Websites for Tradies: What Actually Gets You Work

Plenty of tradies have a website and still get nothing from it. The site looks fine, the logo is there, the photos are alright — and the phone stays quiet. The difference between a website that wins work and one that just exists usually comes down to a handful of practical things, not design taste.

1. The first screen has to answer "are you the right person?"

Someone lands on your site from Google with a job in mind. Within a couple of seconds they want to know your trade, your area and whether you handle their kind of work. If your home page opens with a vague slogan instead of "Licensed electrician serving the Gold Coast", you've made them work for it — and most won't bother.

2. Every service needs its own page

A single "Services" page listing eight things ranks for none of them. Split them out: hot water systems, blocked drains, switchboard upgrades, decking. Each page can then talk properly about that job, show relevant photos, and rank for the searches people actually type. This is the biggest single change most tradie sites need.

More detail on that in should every service have its own page.

3. Your own photos, not stock

Stock photos say nothing about your workmanship. Ten clear photos from your last few jobs do more for trust than any design flourish. They also give you something to put on service pages so they don't read like a brochure.

4. Local proof

Reviews with suburb names, jobs listed by area, and a page for each town you service all tell Google — and the customer — where you actually work. If you cover four towns, four genuine pages beat one page that mentions them in a list.

5. Contact that takes one tap

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often standing next to the problem. A tappable phone number in the header, a short form, and your hours are enough. Long forms asking for a property address before you've earned it lose enquiries.

6. It has to load fast

Slow sites lose people before they see anything. Big uncompressed photos are the usual culprit — a site that takes six seconds on 4G is throwing away enquiries you already paid for.

What doesn't matter much

• Animations, sliders and video backgrounds.
• A long "our story" page — nobody reads it before enquiring.
• Being on the latest platform. The content and structure do the work.

If yours is missing most of that list, it's usually faster to rebuild than to patch. My tradie website service covers the build, hosting and ongoing updates, and the common tradie website mistakes is worth a read before you brief anyone.