A tradie website has one job: turn a stranger who is standing in their laundry looking at a leak into a phone call.
That sounds obvious, and yet most tradie sites are built as brochures. A hero image of a van, a paragraph about family values, a list of services with no detail, and a contact form at the bottom of a page nobody scrolls to. It looks fine on a desktop in a designer’s office and performs badly in the situation it was built for.
The situation it was built for is this: someone on a phone, often one handed, often stressed, comparing three tabs at once, deciding within about eight seconds whether you look like a real business. Everything below follows from that.
This guide covers structure and conversion for trade businesses specifically. For the underlying design theory, our articles on essential web design principles and visual hierarchy go deeper.
The five second test your site probably fails
Open your website on your phone right now. Without scrolling, can a stranger answer these four questions?
- What trade is this and what do they do?
- Do they cover my suburb?
- Are they licensed and insured?
- How do I contact them right now?
If any answer requires scrolling, you are losing jobs. The top of a tradie homepage should carry the trade and location in the headline (“Licensed Electricians in Brunswick and Melbourne’s Inner North”), a tap-to-call button, the licence number, and a one line response promise.
The tap-to-call button deserves emphasis. It must be a button, not a phone number in text. On a mobile, tapping a properly coded tel: link opens the dialler with the number loaded. Making someone memorise ten digits and switch apps costs you calls you will never know you lost.
The site structure that actually ranks and converts
Here is the page architecture for a trade business. This is the same matrix logic covered in our SEO for tradies guide, viewed from the build side.
|
Page |
Purpose |
Priority |
|
Home |
Orientation and fast contact |
Essential |
|
Service page per job type |
Ranking and conversion. The workhorses |
Essential |
|
Suburb pages (top 3 to 5) |
Local ranking |
High |
|
Gallery or projects |
Proof |
High |
|
About |
Trust and E-E-A-T |
High |
|
Pricing or how we quote |
Filters and converts |
Underrated |
|
Reviews |
Social proof |
Medium |
|
Contact |
Capture |
Essential |
|
Blog |
Long term traffic |
Later |
Most tradies need 12 to 18 pages, not 5 and not 200. One page per service you genuinely want more of, plus suburb pages only where you have real work history.
Do not build a single “Services” page. A page listing twelve services in twelve short paragraphs ranks for none of them and converts poorly for all of them. Split it.
The service page blueprint
This is the page that does the work. Build every one of them the same way:
- H1 with service and location. “Hot Water System Replacement in Coburg”
- Tap-to-call button and response time. Above the fold, always
- The symptoms section. Write the problem in the customer’s words, not trade language. Not “thermostatic mixing valve failure” but “no hot water, or hot water that runs out after two minutes”
- What the job involves. The actual steps. People are more likely to book when they understand what they are buying
- How long it takes. “Most replacements are done in half a day”
- Price guidance. A range, a callout fee, or your quoting process
- Photos of that exact job type. Three is enough
- Trust block. Licence number, insurance, years operating, association membership
- Suburbs covered
- FAQ. Six to eight real questions
- Form plus phone. Repeat the call to action
On publishing prices. Most tradies refuse, and it is usually the wrong call. You are not committing to a fixed quote. A range (“Gas hot water replacements typically run $1,800 to $3,200 installed, depending on unit size and whether the connections need reworking”) does three things: it removes the tyre kickers who were never going to book, it increases trust from the ones who will, and it captures searches that competitors ignore. Tradies who publish ranges usually report fewer enquiries and more booked jobs.
Design for how tradie customers actually browse
Assume one thumb and a cracked screen. Tap targets need to be at least 44 pixels. Buttons stacked vertically, not side by side. No hover effects, because there is no cursor.
Assume patchy reception. A significant share of your traffic is on 4G, sometimes in a regional area or a basement. Every megabyte matters. Hero videos are the worst offender on tradie sites: a 12MB background video looks impressive on the designer’s fibre connection and produces a blank white screen on a phone with two bars. Compress images to WebP, lazy load anything below the fold, and keep the page under 1MB where you can. Our explainer on Core Web Vitals covers how Google measures this.
Assume they are comparing you against two other tabs. Whatever makes you different needs to be visible without scrolling. “Same day service”, “30 years in the trade”, “we clean up after ourselves”, “fixed price before we start”. Vague claims like “quality workmanship” do not differentiate because every competitor says it.
Assume they might be at work and cannot call. Give a second option. An SMS link, a short form, or a callback request. Roughly a third of enquiries come from people who cannot talk right now.
The quote form: fewer fields, more jobs
Form design is where tradie sites lose the most conversions, and the fix is usually deletion.
Ask for four fields. Name, phone, suburb, and a short description of the job. That is it. Every additional field measurably reduces completions. You do not need their email if you are going to call them. You do not need their street address before you have spoken to them. You definitely do not need a dropdown of 14 service categories.
