Web design for tradies: three jobs, and nothing else.

Prove you are real and licensed, make it obvious what work you take and where, and make ringing you take one tap. Everything else on a trade website is decoration, and most of it is slowing the page down.

The person landing on it is not browsing. They found you on a map or somebody gave them your name, and they are checking whether you look like a real business before they call.

That check takes under fifteen seconds and it is mostly visual. Is there a licence number, are there photographs of actual jobs, does the phone number work on a phone, does it say which suburbs.

Everything a trade website gets sold beyond that, the sliders, the animated statistics, the stock photograph of a smiling man in a hard hat, is being paid for and is doing nothing.

The overwhelming majority of traffic to a trade website arrives on a phone, often outdoors, often on a poor connection. A site that was designed on a large screen and checked on a large screen fails all three of those.

The failures are consistent and easy to find. A hero image that takes six seconds to load, a phone number that is an image rather than a link, a menu that needs two taps to find anything, and text at a size nobody can read in sunlight.

Speed is the one that costs the most and is discussed the least. A trade site loading in six seconds loses a meaningful share of the people who tapped it, and they go back to the map and ring the next business.

What actually matters on a phone

• The phone number tappable, in the first screen.

  Not in a header that scrolls away. Not as an image. A tap that dials.

• A page that loads in about two seconds.

  On a phone, on mobile data, not on the office wifi.

• What you do and where, above the fold.

  A customer should not have to scroll to find out whether you cover their suburb.

A gallery of jobs you actually did is the most persuasive thing a trade website can contain, and it is the thing most trade websites replace with stock imagery of somebody else's tools.

The reason is simple enough. A customer cannot judge trade work, so they judge the evidence that you have done it before, repeatedly, in houses that look like theirs.

Photographs taken on a phone at the end of a job are better for this than professional photography, because they look like real jobs rather than like a brochure. The bar is that they are in focus and in daylight.

What proof actually looks like on a trade site

• Your own jobs, plainly captioned.

  What it was, what suburb, roughly. Twelve real ones beat a hundred stock images.

• The licence number, visible on every page.

  It is the single fastest way to look legitimate, and it is free.

• Reviews shown as they are.

  Pulled through as written, not rewritten into marketing copy, which readers spot immediately.

A page for each service you want work from, a page for each suburb that genuinely matters, an about page with the licence and the faces, and a way to get in touch. That is the whole site, and it is a small one.

Hiring a web designer and hiring somebody who understands how a trade gets found are two different purchases, and they get confused often.

The suburb pages are where money gets wasted. Twenty pages with a suburb name swapped into the same paragraphs is the exact thing search engines are built to discount, and it can hold a whole site back.

Five suburbs, each with a page that says something true about working in that suburb, will out-perform thirty copies. This is the point where most trade website packages quietly go wrong.

What to leave out

• The slider on the front page.

  It slows the site down and nobody has ever clicked past the first slide.

• Stock photography of anybody.

  A reader who recognises a stock photo stops believing the rest of the page.

• A blog nobody will write.

  An empty blog with two posts from 2022 makes a business look closed.