What a plumber's website must answer first

For your trade 5 min read

Most plumbing websites answer the wrong questions. Here are the six a homeowner with water on the floor actually asks, in the order they ask them.

A homeowner with water coming through a ceiling does not read your About page. They have found three plumbers on their phone, and in roughly eight seconds each they are deciding which one to call. Everything on your website is either helping that decision or getting in the way of it.

They look for six things, in this order.

Do you cover where I live

This is the most common reason a local business loses a call it had already earned. Someone in the next town over cannot tell from "serving the metro area" whether that includes them, so they call the plumber whose site names their town.

Name the towns, not the county or the radius. A list of fifteen place names is the answer to the question being asked.

Are you open right now

Water on the floor is a right-now problem. A site that shows opening hours as a static block, and no more, is telling a Saturday-night caller nothing.

Say what happens out of hours in plain words. "After 6pm and Sundays, calls go to my cell phone and I answer if I am not under a sink" is worth more than an emergency banner, because it is specific and it is true.

Can I call you without filling out a form

Contact forms exist for the convenience of the business, not the customer. Someone standing in a flooded kitchen is not typing their ZIP code into three fields.

• The number is a tap-to-call link, not an image and not plain text
• It appears in the header, not only in the footer
• It is the same number as the one on your Google listing
• The form, if you keep one, sits underneath the number rather than instead of it

What will this cost me, roughly

Nobody expects a quote from a web page. They expect to know whether you are the cheap service call or the expensive one, because what they fear is being trapped in a conversation with a price they cannot afford.

A service call fee, a typical range for the three jobs you do most, and a sentence about what would change the number. That is enough. Vagueness here does not protect the sale, it costs the call.

Are you a real person who did this before

Show photographs of your actual work, with a sentence about what the job was, before any testimonials.

A water heater you replaced last month, said plainly, does more than nine five-star reviews with no names attached. Reviews still matter, but they are the second thing checked.

Does the page load on a phone in a bad signal

Half of local searches happen on a phone, often in a house with poor reception. A page carrying a slideshow, a chat widget and a video header is a page that has not finished loading by the time the homeowner has gone back and tapped the next plumber.

How to check yours in five minutes

Do this on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the wifi in your kitchen, because that is the connection a customer in a strange house is on.

Search your trade and your town. Find your own listing, tap the website link, and start counting. If the page has not painted something readable by the time you would have given up on somebody else's, that is your answer.

Then, without scrolling, ask whether you can see a number to tap and the name of the town you are in. Those two things above the fold do more than everything below it combined.

Last, fill in your own contact form with a real message and wait. If nothing arrives within a few minutes, check the spam folder, and if it is not there either, the form has been failing silently and you have no idea for how long. That is the single most expensive fault on this list, because it looks like nothing is wrong.

What to fix first if you can only fix one thing

The tap-to-call number in the header. Every other item on this page assumes the caller got as far as wanting to call you, and a number they have to select and copy is where that intention runs out.

Second is the towns. Third is the form test. Everything after that is improvement rather than repair.

A short checklist

• Every town you cover, named in text
• Tap-to-call number in the header on every page
• What happens after hours, in a sentence
• Service call fee and a typical range for your three commonest jobs
• Six photographs of your own work, each with one line of context
• The whole page under a second on a phone

Questions people ask

Do I need a separate page for every town I cover

No, and the ones that do it badly are obvious to a reader. One page that names your towns honestly beats twenty thin pages that repeat the same paragraph with the place name swapped.

Is a contact form worse than a phone number

For emergency work, yes. For a quotable job like a bathroom, a form is fine as a second option. The mistake is making the form the only route.

What about a live chat widget

For a one-person plumbing business it is a promise you cannot keep. An unanswered chat window does more damage than no chat window.

Should I put prices on the site

A range, yes. An exact price for work you have not seen, no. The point is to remove the fear of an unknown number, not to quote blind.

How many photographs is enough

Six real ones beat sixty stock ones. If you have two, use two and say they are recent.

My site is three years old, does that matter

Only if it has stopped doing these six things. A dead contact form, an expired certificate, or a page that no longer loads on a modern phone is the problem, and those are all worth checking today.