is not a link. Then try to select and copy it — if you cannot, it is an image, and it does not exist at all for search engines or for screen readers. The fix takes minutes in any content system and is by far the cheapest improvement on this list.
Mistake 2: A form sits where a phone call actually happens
In the trades the call is the normal case. Even so, on many sites the form is the only route on offer — and often a long one: street and house number as required fields, a dropdown for the type of job, a preferred date, plus the privacy tick box. Somebody standing in a flooded cellar does not fill that in. They look for the next number.
The second and worse case is the form that sends nothing at all. It happens after every server or email migration and goes unnoticed for months, because missing enquiries look exactly like a quiet season. So send yourself a test enquiry once a quarter and check the spam folder too. If it is missing there as well, the problem is not your website but the delivery path.
The immediate action has two parts. Cut the required fields down to what you genuinely need in order to call back. And write underneath the send button what happens next and by when: "We will call you back the same working day" answers precisely the question that otherwise causes the abandonment.
Mistake 3: Calls from towns you do not serve
This symptom is unmistakable because it creates work for you: you spend time on the phone turning down enquiries you were never going to take, while the neighbouring town where you are on site every week produces nothing. That means your site does not describe the service area, it hints at it. Phrases like "working regionally" or "and surrounding areas" do not answer the only question the caller has: will you come to me?
The check takes a minute. Ask somebody who does not know your business to find, on your site, the town they live in. If it takes them more than ten seconds, or if they only find it on an embedded map, the point is open — a map is read reliably neither by a search engine nor by a screen reader. Write out instead the places you genuinely travel to, and state the radius in kilometres. Inventing addresses in neighbouring towns, by contrast, breaches Google's guidelines and adds a competition-law risk on top.
Mistake 4: Somebody else is working in your photographs
The symptom is a conversation you have often: prospects ask for references before the quote, or want to know whether you have done "something like this" before. The website should have answered both already. It does not, when what is on it is bought photography — the smiling man with a clipboard in front of a shell building, the perfectly lit show bathroom, the tool wall without a mark of use. Most people recognise those images by now, and they often appear on several sites in the same town at once.
The check: go through three photographs and ask yourself whether you can see your own vehicle, your own people, or a job you recognise. If not, swap them out. Phone shots taken in daylight are entirely good enough; what matters is the caption. "Bathroom in a period building fully renovated, four working days, Offenbach" proves more than any image-library shot — and incidentally supplies exactly the words people will later search for.
Mistake 5: The site loads in the office and dies on site
A website is nearly always tested where it was built: at a desk, on wifi, on a large screen. Your customers open it somewhere else — in the van, in a cellar, in a stairwell, on a connection that comes and goes. If the page stays blank there and then arrives in pieces, the visit is over before a single one of your services was visible.
The check is to turn wifi off on your phone and count out loud. Three seconds is unremarkable, eight is not. The cause is almost always the images: a shot loaded straight from a phone camera into the page is many times larger than it needs to be. Resize and compress the files before uploading them — and throw out the home page slider, which loads several large photographs most of which nobody ever sees.
Mistake 6: The Google Business Profile exists, but nobody maintains it
For local trades a large part of the decision happens before anyone opens your website at all — in the map panel above the search results. That is where it says whether you are open right now, how far away you are, and what other people have written. An abandoned profile does more damage there than none at all: opening hours from the year before last, public holidays never entered, the most recent review unanswered for months.
Check it the way a customer would: search in a private browser window for your trade and your town. Do you appear in the map panel, and is what it says correct? This is the one point on the list that has nothing to do with your website and is on it anyway — because it is the cheapest. Claiming the profile, correcting the hours, entering your services and replying to reviews costs nothing and is an evening's work.
The ten-minute self-diagnosis
If you take one thing from this article, take this sequence. You need your phone, ten minutes, and nobody else.
- Minute 1: Turn wifi off on your phone, open your home page over the mobile network, and count until the text and first image are there.
- Minute 2: Tap your phone number. Does the dialler open? If not, it is an image or plain text.
- Minute 3: Without scrolling, answer the question: what does this business do, and where does it work?
- Minute 4: Look for your most important neighbouring town. Is it written out in the text — or only on a map?
- Minute 5: Look at three photographs. Can you see your own people, your own vehicles, your own jobs?
- Minute 6: Fill in your own contact form one-handed and send it. Count the required fields as you go.
- Minute 7: Check the inbox and the spam folder. Did the test enquiry arrive, and from which sender address?
- Minute 8: In a private browser window, search for your trade and your town. Do you appear in the map panel?
- Minute 9: Open your Google Business Profile. Are the hours, holidays, services and photos correct?
- Minute 10: Compare name, address and phone number across website, Google profile and invoice. Identical all three times?
What the result means
One or two open points are normal and usually settled in an hour — you do not need anyone for that. If four or more stay open, however, and they are spread across different areas (technical, content, visibility), then you are no longer fixing individual faults; you are working against the way the site is built. That is the point at which a rebuild becomes cheaper than more patching, because every correction to an old structure makes the next one more expensive.
One closing note that argues against our own business: as long as your order book is full and you are not hiring, none of these six points is urgent — with the exception of the Google profile, which you should maintain anyway. A new website does not solve a problem you do not have. If you do want to know how a trades website should be built from the ground up, the full list of requirements is on our sector page.
Common questions about mistakes on trades websites
Usually it is not the look of the site but one of the six places above. Two are the most common: a phone number that cannot be tapped, and a form whose messages never arrive. Check those two before you think about styling — both can be settled in an afternoon.
As few as you need in order to call back: name, phone number, and a short description of the job. Everything else — address, preferred date, exact measurements — you will settle faster and more reliably on the phone. Every extra required field is one more opportunity to abandon the process.
Turn off wifi and open your home page over the mobile network, ideally not at your business premises. Count until the text and the first image are there. If the page stays blank for more than a few seconds, oversized image files are almost always the cause — and that can be fixed without a rebuild.
For sheer reachability a well-maintained Google Business Profile goes surprisingly far, and if you are fully booked it is the cheaper first investment. A website pays off once you want to choose jobs rather than accept them, or once you are hiring. Applicants look online first, and the profile says nothing about that.
Repair it as long as the structure holds and only individual points are open. A rebuild is the better call when several areas are affected at once, when the site cannot be changed without outside help, or when every correction produces new side effects. The ten-minute self-diagnosis above tells you which case you are in.
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