We review tradie websites every week, through free site checks, quotes for rebuilds, and the sites we already host. The problems are remarkably consistent. Most aren’t about design taste. They’re about a customer trying to do something simple, like ring you, and the website getting in the way.
The ten we see most often are a phone number you can’t tap, a broken contact form, no towns listed, stock photos, out-of-date information, a missing licence number, a slow mobile site, no clear next step, lost logins and a home page that talks about you instead of the customer. They’re listed below roughly in order of how much work they cost you, each with a test you can do yourself in a couple of minutes.
1. The phone number doesn’t work on mobile
The number is in the header as an image, or as plain text that can’t be tapped, or it’s only on the Contact page three taps away. On a phone, which is where most people find a tradie, that’s a lost call.
The test: Open your home page on your phone. Can you call with one tap without scrolling? Tap it. Does it dial the right number?
The fix: A tap-to-call button in the mobile header, on every page. If you take a lot of urgent work, a sticky call button at the bottom of the screen too.
2. The contact form is broken
This is the one that hurts, because you don’t know it’s happening. The form looks fine, the customer hits send, sees “Thank you”, and the message goes nowhere. Usually because the email address it sends to was changed, the mailbox is full, or the site’s emails are landing in spam because they aren’t authenticated properly.
We find this on a surprising number of sites, and in our experience the owner usually had no idea. Some had been missing enquiries for months.
The test: Fill in your own form from your phone right now. Did it arrive? How long did it take? Was it in spam?
The fix: Get the form sending through a proper email service with SPF and DKIM set up, and test it every couple of months. Our guide to quote request forms that save tradies time covers what the form should ask while you’re at it.
3. No towns listed anywhere
“Servicing the local area.” “Proudly serving the region.” Neither tells a customer in Bangalow whether you’ll come out, and neither tells Google where you work.
The test: Search your site for the names of the three towns you most want work in. Do they appear on the home page?
The fix: List your service towns by name on the home page and contact page. For tradies covering a wide area, individual town pages can help you rank, if they’re written properly. We explain how in location pages for tradies who cover several towns.
4. Stock photos
The smiling model in a spotless hard hat. The plumber holding a wrench to a pipe that isn’t connected to anything. The electrician who is clearly a stock photo electrician. Customers recognise these instantly, and they make a real business look like a lead-generation site.
The test: Count the photos on your home page. How many are of you, your team, your vehicles or your work?
The fix: Replace them with real photos, even phone photos. A slightly imperfect photo of your own van says more than a perfect photo of someone else’s. If you want better than phone quality for the hero images, a half-day professional shoot is money well spent.
5. Out-of-date information
Old phone numbers. An address from two moves ago. A notice about COVID trading hours. “Copyright 2019” in the footer. A Facebook feed widget that stopped working when Facebook changed something. A services list that includes work you stopped doing years ago.
Each one is small. Together they say “nobody is minding this business”.
The test: Read every page of your site as if you were a customer. Note anything that’s no longer true.
The fix: Update it, then do the same read-through every six months. The week you do your BAS is as good a trigger as any.
6. No licence number
In NSW, your name and licence number are required in advertising for residential building work over $5,000 and all specialist work like electrical and plumbing. Your website counts. It’s also a trust signal that costs nothing.
The test: Is your licence number on every page?
The fix: Put it in the footer, as text, with the name the licence is held under.
7. The site is slow on a phone
Huge uncompressed photos, a background video, a slider with eight images, three chat widgets and a plugin for every feature. On the NBN at home it’s fine. On a phone in a paddock outside Kyogle it takes eight seconds, and the customer has already rung someone else.
The test: Run your home page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score. Or just load it on your phone with wifi turned off.
The fix: Compress images, remove the slider, and remove plugins you don’t need. If the hosting is the bottleneck, move it. Cheap hosting is a false economy on a site that’s meant to make money, and proper hosting and maintenance costs less than one lost job a month.
8. Nothing that says what happens next
The site describes your services, then stops. No “Get a quote” button. No explanation of how quoting works, how fast you respond or whether there’s a call-out fee.
The test: Look at the bottom of each service page. Is there a clear next step?
The fix: End every service page with a call to action: a quote button, your phone number and one sentence about what happens when they get in touch.
9. Nobody can log in
The site was built by a nephew, a mate or a company that has since disappeared. Nobody has the login. The domain is registered in someone else’s name. The hosting renews on a credit card that expired.
This one doesn’t cost you jobs until the day the site disappears. Then it costs you all of them.
The test: Can you log in to your website, your domain registrar and your hosting today? Is the domain in your business name?
The fix: Recover access now, while things are working. Get the domain in your name. We explain what you should own and hold logins for in owning your website. If that’s impossible, it’s usually a sign it’s time for a rebuild you control.
10. A home page that’s about you, not them
“Established in 2008, we pride ourselves on quality workmanship and customer service.” Every tradie says this. It doesn’t help a customer decide.
The fix: Lead with what you do, where you do it and how to book. “Electrician in Ballina and Lennox Head. Switchboards, lighting, solar and safety inspections. Call for a quote.” Then the history.
What a decent tradie site gets right
None of this is complicated. On a trade site like the one we built for Richmond River Roofing, these basics come first, before anyone talks about colours or layout. Get them right and the site will usually outperform a fancier one that doesn’t.
More than three failed tests usually means it’s time for a proper look. tradie.agency does a free site check, and the main question it answers is whether those problems need a fix or a rebuild. You can also see the kind of sites we build on our websites for tradies page.