Most trade websites fail for the same boring reason: nobody ever told the owner what actually needs to be on one. So the site ends up with a welcome message, a paragraph about quality workmanship, a photo of a handshake and a contact page, and then the phone doesn't ring and everyone shrugs.
I run Pixel Heaven, a one person studio in Wallingford that builds custom-coded websites for UK tradespeople and small businesses. This article is the exact blueprint I use, section by section, with example copy for each. You could take this outline and build your own site from it, and honestly, that's the point. A tradesperson who builds a decent site from this checklist is better off than one who pays anyone, me included, for a bad one. If you're still deciding whether a website is worth having at all, start with do tradespeople actually need a website? and come back.
Nine sections. Rough order they should appear in. Here we go.
01The hero: trade, area, one promise, phone number
The hero is the first screen someone sees, before any scrolling. It has one job: let a stranger work out in three seconds whether they're in the right place. That means four things, and nothing else: what you do, where you do it, one specific promise, and how to contact you.
Not this: "Welcome to our website. We are a family-run business dedicated to providing quality services to all our customers."
Write this: "Plumber in Reading. Fixed today or you don't pay the call-out." Or: "Kitchen fitter covering Oxford and Abingdon. Fixed quote up front, finished on the date we agree."
The first version could be any business in any country. The second tells the customer their trade, their town and the one thing they're worried about (cost surprises, jobs dragging on) is handled. Under the headline: a tappable phone number and one button. That's the whole section.
Show your homepage to someone who's never seen it for three seconds, then take it away and ask: what does this business do, and where? If they can't answer both, your hero has failed, and nothing further down the page will save it, because most visitors never get further down the page.
02The trust strip: insured, certified, years, rating
Directly under the hero, one thin row of hard facts. Not paragraphs, just short items: "Fully insured · Gas Safe registered · 12 years trading · 4.9★ on Google." Swap in whatever applies to your trade: NICEIC for electricians, FENSA for window fitters, City & Guilds, Checkatrade score, whatever you genuinely hold.
Why so high up? Because a customer's first unspoken question isn't "are they good?", it's "are they legit?" They've heard the horror stories. Insurance, a real certification body and a visible year count answer that question before it's consciously asked, and then the rest of the site gets read with the guard down.
Two rules. First, only claim what you can prove; putting a Gas Safe logo on a site without a registration number behind it is worse than leaving it off. Second, use real numbers, not vague words. "Established for years" says nothing. "Trading since 2009" says everything.
03Services: one section per money-making job, written around the customer's problem
Here's where most trade sites go vague. They write one paragraph: "We offer a wide range of plumbing services including repairs, installations and maintenance." That sentence wins nothing, because nobody searches for "a wide range of services". They search for the specific job they need done.
Instead, give each service that actually makes you money its own section, and ideally, once the site grows, its own page. Boiler repairs. Bathroom installs. Emergency call-outs. Each one written around the customer's situation, not your capability list.
Not this: "We provide professional boiler installation services using the latest equipment."
Write this: "Boiler died? I supply and fit new combi boilers, usually within a week, with the price agreed before I order anything. Most installs come in between £1,800 and £2,600."
Separate pages matter for Google too: a dedicated bathroom fitting page can rank for "bathroom fitter Didcot" in a way a general services paragraph never will. Start with sections on the homepage if that's what you can manage, and split them into pages as you go.
04Real job photos, with one-line captions
Photos of work you actually did are the single most persuasive thing on a trade website, and the most commonly missing. Not stock photos. Not a model in a clean hard hat. Your jobs, your van, your finished work, shot on your phone in decent daylight.
Six to twelve photos is plenty. Each one needs a one-line caption saying what and where: "Full rewire, three-bed semi, Wallingford." "Resin driveway, 60m², Henley." The caption does double duty: it proves the photo is real, and it quietly plants town names all over your site, which Google notices.
Before-and-after pairs are the jackpot. A cracked, weed-filled patio next to the finished job tells the whole story with zero words. If you're on the tools this week, start taking a "before" photo at the start of every job. Six months from now you'll have a gallery no competitor can fake. You can see how I set galleries out on my own work page.
05Reviews: real names, real towns, placed next to your buttons
Most sites that have reviews at all bury them on a separate testimonials page nobody visits. Wrong spot. Reviews work hardest next to the point of decision: beside the phone number, above the contact form, under the price guidance. The moment a customer hesitates is the moment "Sorted our leak within two hours of calling. Straightforward about cost. — Dave M, Goring" should be in their eyeline.
Not this: "★★★★★ — Great service, would recommend. Anonymous."
Write this: "Rang at 8am with a dead boiler, hot water back by lunch. Price matched the quote exactly. — Sarah T, Cholsey."
Names and towns are what make a review believable; an anonymous five-star quote is wallpaper. Pull your best three or four from Google, keep them short, and rotate in new ones as they come. If you've only got a couple of reviews to your name, fixing that is quicker than you think: here's how to get more Google reviews without pestering anyone.
06Prices, or at least "from" guidance, and how quoting works
The section trades resist hardest, and the one that quietly wins the most enquiries. Customers who have no idea whether your job costs £200 or £2,000 mostly won't ring to find out. Ringing to ask a price feels like walking into a negotiation unarmed, so they keep scrolling until somebody publishes a number, and that somebody gets the call.
You don't need a full price list, and "every job is different" is a fair objection to exact figures. It's not an objection to guidance:
- Fixed prices for standard jobs: "Boiler service: £85." "Gutter clean, semi-detached: from £70."
- Honest ranges for bigger work: "Most bathroom refits come in between £4,000 and £7,000 depending on tiling and fittings."
