5 Things Every Tradie's Website Needs (and 3 Things It Doesn't)

Most advice about "what your website needs" is written by marketers trying to sell you marketing services. Here's a simpler take from the perspective of what actually gets tradies more jobs.

Five things your site needs. Three things it doesn't. No fluff.

The 5 Things You Need

1. Mobile-First Design

73% of local searches in Australia happen on mobile. When someone's standing in their kitchen with water pouring through the ceiling, they're not opening a laptop. They're Googling "emergency plumber near me" on their phone.

If your site doesn't look good and work properly on a phone screen, you've lost that customer before they even see your phone number. Buttons need to be tappable, text needs to be readable without zooming, and the layout needs to make sense on a small screen.

This isn't a nice-to-have. It's the baseline.

2. A Click-to-Call Button

On mobile, the single most important thing on your website is a phone number that people can tap to call you. Not buried in the footer. Not hidden behind a "Contact Us" page. Right there, front and centre, on every page.

The best tradie websites have a sticky call button that follows you as you scroll. One tap, the phone rings, you answer, you've got a job. Every extra step between "I need a plumber" and "I'm talking to a plumber" costs you work.

If you do nothing else to your website, make your phone number clickable.

3. Service Area Pages

This is the biggest missed opportunity we see. Most tradies have one page that says "We service the greater Melbourne area" and call it done. That's leaving money on the table.

Google ranks pages for specific searches. If someone in Essendon searches for "electrician Essendon," a page specifically about your electrical services in Essendon will outrank a generic page that lists 30 suburbs in a comma-separated list.

Create individual pages (or at least sections) for each suburb or area you service. They don't need to be long — a couple of paragraphs about your services in that area, your phone number, and a contact form. This is local SEO that actually works, and it's how businesses show up in the Google Map Pack without paying for ads.

Pair this with a properly set up Google Business Profile and you're ahead of 80% of your competitors.

4. Social Proof

Australians trust reviews. 93% of consumers read online reviews before choosing a local business. Your website needs to show that real people have hired you and been happy with the result.

The best approach: display your Google reviews directly on your site. Star rating, reviewer name, their comment. If you've got 50 reviews averaging 4.8 stars, that's the most powerful thing on your entire website.

Don't have many Google reviews yet? Use what you've got. Photos of completed work (before and after shots are gold), licence and insurance details, industry association memberships, years of experience. Anything that builds trust.

The goal is simple: when someone lands on your site, they should feel confident that you're legitimate, experienced, and reliable — within about five seconds.

5. Fast Load Times

Your site needs to load in under 3 seconds. Ideally under 2.

This matters for two reasons. First, people are impatient. If your site takes 5 seconds to load on a mobile connection, roughly half your visitors will leave before it finishes. They'll tap the back button and call the next tradie in the search results instead.

Second, Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. Faster sites rank higher. It's that straightforward.

The biggest speed killers are unoptimised images (that 4MB hero photo from your phone), heavy JavaScript frameworks, and cheap shared hosting. A well-built site on decent hosting loads in under a second.

The 3 Things You Don't Need

1. A Blog You'll Never Update

Every web agency will tell you that you need a blog for SEO. And they're technically right — fresh content helps rankings.

But here's the reality: if you're a sparkie running a two-person operation, you are not going to write a weekly blog post about "Top 10 Signs Your Wiring Needs Replacing." You'll write two posts in the first month, then never touch it again. An abandoned blog with two posts from 2024 looks worse than no blog at all.

Skip it. Focus your SEO effort on strong service pages and service area pages instead. If you ever want to add a blog later, you can.

2. An Online Store

Unless you're selling products (and most tradies aren't), you don't need e-commerce functionality. It adds complexity, cost, and pages you'll never use.

Your website has one job: get people to call you or fill out your contact form. Every page and feature should serve that goal. A "Shop" link in your navigation that leads to an empty page does the opposite.

3. A Chatbot

Those little chat bubbles in the bottom corner of websites? For a tradie business, they're almost always a waste of money.

Either you're paying for a live chat service that you won't monitor (you're on a job site, not at a desk), or you're using an automated chatbot that frustrates people with scripted responses when they just want to know if you can come fix their hot water system tomorrow.

A clear phone number and a simple contact form will serve you better. People who need a tradie want to talk to a human, not a robot.

The Bottom Line

A good tradie website is simple. Mobile-friendly, easy to call, strong on local SEO, backed by social proof, and fast. Everything else is optional.

If your current site doesn't tick those five boxes — or if you don't have a site at all — it's worth sorting out. It doesn't need to take long or cost a fortune.

Plinth builds custom websites for tradies and small businesses for a $599 one-time build fee plus $29/month, with all five of these essentials baked in from the start. No templates, no weekends lost to DIY builders.

Check it out at plinth.au