Do You Need a Website as a Tradesperson? An Honest Answer

Sooner or later someone rings you up and tells you that you're invisible without a website, and that for £1,200 plus a monthly fee they'll sort you out. It's a good pitch, because most trades have a nagging feeling they should have one.

So here's the honest answer, from the customer's side rather than the salesman's: for a lot of sole traders, a website is not the thing standing between you and more work. Sometimes it genuinely is. Here's how to tell which one you are.

What customers actually do when they need a trade

Picture someone whose shower has packed in. They don't go browsing websites. They do this:

• Ask someone they know first. Word of mouth is still how most trade work gets found — which is why repeat customers and referrals matter more than any marketing.
• Then they google it. "Plumber near me", on a phone, stood in the bathroom.
• They look at the map results. The three businesses in the little map box at the top, with the star ratings.
• They read a couple of reviews. Enough to check you're real and you turn up.
• They tap the call button. Not "contact us". They ring.

Notice how far down the list a website comes. For most local jobs, it doesn't come into it at all.

Your Google listing does more than a website will

The free Google Business Profile is the single biggest thing for most trades, and plenty haven't claimed theirs. It's what puts you in that map box, it shows your phone number, your photos, your hours and your reviews, and it costs nothing. If you only do one thing this month, do that one — here's how to set it up properly.

Pair it with a steady trickle of reviews and you've covered what the customer with the broken shower actually looks at. No website needed.

When a website genuinely earns its keep

That said, there are real cases where one pays for itself:

• Bigger, considered jobs. Nobody books an extension, a full rewire or a bathroom refit off a map pin. For jobs where people spend weeks deciding, they will look you up properly first.
• Commercial and landlord work. Letting agents, builders and facilities managers often want to see a proper outfit before they put you on their list.
• Specialist trades. If you do something less common — underfloor heating, heritage work, EV chargers — a website lets you explain it and get found for those exact searches.
• If you're running ads. Sending paid clicks to nothing is throwing money away.
• If you're hiring. Somewhere to look legitimate to a decent sparky who's thinking about joining you.

If none of those are you, a website is a nice-to-have. If two or three are, it's probably costing you work not to have one.

What a good trade website actually needs

If you do get one, keep it simple. Six things do almost all the work:

• Your phone number, big, at the top. Tappable on a phone. This is the whole point of the page.
• What you do and where. "Gas Safe registered plumber covering Middlesbrough, Stockton and Redcar." Plain words customers actually type.
• Photos of your own work. Real jobs off your phone beat any stock image of a smiling man in a hard hat.
• Reviews on the page. The same ones from your Google listing, pulled through where people can see them.
• Your registrations. Gas Safe, NICEIC, insurance. It's the proof a nervous homeowner is looking for.
• A single, obvious way to get in touch. One short form or a WhatsApp link, not a twelve-field questionnaire.

And it has to look right on a phone, because that's where nearly everyone will see it. If you have to pinch and zoom to read your own number, it's not finished.

What it doesn't need

Most trade websites fail by being too clever, not too plain. You can skip the sliding photos, the "we pride ourselves on quality workmanship" paragraph everyone writes and nobody reads, the stock photography, and the contact form that's the only way to reach you. Five clear sections on one page will beat a ten-page site every time.

You don't need to spend four figures either. A simple one-pager you build yourself, or a few hundred quid to someone local, does the job. Just make sure you own the domain and can get at it — plenty of trades find out the hard way that the site they've paid for monthly for years isn't actually theirs.

Every route to you ends in a phone call

Here's the thing that ties all of it together. Word of mouth, your Google listing, a paid directory, a website, a sign on the van — every single one of them does the same job. It gets someone to ring your phone.

Which means the phone is where the money is won or lost, not the marketing. There's no point paying for a website, then paying for ads to it, if the calls it generates ring out while you're under a sink. A customer whose call goes unanswered doesn't wait or try again later — they ring the next name on the list, and whoever answers first usually gets the job.

Spend your effort in that order: get the phone answered, claim your Google listing, gather reviews, keep customers coming back. Then, if you're chasing the sort of work that gets researched before it gets booked, build the website. There are plenty of other ways to bring the work in that cost you nothing at all.

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