The typical tradie website form asks for name, email and “message”. Then the message arrives: “Hi can I get a quote”. No suburb, no phone number, no idea whether it’s a $200 job or a $20,000 one. You ring back, play phone tag for two days, and find out they’re in Casino and you don’t go to Casino.
A quote form should do the first phone call for you. Ask the right questions up front and you’ll know within ten seconds of opening the email whether it’s worth your time, what to bring, and roughly what to quote.
The fields, and why each one is there
This is the form we’d start with for most trades. Adjust the job types to your work.
| Field | Type | Required? | Why it’s there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Text | Yes | Obvious. First name is enough. |
| Mobile | Phone | Yes | Tradies call back. Email-only leads go cold. |
| Optional | Handy for sending the quote, but don’t block people without one. | ||
| Suburb or town | Dropdown or text | Yes | Instantly tells you if it’s in your area. |
| Job type | Dropdown | Yes | Sorts the lead before you read a word. |
| Describe the job | Text area | Yes | A short prompt helps (see below). |
| Photos | File upload | Optional | Often replaces a site visit for small jobs. |
| When do you need it done? | Dropdown | Yes | Emergency, this week, this month, just planning. |
| Rough budget | Dropdown | Optional | For bigger jobs only. Filters fast. |
| Property type | Dropdown | Optional | House, unit, commercial, rental. Matters for access and who pays. |
| How did you hear about us? | Dropdown | Optional | Tells you which marketing is working. |
That’s eleven fields, which sounds like a lot. In practice, a well-built form with dropdowns takes about a minute to fill in, and the person filling it in is someone who wants a quote. Long forms only kill enquiries when the questions feel pointless. These all have an obvious reason.
If you want a deeper look at form length and design in general, our guide to contact forms people actually finish covers it.
Getting each field right
Suburb
A dropdown of the towns you service, plus “Other”, works better than a free text box for most tradies. It also tells the customer where you go. If someone picks “Other” and types Tenterfield, you know before you ring.
Job type
Use the words customers use, not trade jargon. An electrician’s list might be: power points and switches, lighting, switchboard upgrade, ceiling fans, safety switch or tripping power, new build or renovation, solar or battery, something else. A plumber would have hot water, blocked drain, leaking tap or toilet, burst pipe, gas, bathroom or kitchen renovation, and so on.
The description box
An empty box gets empty answers. Put a prompt in it:
“Tell us what’s going on. For example: ‘Two power points in the kitchen stopped working after a storm. House is about 30 years old.'”
That example teaches people the level of detail you want.
Photo uploads
This is the most useful field on a tradie form. A photo of the switchboard, the leaking pipe or the cracked slab tells you more than a page of description, and for small jobs it can save a site visit altogether.
A few technical things to get right:
- Allow at least three photos. One is rarely enough.
- Allow files up to 10 MB each. Modern phone photos are big, and a form that rejects them with an error message loses the lead.
- Accept the formats phones produce, including HEIC from iPhones.
- Make sure the upload works on mobile, where most of your customers will be.
Tell people what to photograph: “A wide shot showing the area, plus a close-up of the problem.” If you’ve ever had a customer send six photos of the wrong thing, you’ll know why. Our guide to before-and-after photos for tradies has more on getting usable shots.
Timing
“When do you need this done?” sorts urgent work from people collecting quotes for next year. Both are fine, but you’ll respond to them differently. If you offer emergency work, put a line above the form: “Emergency? Don’t use this form. Call 0491 570 156.”
Budget
For small jobs, skip it. For renovations, builds, landscaping and anything over a few thousand dollars, a budget dropdown with ranges (“Under $10k”, “$10k to $30k”, “$30k to $75k”, “Over $75k”, “Not sure yet”) filters faster than anything else. People who pick a range below your minimum usually self-select out, or at least you know what conversation to have.
Filtering tyre-kickers without being rude
You don’t want to scare off genuine customers. But a few honest lines near the form do a lot of filtering:
- “We service Ballina, Lennox Head, Alstonville and Lismore.” People outside those towns mostly won’t bother.
- “Our minimum call-out is $X.” Or “We specialise in jobs over $10,000.”
- “We’ll call you within one business day.” Sets expectations and stops follow-up emails.
Required fields filter too. A required mobile number and suburb weeds out most of the “just looking” enquiries, because people who aren’t serious don’t want a phone call.
And add spam protection. A quote form without it will fill up with junk within weeks. Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile both do the job without making real people solve puzzles.
Where the submissions go
This is the bit nobody checks. A perfect form that sends leads to an old email address is worse than no form, because people think they’ve contacted you.
Before you launch, and every couple of months after:
- Submit a test enquiry from your phone, with a photo.
- Check it arrives at the right inbox, not spam. If form emails keep landing in junk, the cause is usually missing SPF and DKIM records, which is a quick business email and DNS fix.
- Check the photo is attached or linked.
- Check the customer gets an automatic reply confirming you received it.
If you use job management software, many can accept enquiries straight into a new job or lead, which saves retyping. Worth asking your software provider.
Also make the automatic reply useful. “Thanks, we’ve got your request and will call you within one business day. For emergencies, call 0491 570 156.” That one email stops them calling the next tradie on the list while they wait.
Put the form where the decision happens
Link to the quote page from the main menu, from every service page and from the bottom of every project page. On mobile, a “Get a quote” button next to the call button covers both kinds of customer: the ones who want to ring now and the ones who’d rather type at 9pm.
Building a form like this and testing every submission before it goes live is standard work for tradie.agency. For trades with more complex quoting, such as multi-step forms or integration with your job software, our custom web design work handles that.