There are two kinds of trade website. One lists your services and sits there. The other produces phone calls. They often cost about the same to build.
The difference is rarely how it looks. It is a handful of structural decisions that most trade sites get wrong.
Start with what the visitor is doing
Somebody lands on your site from a Google search. They are on a phone, probably standing up, and they have a problem. They will decide whether to call you in roughly ten seconds, and they are looking for three things:
- Do they do the thing I need?
- Do they work where I am?
- Are they any good?
Everything on the page either answers one of those or gets in the way. Your company history does not answer any of them. Neither does a rotating hero carousel.
The things that matter
A phone number that is always visible and tappable. On mobile, the number should be on screen without scrolling and should dial when tapped. This sounds obvious. A surprising number of trade sites bury the number in a footer or, worse, render it inside an image where it cannot be tapped or read by search engines.
Speed on a bad connection. Your visitor is not on office wifi. They are outside, on patchy mobile data, and if the page takes five seconds they are gone. Large unoptimised images are the usual culprit. This matters more than any design decision.
Say what you do in plain words, immediately. “Complete property solutions” tells nobody anything. “Emergency electrician, Perth metro” tells them everything. Use the words customers use, not the words that sound impressive.
Say where you work. A homeowner’s second question is always whether you cover their area. If the answer requires a phone call to find out, some proportion of visitors will not bother making it.
Real photos of real work. This is the single biggest trust lever and the one most trade sites skip. Photos of your actual jobs, your actual van, your actual crew. Stock photography of a smiling model in a clean hi-vis is instantly recognisable and it actively costs you credibility.
Reviews on the page. Not a link to your Google profile — the reviews themselves, visible where the decision is being made.
One clear action. Call, or fill in a short form. Pick a primary one and make it obvious. A page offering six equally weighted options gets fewer of all of them.
The things that do not matter
A big services menu. Eleven services in a dropdown is organisation for your benefit, not the customer’s. They came for one thing.
Your company story on the homepage. Have an About page — it helps credibility, and search engines like knowing who you are. Just do not make it the first thing.
Clever animation. It costs load time and it does not make anyone call.
A blog nobody reads. Content can be genuinely valuable for search, but only if it answers questions people actually ask. Four posts about “the importance of quality workmanship” do nothing.
Live chat you never answer. Worse than no chat. An unanswered chat widget is a visible demonstration of unresponsiveness.
The form question
Most trade sites have either no form or a bad one.
A bad form asks for everything — name, email, phone, address, job type, preferred contact method, how you heard about us — in one intimidating block. Completion rates fall off a cliff.
A good form asks a small number of questions that genuinely help you decide whether the job is worth attending: what the job is, roughly where, and how urgent. Split across short steps rather than one long list.
There is a real trade-off here. Asking more questions means fewer submissions, but the ones you get are better qualified and you waste fewer trips. For most trade businesses, filtering is worth more than raw volume — driving forty minutes to quote a job that was never in budget costs a lot more than a lost form fill.
What happens after the form is more important than the form
This is where most trade websites fall down, and it is invisible when you look at the site.
An enquiry arrives. Where does it go? If the answer is “an email address someone checks in the evening”, the site is not really working, no matter how it looks. The enquiry needs to reach you immediately, get an automatic acknowledgement so the customer stops shopping, and land somewhere you will actually see it.
A beautiful website feeding an inbox nobody checks produces the same result as no website at all, just more expensively.
The honest test
Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, standing outside.
Can you tell in five seconds what the business does and where it works? Is the number tappable without scrolling? Are there photos of real jobs? If you filled in the form right now, how long until somebody replied?
If any of those answers are unsatisfying, that is the work — not a redesign.