- Day rates if that's how you work: "Day rate from £250 plus materials."
Then, right beside the numbers, explain how quoting works in two sentences: "Every job gets a free written quote before any work starts. The price I quote is the price you pay." That single line dismantles the customer's biggest fear, which was never the amount, it was the uncertainty.
They already know your prices, roughly, because you all buy from the same merchants and quote the same jobs. The only people your hidden prices are hidden from are your customers. And the customer who'd pick a rival purely for being £30 cheaper was never your customer anyway.
07About: a face and a short honest story
People hire people. This is truer in the trades than anywhere, because the customer is letting you into their house. A short about section with a genuine photo of your face (or you and the van, or the team on site) converts better than any amount of polished copy, and it's the section most sole traders skip out of embarrassment.
Keep it short and keep it human. Five sentences: who you are, how long you've been at it, how you got into the trade, the area you're from, and one line about how you like to work.
Not this: "Our company was founded with a mission to deliver excellence and customer satisfaction across all projects."
Write this: "I'm Dave. I've been laying driveways around Reading for 14 years, first for a big contractor, then on my own since 2016. It's me and one labourer, so when you ring, you get me, and I'm the one who turns up."
Nobody has ever hired a builder because of a mission statement. Plenty of people have hired one because he seemed like a normal bloke who'd been doing it a while. If you want a live example of the format, my own about page follows the same recipe.
08Areas served: name the towns, and give the big ones their own page
Google cannot send you local customers if your site never says where you work. It sounds too obvious to be a real problem, and yet a huge share of trade sites list a mobile number and no place names at all. When someone searches "electrician Didcot", Google backs the electricians whose sites actually say Didcot.
Minimum version: an "areas we cover" section written like a person, not a list of forty comma-separated towns. "Based in Wallingford, covering Didcot, Abingdon, Benson, Cholsey and the villages in between. Further out? Ask, I often say yes."
Better version: your three or four most valuable towns each get their own page, with copy about your work in that town, jobs you've photographed there and reviews from customers who live there. One genuine page per town beats one page name-dropping the whole county, and it's the core of how local sites climb the rankings. I've written up the whole method in how to rank on Google in 90 days.
09Contact: phone first, short form second, and say what happens next
The contact section should be the easiest part of the site, and it's where an astonishing number of jobs are lost. Three rules.
Phone number first, and tappable. Most trade customers still want to talk to a human, especially for urgent work. The number goes at the top of every page and again in the contact section, as a link that dials when tapped, not a string of digits someone has to copy out.
Form second, and short. Name, phone or email, what do you need. Three fields, four at most. Every extra field loses people, and a ten-field form on a phone screen looks like a job application. Nobody fills in "How did you hear about us?" to ask about a fence panel.
Say what happens after they enquire. One line under the button: "I reply within 4 working hours, usually sooner." Or: "You'll get a call back the same day and a written quote within 48 hours." The silence after sending a form is where customers second-guess themselves and ring somebody else; that one sentence closes the gap. Then make the promise true, and test your own form monthly, because a silently broken form is one of the most common reasons a website stops producing enquiries entirely.
What to leave off
Half of a good trade website is what isn't on it. Every one of these is common, and every one costs you jobs:
- Image sliders and carousels. Visitors don't wait for slide two. Sliders bury your best content behind a timer and slow the page down. One strong image beats five rotating ones, every time.
- Auto-playing music or video with sound. Your customer is browsing on the sofa at 10pm next to a sleeping partner. Sound they didn't ask for gets the tab closed, not the phone picked up.
- Ten-field contact forms. Covered above, but it bears repeating: every field is a toll gate, and most visitors won't pay ten tolls to ask a question.
- Stock photos of models in hard hats. Customers can smell a stock photo instantly, and it makes them wonder what you're hiding. A slightly wonky phone photo of your actual work is more persuasive than a perfect photo of someone else's.
- Filler lines like "quality is our priority". Every competitor's site says it too, which means it carries zero information. If a sentence could sit unchanged on your rival's website, it isn't earning its place on yours. Replace it with something only you can say: a real number, a real town, a real photo.
The pattern behind all five: they're things people add to make a site feel finished, when what wins jobs is being specific, fast and easy to contact.
Common questions
"Can all nine sections fit on one page?"
Yes. A single well-organised homepage carrying all nine sections is a genuinely good website, and it's how I'd start any sole trader off. Split services and towns out into their own pages as the business grows; that's when the Google side really starts compounding.
"What order should the sections go in?"
Roughly the order in this article: hero, trust strip, services, photos, reviews, prices, about, areas, contact. The logic is that it answers the customer's questions in the sequence they ask them: what do you do, can I trust you, can you do my job, can I see it, what do others say, what will it cost, who are you, do you cover me, how do I reach you.
"What does a site like this cost if I don't build it myself?"
Anywhere from free-with-strings to five figures, depending on who you ask, which is why I wrote an honest breakdown of what a small business website actually costs in the UK. For what it's worth, my own price for exactly the blueprint above is £100 one-time plus £20/month for the domain, hosting and maintenance, with no contracts.
Use the checklist, or let me use it for you
Everything above is yours to use. Print it, work down it on a Sunday, and you'll end up with a site better than most of your competitors'. And if you'd rather be on the tools while someone else does it, this blueprint is exactly what I build: custom-coded trade sites for £100 one-time plus £20/month covering domain, hosting and maintenance, no contracts, with 13 live client sites and a 5.0★ average client rating behind it.
Before any payment, I'll build you a free preview of your homepage, all nine sections, your real business, your real towns, so you can judge it against this very checklist before spending a penny. Full details on the services page.
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