Photo upload is the exception worth adding. Let customers attach a photo of the problem. It costs one field, dramatically improves your ability to quote accurately over the phone, and customers like it because it feels like progress.
Set expectations on the button. “Get a Quote” is weak. “Send Photos, Get a Price Today” tells them what happens next. Our guide to calls to action covers the wording.
Fix the thank you page. Most tradie forms dump the user on a blank “Thanks, we’ll be in touch” message. Use that page. Tell them when you will call, give the phone number for urgent jobs, and link to your reviews so they keep reading about you instead of going back to Google and clicking your competitor.
The trust stack
Trade services are high trust purchases. You are asking a stranger to let you into their home. These elements do the reassuring:
- Licence number, displayed openly. In NSW, contractors are legally required to display their licence number on advertising and correspondence, and other states have their own requirements. Beyond the legal side, a visible licence number separates you from the unlicensed.
- Public liability insurance, with the cover amount stated.
- Real photos of real people. Stock photos of models in clean hi-vis read as fake to Australian customers. A slightly rough photo of your actual crew beats a polished stock image every time.
- Association logos. Master Plumbers, Master Electricians Australia, HIA, Master Builders.
- Google reviews embedded live, not typed out as text. Typed testimonials with a first name and an initial look invented, because most of them are.
- Years in business and job count. “Over 4,000 jobs across Melbourne’s north since 2011” is specific and credible.
- A real address or at least a real suburb. Total anonymity reads as a red flag.
The gallery that sells versus the gallery that bores
Most tradie galleries are a grid of 60 untitled photos. Nobody looks past the first row.
Structure it as before and after pairs, grouped by job type, with one line of context each. “Switchboard upgrade, 1960s weatherboard in Coburg. Old ceramic fuses replaced with a compliant board and safety switches. Half day job.”
That single caption does several things: it proves you have done this exact job, it names the suburb for local relevance, it sets a duration expectation, and it uses the language customers search with. Twelve captioned jobs beat sixty bare photos.
What a tradie website should cost
Rough Australian ranges as of 2026:
|
Option |
Cost |
Suits |
|
DIY site builder |
$300 to $600 a year |
Testing an idea, brand new sole trader |
|
Template site set up by a freelancer |
$1,500 to $4,000 |
Sole trader with a clear service list |
|
Custom WordPress build, SEO structured |
$5,000 to $15,000 |
Established business investing in search |
|
Larger build with integrations and booking |
$15,000 upwards |
Multi crew operations |
The number that matters more than the build cost is what it earns. A $2,000 site that converts 3% of visitors is worse business than a $9,000 site converting 9%, at any traffic level. Our breakdowns of website design prices in Australia and website development costs go through what drives the variation.
On DIY builders. Wix and Squarespace are fine for a first site and genuinely better than no site. The constraint appears when you want the service and suburb page structure that ranks, where a properly configured WordPress build gives you more room. Our comparison of the pros and cons of WordPress covers the trade offs.
Seven things to fix on an existing tradie site this week
If you already have a site and do not want a rebuild, these deliver the most for the least:
- Add a sticky tap-to-call button that stays visible while scrolling on mobile
- Put your licence number in the header or footer, on every page
- Cut your quote form down to four fields and add photo upload
- Compress every image and remove any background video
- Split your “Services” page into one page per service
- Add captions with suburb names to your gallery photos
- Embed live Google reviews instead of typed testimonials
Our list of common website design mistakes covers the wider set of issues, and the website maintenance checklist keeps things healthy afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
Do tradies really need a website when they have Google Business Profile?
The profile drives the map pack and will generate calls on its own. The website is what converts the researchers, holds your service and suburb pages, and gives Google something to rank organically. The two feed each other, and a profile linked to a weak site underperforms.
How many pages should a tradie website have?
Usually 12 to 18. One per service you want more of, three to five suburb pages where you have genuine work history, plus home, about, gallery, pricing and contact.
Should I put prices on my website?
Ranges, yes. Fixed prices, only where you genuinely have them. Publishing a range filters out unqualified enquiries and picks up search traffic your competitors are ignoring.
How long does a tradie website take to build?
A template based site takes two to three weeks. A custom build with a proper service and suburb structure takes six to ten weeks, with most of that time spent on content rather than design.
Will a new website improve my Google rankings?
Not by itself. A rebuild that adds proper service pages, faster load times and structured data usually helps considerably. A rebuild that just changes the visual design typically changes nothing, and can lose ground if URLs move without redirects. Our website go live checklist covers protecting rankings through a migration.
Where to start
Run the five second test on your phone. If a stranger cannot tell what you do, whether you cover their suburb, whether you are licensed, and how to reach you without scrolling, that is the first fix and it is usually a half day of work.
If you want the full structure built, our web design and development team builds sites for Australian service businesses, and the conversion rate optimisation team works on existing sites that get traffic but not enough calls. Get in touch and we will review your current site against this checklist.
