A website for tradies: what it needs, what it costs and what to avoid

A tradie website works when a stranger on a phone can confirm in about twenty seconds that you do the job they need, work in their area and are worth ringing. That means a phone number that can be tapped, a short form, honest information about what you cover, proof of real work and a page for each job you want more of. It does not need to be large. This guide sets out what to include, what a site costs on our monthly plan, and the mistakes we see most often on trade sites across Australia.

What does a tradie website need to include?

Start with the things a customer checks before they ring.

• A tappable phone number in the header and again near the bottom of each page. On a mobile it should be a proper phone link, not text baked into a logo image. We opened a builder's site on a phone and found the number was part of the logo. Nobody could tap it, and the business had been paying for ads that landed on that page.
• What you do and where you work, said plainly in the first screen. The trade, the region and the councils or suburbs you really cover.
• Your licence number and ABN, somewhere a nervous customer can find them. Every state has a licence register and checking takes about a minute, so showing the number reads as confidence.
• Real photos of finished jobs, with a line saying what the job was and roughly where. Phone photos of your own work beat a stock library because people can tell.
• A short enquiry form and a phone number side by side, so people can choose.
• One page for each job you want more of. A services list with dot points cannot rank for a specific job and cannot sell it. A page that explains an EV charger install or a hot water replacement can do both.
• Reviews you can verify, with the source named. Do not paste in praise you cannot point to.
• Hours that are true. If you do not answer at night, say so, because a clear callback promise beats a vague "24/7".

Our post on what actually gets a tradie the call goes through these in more detail, and the trade-specific versions are in plumber and electrician website design.

How should the quote form work?

Keep it to a name, a phone number or an email address, and a message. That is what we use on client sites and it works best in our experience. Each extra field, such as budget, job type, how you heard about us or a suburb dropdown, adds a reason to stop. You can ask for detail on the first call.

Do not reject a submission because a tracking field looks odd, and do not hide the phone number behind the form. Make sure the enquiry reaches a person quickly: we have written about why contact form emails land in spam, and a form that sends mail as your own domain without authentication is a common reason enquiries go missing.

Count what arrives. A website you cannot measure is hard to improve, which is why we wrote up counting the enquiries you already get.

What does a tradie website cost?

Agencies usually quote a one-off build fee, then charge for hosting, updates and changes separately. Our website cost guide sets the ranges out. Pagecog works differently, and we think it suits a tradie's cash flow better.

All prices are in Australian dollars and include GST.

The website plan covers the design and build, hosting, security upkeep, a domain we manage for you, small edits on request, a monthly report and a dashboard login. Over the 12 month term that comes to $3,576. If you leave early you pay out the rest of the term at your plan rate. The add-ons cancel without a payout.

For Google Ads, you create your own Ads account and pay Google directly for the ad spend. We charge for management only, and we never hold your card.

A rough way to think about it: if your average job brings in more than $298, one extra job a month covers the base plan. We cannot promise that the site will bring you that job, or any ranking or revenue. What we can say is that the model is built so we only keep earning if the site keeps working for you. Details are on the pricing page, and website subscription versus a one-off build compares the two models.

What should a tradie avoid?

Three things come up again and again.

Suburb doorway pages. The idea is to publish a page for every suburb you serve, each with the suburb name swapped in. Search engines treat pages that differ only by the place name as near-duplicates, and the whole group can drag down the site. On a pest control client's site, six near-identical suburb pages went up on one day. A week later the searches it held in the top 30 had fallen from 43 impressions a day to 15. We cover that case in suburb pages: what happened when we published six at once. A single clear service area page, plus a suburb page only where you have something real to say, is safer. More in local SEO for tradies and service area pages.

Invented claims. "Over 20 years of experience", "most trusted in the region" and "24/7 emergency service" are easy to write and hard to defend. If a claim is not true or you cannot prove it, leave it out. Customers notice, and so can the ACCC. Our post on ad claims you can prove covers the same discipline for ads.

Ranking for work you do not do. An appliance repair site we looked after was showing for electrician and air conditioning searches it could not serve. The cause was how the pages described themselves, and the fix was to change the pages, not to write content for the stray searches. See ranking for trades you do not offer.

Also avoid stock photos of models in clean hi-vis, a live chat widget that intercepts people who were about to ring, and a heavy page that takes six seconds to load on patchy reception. We have written about what a slow site costs.

Which schema markup does a tradie site need?

Schema is structured data that tells search engines what a page is about. For a tradie the useful part is small: one LocalBusiness entry, using the most specific type available, such as Plumber or Electrician, declared once for the whole site.

Include the business name, phone, address or service area, opening hours, your ABN and a link to your Google Business Profile and social profiles. Keep these identical to what the profile says. Contradictions between the profile, the site and the markup are a common reason a local business looks untrustworthy to search engines.

Do not mark up reviews you wrote about yourself, and do not add a rating you cannot show. Declare the business once, not separately on every page, which we explain in declare your business once.

How does Google Business Profile fit in?

For most tradies, the profile is where the first impression happens. A search such as "plumber near me" shows a map with three businesses before any website. People tap it. The profile needs the right primary category, real hours, a service area that matches where you would actually drive, photos of real work, and a steady flow of recent reviews that you reply to.

The website supports the profile. It gives Google pages that say plainly what you do and where, and it gives a cautious customer somewhere to check you out. Read Google Business Profile and the map pack for what to fix, and getting Google reviews without being weird about it for the review side.

How do SEO and Google Ads fit in?

A website that exists is not the same as a website that is found. SEO covers the work of being found on Google, and Ads covers paying to appear for specific searches. Both need a site that turns the visit into a call, otherwise you pay twice to lose the same customer.

• SEO for tradies is mostly local: your trade, your region and the jobs people sit on for weeks before they ring. See SEO for tradies, plumbers and electricians, and our SEO service page for what the add-on covers.
• Google Ads for tradies works best when the tracking is clean, the schedule matches how you work and the negative keywords reflect what you really sell. See Google Ads for tradies, and the Ads service page.

If you want a first step, begin with the site itself. Our web design service page explains how we build and run it.

A short checklist before you spend money

1. Open your site on your phone and tap the number. Does it ring?
2. Count the fields on your form. Cut it to a name, a contact and a message.
3. Check your Google Business Profile name, phone and hours against the website.
4. List the five jobs you want more of. Does each have its own page?
5. Look for any claim you could not prove to a customer. Remove it.
6. Check for suburb pages that read the same apart from the place name.
7. Send yourself a test enquiry and see how long it takes to arrive.

When you are ready for us to take it on, get started and we will set up the plan that fits. If you want to compare costs first, see the pricing page.