Does a plumber or electrician need a website?
The short answer
Yes, and for a narrower reason than most trades are sold: it is where you answer the questions that decide a call — what areas you cover, whether you do emergencies, whether you are certified, and roughly what things cost. Word of mouth still brings most of your work. The website is what converts the person who was given your name and is now checking you out.
On this page
Where your work actually comes from
Be honest about the order, because it changes what the site is for:
- Referrals and repeat customers — most of it
- Local search — someone with an urgent problem and no recommendation
- Directories and marketplaces — commission attached
A website does not replace the first. What it does is finish it. Somebody is given your name, types it into their phone, and decides in about twenty seconds whether to call. That decision is the website's entire job, and it is where most trades lose work without ever knowing.
The four questions that decide a call
Answer these clearly and you convert most of the people who reach you:
What areas do you cover? Name the towns and postcodes. This is the single most-searched thing in the trades and the most commonly vague — "and surrounding areas" makes someone guess, and guessing means calling the next name on the list.
Do you do emergencies, and when? If you take out-of-hours calls, say so, say what hours, and say what the callout costs. If you do not, say that too — it saves you the 2am call and saves them the wait.
Are you certified and insured? Registration numbers, scheme memberships, public liability. For anything gas, electrical or structural this is not marketing, it is the reason someone chooses a stranger to enter their home.
Roughly what does it cost? Not fixed quotes. A callout fee, an hourly rate, a typical price band for common jobs. "Contact for a quote" on every job loses to the tradesperson who published a starting figure, because the customer is trying to work out whether they can afford this at all.
What a trades site needs
Genuinely small. Five pages at most, and one is often enough to start:
- What you do, in the words customers use — "boiler repair", not "domestic heating solutions"
- Where you work, listed by name
- Certifications and insurance, visible rather than buried
- A phone number that is tappable, at the top of every page, as text and not an image
- A few photographs of real finished work, not stock images of tools
- Reviews, or a link to where they live
That is it. A big site does not win this trade; being reachable and credible in twenty seconds does.
The mobile point is not optional here
Your customer is frequently standing next to the problem. A leak, a dead socket, no hot water. They are on a phone, one-handed, possibly stressed.
If your number cannot be tapped, if the page takes eight seconds, if they have to pinch to read your service area — they are already dialling someone else. This is the trade where mobile experience most directly converts into work.
Service area pages, done honestly
A common recommendation is a page per town. It works when done properly and backfires when it is not.
Done properly: a real page for each place you genuinely serve, with something specific to it — how quickly you get there, jobs you have done nearby, any local considerations.
Done badly: twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped. Search engines recognise this pattern, it can be treated as spam, and it makes you look like a lead-generation site rather than a local tradesperson.
Three honest pages beat twenty generated ones.
The one thing worth more than the site
Reviews, and replying to them. In the trades, trust is the entire purchase — someone is choosing who to let into their house. A dozen recent reviews with replies does more for that than any amount of design.
The enquiry, and what happens to it
For a trade the website has one job, and it is not brochureware. Somebody with a leak wants to reach you in under ten seconds, and if they cannot, they call the next name on the list.
That means the phone number is a tap-to-call link at the top of every page — not an image, not buried in a footer. And it means the enquiry form has to actually work, which is worth checking rather than assuming: a silently broken contact form is the single most expensive fault a trade website can have. Weeks of quiet that look like a slow season are very often a form posting into nothing. See my contact form stopped working.
On Helm, form submissions land in an inbox in the dashboard rather than only in an email that might be filtered — spam handled, every enquiry kept — so "did anything come in this week" is a page you look at rather than a hope. The person who sent it gets an automatic reply with your name and branding on it, which for a trade is worth more than it sounds: it tells somebody standing in a flooded kitchen that a human is now aware of them.