Plumber websites: your site won't win the emergency, and that's fine

I spent an hour going through a plumber's invoices last year, mostly because he wanted to know whether his website was worth keeping. He was fairly sure it wasn't.

Two things fell out of it. Burst pipes and blocked toilets were maybe a fifth of what he'd billed, and every single one of those had come from a phone that rang. Not one had come through the site. The rest of the year, the actual bulk of it, was hot water systems, a leaking shower that had been leaking for a year and a half, a gas cooktop, two bathroom jobs and a run of work from one real estate agent.

He'd built his website entirely for the fifth.

Nobody reads your website with water coming through the ceiling

I want to be blunt about this because plumbers get sold the opposite constantly.

Someone with water spreading across a floor is not reading anything. They're searching from a phone, tapping the first map result, and if it rings out they're tapping the second one about eleven seconds later. There is no page you can write that beats a phone being answered.

So the emergency half of your business isn't a website problem. It's an answering problem, and after that it's a Google Business Profile problem, because the profile is what they tapped. Hours that are actually true, a service area that matches where you'd really drive, and a number that a human picks up. That's the whole play. If you fix nothing else this year, fix whether the phone gets answered at 6pm.

Your site's job in that moment is small and worth doing anyway. Load fast, put the number where a thumb lands, and don't make anyone pinch to zoom. That's it. That's the emergency page.

The jobs people sit on for six months

Here's where a plumber's website is different from most trades, and it's the part I'd spend the money on.

A hot water system that's making a noise. A shower that's been leaking since before Christmas. A drain that blocks every winter and gets cleared and blocks again. A gas point someone wants for a new cooktop. None of these are emergencies. All of them get thought about, googled at night, ignored, googled again, and eventually acted on weeks or months later.

Those people read. Properly. And what they're reading for is not a sales page, it's a diagnosis. How bad is this if I leave it. Is the noise the tank or the valve. Does a recurring blockage mean roots, and does that mean digging up the yard. What's the difference between patching this shower and doing it properly, and which one am I going to regret.

Write those pages. One per job, written the way you'd explain it standing in the laundry. The one that surprises people is that being honest about "this one can wait until spring" wins you the job, because you've just become the plumber who didn't try it on.

We made a version of this argument for electricians and the shape is similar, but the reason is different. An electrician's slow reader is comparing three quotes. A plumber's slow reader hasn't decided there's a job yet. You're not competing on price at that point, you're competing with doing nothing.

The agents and strata managers nobody writes for

Go back to that invoice list. One agent had put through eleven jobs.

Property managers, strata managers and builders are a big slice of most plumbing businesses and I have never once opened a plumber's website that had a single line addressed to them. Not one. They're a completely different reader: they don't care about your bathroom photos, they're not nervous, they're not choosing you emotionally, and they need to justify the choice to somebody else.

What they want is boring. Your insurance and the level of it. Whether your invoices carry the tenant and property details their system needs. How you handle access and keys. Whether there's an after-hours contact for their portfolio. Half a page covers it, and the point of writing it down is that it's forwardable, because that's a person who pastes your link into an internal email.

Put your ABN on it. Sounds trivial. It's the first thing anyone in property checks.

The gas thing worth saying out loud

Most customers don't know that gas work is a separate authorisation, and plumbers rarely mention it, which means the ones who do get the gas jobs.

Say what you hold and let people check it. In NSW anyone can look you up on the licence verification service in under a minute, and there's an equivalent in every state through the state licensing registers. Putting the number on the page and saying "check it" reads as confidence, which is the opposite of how most tradies feel about publishing their paperwork.

Same goes for a compliance certificate. If the customer gets one at the end, say so. Plenty of them have been burned by someone who vanished without producing anything.

If you only change one thing

Look at your last twenty invoices and count how many were emergencies.

Whatever the second-biggest category is, that's the page you don't have. Write it this month, badly if necessary, in your own words. Badly and specific beats polished and generic every time, and you can always tidy it later.

The rest of the site can stay as it is for now. If you'd rather someone else tell you which pages are pulling their weight, we'll go through it for free, and if the honest answer is that your phone is the problem and not your website, we'll say that instead. The general version of all this, for trades that aren't plumbing, is over in what actually gets you the call.