Most trade websites we look at get one or two of these right and quietly miss the rest — which usually means the site is losing calls it should be winning. None of this is complicated; it's mostly things that get skipped under time pressure.
Over half your visitors will be on mobile, often mid-job with dirty hands and thirty seconds to spare. If your number isn't a tappable tel: link in the header, you're asking them to memorise it or type it out manually. Most won't bother.
Plenty of trade sites still break on phones — text too small, buttons too close together, menus that don't work. If it's fiddly on mobile, people leave and call the next result instead.
Stock photos of a generic smiling tradesperson are an instant tell that a site was thrown together cheaply. Real before/after shots — even taken on a phone — build far more trust than polished stock imagery ever will.
"We cover Leicester and surrounding areas" tells both customers and Google exactly where you work. Without it, you're relying entirely on your business name to signal location, which search engines can't reliably use for local rankings.
Insurance, certifications (Gas Safe, NICEIC, etc.), years trading, or a review score — put at least one of these where a first-time visitor sees it in the first few seconds, not buried on an about page.
Tradespeople's customers are often searching from a job site or a van with patchy signal. Huge unoptimised images and bloated page builders can mean a 5-8 second load — long enough that most people bounce before it even finishes.
This sounds obvious, but it's more common than you'd think for a contact form to silently fail — bad email routing, no confirmation, or a broken integration — and the business owner never finds out an enquiry went missing. Worth testing your own form every few months by submitting it yourself.
Happy to take a quick look and tell you honestly what's working and what isn't — no obligation.
Get a Free Quote