Web design for tradesmen, and what your site needs.

What a trade website has to do

A trade site is opened once, late, by somebody who has just found water coming through a ceiling or has finally got round to the drive. When we wrote up our own pressure-washing business we put it as the things a customer needs from a website at 9pm on a Tuesday, and that is still the whole test.

At 9pm there are three answers to give, and we put all three where nobody has to hunt for them. Do you do this exact job. Do you come to this town. How do I reach you from the screen I am holding. A site that answers all three in the first screenful is doing its job. We build to the assumption that a visitor will not scroll to find out whether the job is even on the list.

That is why the work on a trade site is mostly structural rather than decorative. The jobs get named, the towns get named, and the contact route is put where a thumb already is. Nothing on this page is about making a site look more expensive.

Three faults you can check on your own site in ten minutes

Before anybody sells you a rebuild, test what you already have. Three faults are worth checking first, and none of them is about how the site looks.

Tap your own phone number on your own home page. If nothing dials, the number is sitting inside an image instead of a link, and every caller has to memorise it and type it by hand. Then open the home page on mobile data, away from the yard wifi, and count. Our own old site took eight seconds to first paint on 4G. If yours is anywhere near that, you are paying for uncompressed job photographs and a theme loading fonts and sliders nobody asked for.

Last, look for a town you work in. If the only answer is one page listing postcodes, there is nothing on the site for Google to put in front of somebody typing that town's name.

We can be this specific because our own pressure-washing site failed every one of them before we rebuilt it, and the measured version of each is written up in the Sameday Jetwash case study. A design failure is a matter of taste. These three cost calls.

One page per job, one page per town, and where the line sits

The shape that works is dull and well known: a page for each job you want enquiries for, and a page for each town you genuinely work in. The page-per-service half of that is not particular to trades, and it sits with the rest of the general list on our small business websites page.

The line to be careful about is on the town side. A town page has to be worth reading to somebody who lives there: the work you have finished nearby, how long the van takes to reach them, what the usual job costs at that end of the patch. Copy one page over and over and swap the place name and you have a batch of near-identical pages. Google names that pattern and the penalty for it in its own spam policies, and we quote the wording and the dates on the service-by-town section of the local SEO page.

So the test we build to is per page rather than per site: a town or job page goes in the plan only where it has something specific to say, and a job paired to a town only where that combination is worth its own paragraphs. Page count comes out of the test. It is not a number set before it.

Three things to insist on before a trade site goes live

This is what we build to for a trade, and it is worth holding any designer to it, ourselves included. None of it is clever. The difference between a site that earns and one that sits there is usually getting all three rather than one.

1. A brief you can argue with. Written down before anything is drawn: the jobs you want more of, the towns you will genuinely drive to, and what you expect the site to be doing for the business two months after launch. If you cannot recognise your own business in it, say so then, not at handover.
2. A postcode, a job and a turnaround on every town page. Each one carrying the postcodes you cover, the job you usually get called out for there, and roughly how soon you can be on site.
3. The Google Business Profile claimed at launch. On our own pressure-washing rebuild the profile was claimed and updated alongside the launch, in the same week the site went live, rather than picked up as an afterthought a month later.

The one that gets quietly dropped is the profile, because it sits outside the website and can be called someone else's job. We run through how we handle a profile on the Google Business Profile management page, and the wider search side on the local SEO page. Our own pressure-washing rebuild followed all three, in five working days.

What changes from one trade to the next

The three above apply to every trade. What changes is the brief: which pictures the job can actually produce, and which parts of the spec are worth the time. Which channel wins a given trade, profile or website, is a separate argument and it is made in full on our local SEO page.

Three we have written up already show how far the brief moves. A roofer splits in two: the storm leak is settled in the map pack on how far the van is from the searcher, while a reroof is researched on cost pages for weeks, so a reroof needs its own page instead of being folded into a single services page. A plumber is settled by the clock instead: the out-of-hours search meets the profile before it meets any sentence on the site, so the category and the night hours earn more attention than service-page wording. A cleaning firm runs to a season rather than to an emergency, so the pages have to be live before the demand arrives rather than written during it.

The photographs are the first question the brief has to answer, and they change it more than owners expect. Can the finished job be photographed at all, or is it hidden behind a wall the moment it is done? Can it be shot safely from the ground? Is there a before worth putting next to the after? Pressure washing is the easy end of that, and it is the only trade we know from the inside, because we own one: the before and after of the same slab sells the job on its own. A trade whose work disappears once it is finished needs a different answer, and the brief should settle it before anybody designs a page.

The spec shifts on the contact route and the seasons. Trades taking out-of-hours work need the tap-to-call tested on a real handset and put in reach on every screen. Trades that run to a season need the pages published before the demand, not during it, which is a scheduling decision rather than a design one. Pressure washing runs to a season, and its figures are below with the awkward parts included.

What it costs, and where to read what happens if you stop paying

One monthly figure pays for building the site and for keeping it running afterwards, and it does not move when the site does. Three tiers: Essentials at £49 a month, Growth at £79, and Pro at £200. Setup is £0 on every tier. The opening 30 days run as a trial: say stop inside that window and every month already charged comes back to you.

The usual alternative is a one-off build, priced somewhere between £1,500 and £5,000 by a freelancer or small agency. Hosting it yourself afterwards costs £5 to £30 a month; handing the upkeep to somebody else costs £50 to £300, usually landing near £150. Those are ranges we see quoted in the UK in 2026 rather than any published statistic.

The question a tradesman should ask about any monthly arrangement is what happens when it stops. We answer it in one place rather than in two, because terms that live on two pages drift apart: what you are asked for and what you walk away with are set out under what happens if you cancel. The full tier detail is on the pricing page.

One thing a website cannot do for you

Google stopped Business Profile chat taking new messages on 31 July 2024, and the window to download the chat and call history closed on 30 August 2024 (Google Business Profile Help, checked 22 September 2026). Anybody running on a profile alone lost a contact route from it, with no say in the decision. The point is not the feature. The point is that everything on a profile sits on somebody else's terms and can be changed or withdrawn again, and the same is true of any directory you rent a listing on. A form and a tap-to-call on a site you own are the two contact routes nobody else gets to switch off, which is the one argument for a website that does not depend on where you rank. How the profile compares with ads and with search as a channel, quoting Google's own wording on each, is set out in Google Ads versus Google Business Profile versus SEO for a UK trade.

One pressure-washing site, and what its numbers do and do not show

Sameday Jetwash is ours, not a client, so its unedited Search Console export is published here without a confidentiality conversation. Read what follows knowing we had every reason to flatter ourselves.

Over the 90 days to 11 August 2026 clicks went from 125 to 9,126. Then the part that decides what the figure is worth: two hosepipe-ban guides took 8,423 of them, 92.3 per cent, during a Surrey drought. Set those two pages aside and everything else went from 125 clicks to 703.

Judge us on 703. We will not promise anybody a spike that needed a hosepipe ban to happen, and we would be wary of a designer who did. Three of the seven cost guides also lost average position across that window while their clicks rose, which the case study lists in full. It is not a client on a plan: it runs on the playbook we sell as the Growth plan. What carries over to another trade is the reflex rather than the spike, which is to watch the market the business actually serves, answer a question while people are still typing it, and quote the raw export rather than a slide. The whole write-up, chart and wobbles included, is on the Sameday Jetwash case study.