Tradie websites: what actually gets you the call

A carpenter sent us his site last year and asked if it needed a refresh. New colours, maybe a better logo. I opened it on my phone standing in a driveway, which is more or less where his customers open it, and the first thing I noticed was that the phone number in the header was baked into the logo image. You couldn't tap it. You had to memorise nine digits and type them into the keypad yourself, on a job site, one-handed.

He'd been running ads into that page for the better part of a year.

That's the pattern with tradie websites. The problem is hardly ever the design. It's that somewhere along the way the site stopped being a tool for getting phone calls and turned into a brochure nobody reads.

The person on your site is already mostly sold

This is the bit that changes how you look at the whole thing. Someone landing on a tradie's website is rarely browsing for fun. They got your name from a neighbour, or they tapped you in the map pack, and now they're doing the check people do before they ring a stranger and let them into their house. Are these people real. Do they do this exact job. Do they come out this far. Have they done it before.

You get about twenty seconds to answer that. Everything else on the site is decoration.

Which is why the things that quietly cost the most work are so unglamorous. The phone number that isn't a real link, so tapping it does nothing. The quote form with eleven fields, including "how did you hear about us", asked before you've earned the right to ask anything. The gallery of stock photos, a model in a clean hi-vis vest smiling at a level, when the bloke has three thousand photos of actual jobs on his phone. The site that never names a single suburb, so a reader in Dapto has no idea whether you'd drive the twenty-odd kilometres to get there.

And speed, which sits underneath all of it. A page that takes six seconds on patchy reception in a garage has already lost the person who was mildly curious. We've written about that in more detail, because it's the single most common thing we find and the most boring to fix.

Proof does more than polish

The one thing I'd change first on most trade sites isn't a button colour. It's the photos.

Real photos of finished work, taken badly on a phone, outperform a professionally shot stock library nearly every time. People can tell. A slightly crooked shot of a deck you built in Figtree says "this person exists and does this" in a way that no amount of design does. Fifteen of them, with a line under each saying what the job was and roughly where, is a portfolio.

Put your licence number where someone can see it, too. Most owners treat it as fine print. It's actually one of the strongest trust signals you've got, because a cautious customer can look it up on the register in about a minute and confirm you're who you say you are. Same with being clear about whether your prices include GST. Nobody enjoys finding that out later.

The search half of it

Getting found is the other job, and for trades it's mostly local. You're not competing nationally for "carpenter". You're competing for your trade plus a suburb, over and over, across the handful of councils you actually work in.

Most of that fight happens on your Google Business Profile rather than your website, and if you only do one thing this month, do that one. We went through what to fix on a profile separately, and it's the cheapest ground you'll ever make up. The website's role is to back it up: pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it, so Google has something to match a local search against. That's the part we cover in the on-site side of local SEO.

None of this needs a rebuild to start. Make the phone number tappable. Cut the form down to name, phone, suburb and what's wrong. Swap the stock photos for your own. Put the licence number in the footer. That's an afternoon, and it will do more than a new logo.

If you'd rather know what's actually broken before you touch anything, a free website audit will tell you, and we'll say so if the answer is "not much".