Free, no email required
The 12-point website checklist for trade businesses.
This is the list we run against every site before it publishes. Use it on your own site tonight, whoever built it — a builder site, an old agency site, the one your nephew did. Nothing here needs a designer to fix.
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01 A phone number you can tap, on every page
Most trade visitors arrive on a phone and want to call, not read. If the number is an image, or only on the contact page, you are losing the ones in a hurry.
How we do it: a
tel:link in the header, the hero, a call band and the footer of every page. -
02 Your trade and your town in the page title
"Home | Smith & Sons" tells Google nothing. "Emergency Plumber in Austin, TX" is what somebody types at 7am with a leak.
How we do it: titles, descriptions and headings are written from your trade and town, per page.
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03 One obvious thing to do on the home page
Two equal buttons — call us, book online, download our brochure — split attention and get neither. Pick the one that pays.
How we do it: an emergency business gets "call first, form second"; planned work gets the form.
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04 A page per job you want more of
One "Services" page listing fourteen things ranks for none of them. A page for drain cleaning can rank for drain cleaning.
How we do it: six services written for your trade, in the words customers use.
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05 Photos of your actual work
Stock photos of a smiling man in a hard hat are worse than no photo. Three real jobs beat thirty downloaded ones.
How we do it: your photos, resized in the browser, location data stripped, alt text written.
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06 Opening hours, and what happens out of hours
If you answer at 2am, say so — it is the single most valuable line on the page. If you do not, say that too, so nobody rings twice and leaves.
How we do it: an hours editor that folds weekdays into "Mon – Fri" and an emergency switch for the call band.
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07 Your licence, insurance or years trading
Where a licence applies, it is the fastest trust signal a stranger can check. A number in the footer is worth more than the word "trusted".
How we do it: licence and years are fields in the brief, shown as badges and in the footer.
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08 A form that reaches somebody
The most common broken thing on a trade site is a contact form that emails an address nobody has read since 2019. Test it from your own phone tonight.
How we do it: the form posts to your own inbox and shows a phone number as the fallback.
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09 Fast on a weak signal
An 8 MB hero photo is a twelve-second wait in a van on a 4G edge. Speed is mostly a decision about what you refuse to load.
How we do it: static HTML and CSS, no framework, no external scripts — a sample home page is around 34 KB.
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10 Readable and usable by everyone
Contrast, labels on form fields, one heading level one, visible keyboard focus, a skip link. Accessibility is also what makes a site usable in sunlight on a cracked phone screen.
How we do it: checked on every build, in light and dark mode, before publishing.
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11 The boring search-engine essentials
One page per real page, unique titles and descriptions, a canonical URL, structured data for a local business, a sitemap and a robots file. Unglamorous, and often missing.
How we do it: all of it generated with every page, and checked by the validator.
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12 Proof, and only real proof
Three recent jobs and two genuine reviews beat a five-star widget and a "10,000 happy customers" badge. Invented reviews are a search-engine risk and a bad look with neighbours.
How we do it: the reviews section stays off until you add real quotes, and the About page says why.
That is the whole list. We build every one of them in.
Not because it is clever — because it is the difference between a site that exists and a site that gets the phone ringing.
Printing this? It fits on two sides of A4. No email, no account, no pop-up — if it is useful, it is useful.