The way people find a tradie isn’t subtle. Something breaks. They pick up their phone, search “emergency plumber” plus their suburb, and open the first two or three results.
They’re standing up, one-handed, mildly stressed, on whatever mobile signal they’ve got in a laundry. They’ll give each site a few seconds before going back to the results page.
Almost every trade website I’ve looked at was designed for someone sitting at a desk with a mouse. That mismatch is where the work goes.
The phone number problem
The most common failure, and the most frustrating, is a phone number you can’t tap.
On a mobile, a number should be a link that opens the dialler. When it’s plain text, or worse, baked into a header image, the customer has to memorise it, leave your site, open their phone app, and type it in. Some will. Plenty won’t, because the next result’s number was tappable.
Just as common: the number sitting below the fold. If someone has to scroll to find how to contact an emergency service, the page has failed at the one job it had.
Check yours: open your site on your phone. Can you see a number without scrolling? Does tapping it start a call?
The fix is one line of HTML. It’s <a href="tel:0891234567">. If your site is on WordPress and you can edit the header, this is fifteen minutes.
Load time on a real connection
Desktop speed tests flatter everyone. Testing on office wifi at a desk isn’t the situation your customer is in, and a site that feels instant on a laptop can take eight seconds on a phone with two bars.
Trade sites tend to be slow for the same three reasons every time:
Enormous photos. Pictures of completed jobs are genuinely good for winning work. A 4MB JPEG straight off a phone camera, served at full resolution to a mobile, is not. Resize to around 1600px wide and compress. That alone often halves the page weight.
A homepage slider nobody asked for. Sliders load every image whether or not anyone scrolls, and people rarely swipe past the first one. Cut it, keep the best photo.
Plugin sprawl. Each one adds a bit of CSS and JavaScript. Twelve of them add a lot.
None of that requires a rebuild. It’s the boring work I describe in where to start when everything feels slow.
Check yours: run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score, not desktop. Under 50 means you’re losing people before the page appears.
Tap targets, forms, and missing basics
A handful of recurring irritations, all cheap to fix:
Buttons too small or too close together. Fine with a mouse, fiddly with a thumb. Aim for 44px minimum and space them out.
Contact forms asking far too much. Name, surname, email, phone, suburb, job type, preferred time, budget. Someone with water coming through the ceiling is not completing that, and the fix is cutting it to three fields.
No visible service area. A lot of trade sites never say which suburbs they cover. If someone in Joondalup can’t tell whether you’ll come out to them, they’ll assume not and call someone who said so.
Hours nowhere to be found. For anything advertised as emergency or after-hours, this matters more than the photo gallery.
No Google reviews on the page. They’re the strongest trust signal a trade business has, and they’re usually buried on a testimonials page nobody visits. Put three near the top.
What the good ones do
The trade sites that work well have obvious things in common, and none of them are expensive.
They open with a clear statement of what and where: “24/7 emergency plumbing across Perth’s northern suburbs”, with a tappable number directly beneath it. No slider. No stock photo of a model in a hard hat. No paragraph about company values above the fold.
They show real photos of real jobs, and they put reviews where people see them rather than on a separate page.
That’s not a budget question. It’s a question of deciding what the visitor came for and putting it first, which is the same argument I make about your homepage’s first line.
The five-minute check
On your phone, right now:
- Open your homepage. Count how long until you can read something.
- Look without scrolling. Is it obvious what you do, where you work, and how to call?
- Tap the number. Does the dialler open?
- Fill in your contact form as a stranger would, then check it actually arrived.
- Search your own trade plus your suburb. Do you appear at all?
Most of what fails these checks is a day or two of work for someone who knows what they’re looking at. That’s the frustrating part. This isn’t expensive to get right. It’s just that nobody has looked at these sites the way a customer does since the day they launched.