What makes a trade website that gets calls: a 9-point checklist

I build websites for trades as well as running their ads, and our own site is built and looked after the same way as theirs. So every point below comes with what it looks like on leadwave.co.uk, which you can open on your phone while you read.

Assume your visitors are on a phone, and often not in working hours. We looked at when 67,379 homeowners sent an enquiry to a UK trade last year: 51.0% came in outside 8am to 5pm, and the busiest hour was 6pm. There’s more on that in when homeowners actually send enquiries.

1. One tap to WhatsApp or ring you, with the message already written

This is the button that turns a visitor into an enquiry, so it has to be easy to find and easy to hit with a thumb. On our site there’s a WhatsApp button in the header of every page. On the smallest phones it shrinks to just the icon, so it never gets pushed off the screen.

Tap the button on one of our guides and WhatsApp opens with this already typed: “Hi Nick, I found you on your website. Is my area free? I’d like to hear about getting leads.” The visitor only has to press send. The message changes with the page, so I can often tell which page someone was on before I’ve said hello.

Done well, it looks like this:

• A WhatsApp button and a call button near the top, and again after your proof.
• Your number written as a link, so one tap dials it.
• A first message that fits the page, like “I’d like a quote for a new driveway.”

At 6pm you’re probably driving home. A WhatsApp waits until you’re ready to answer it.

2. A page for every job you do

One “Services” page that lists roofing, chimneys, guttering and flat roofs gives Google a single page to match against a dozen different searches. A page for each job, with photos of that job and the towns you do it in, gives each search a proper answer.

Our site has a page for each trade we work with, and one for each service. Each page needs its own words, though. When we put the same long block of text on six of our pages, they started to look like copies of each other, so long shared pieces now go in full on the most relevant page only.

3. Real proof: customers’ own words, job photos and video

“Quality workmanship, friendly service” says nothing, because everyone says it. What works is proof a homeowner can check:

• Customers’ own words, word for word, with a first name, the town and when they said it.
• Photos of your jobs, taken on your phone. Before and after is even better.
• A short video of a happy customer.

Our roofers page shows roofers’ own WhatsApp messages, with the date they were sent. On our home page there’s a video from Martin, a carpet cleaner in the North West. We cut it to 92 seconds and added captions, two short lines at a time, because plenty of people scroll with the sound off. It plays silently as it comes into view, with a “tap for sound” button.

I can honestly say I’ve never come across a marketing firm that seemed to care so much about whether you do well

Martin, carpet cleaner, North West · video, Feb 2024

Your Google rating belongs near your buttons too. Ours (5.0 from 19 reviews) sits right beside them on our websites page.

4. Fast on a phone

If a page hangs, people tap the next name on the list. On 15 Oct 2026, Google’s own mobile speed test scored leadwave.co.uk 96 for speed, and 100 for accessibility, best practice and SEO. Google colours anything from 90 up in green.

For a visitor, fast means the words are readable almost straight away and the page doesn’t jump about as photos load. The usual things that slow trade sites down are photos uploaded at full size straight off a phone, and pop-ups that cover the very button you want people to press.

5. Nothing spilling off the screen on small phones

This one caught us out. The word “Landscaper” spilled out of its tile on a smaller Android phone, and nobody spotted it until I did, on my own phone. Another page was slightly wider than a common phone screen, so the whole page slid sideways and showed a white strip down the side.

Neither would stop someone enquiring on its own, but both make a business look careless. Now every page is checked at seven screen widths, from the smallest phones still in use up to a big desktop screen, with every menu and question opened, and a page doesn’t go live until it passes.

6. Say which towns you cover, in names people know

Write “roofing in Norwich and the villages around it, including Wymondham and Aylsham”, not a list of postcode districts. People know their town. They don’t know the code for their district, and a list of codes is hard to read on a phone. We stick to broad area names across our own site too, like Greater Manchester or Blackburn & Burnley, never a postcode.

Don’t make 40 pages that are the same text with the town name swapped. Google treats pages like that as spam, and they read badly to customers anyway. Put your towns on each service page instead.

7. Know where each enquiry came from

If you can’t tell which page brought in a call, you can’t do more of what’s working. On our site we can see WhatsApp and call taps by page, and the searches people used to find us. That’s how we know which guides start conversations and which just get read.

The free version: ask every new enquiry “where did you find us?” and write it down. Once you know where the work comes from, put your own numbers into the cost per job calculator to see what each won job is really costing you.

8. Keep the small print small

I found our own pages hard to follow at one point, with footnotes and source lines under every number. We cut them, and now small print only goes where the law needs it.

On a trade site that means one plain line for your guarantee, one for your insurance, and your terms on a page of their own. Nothing between the customer and the button.

9. Keep improving it after it goes live

Most trade websites are built once and never touched again, so Google has no reason to show them more. Google says SEO usually takes four months to a year, and that time only counts if someone is working on the site.

Ours is checked on Google every day and improved every week. In the first week we saw Google pick the wrong version of our address as the main one, and an old page from a previous site still showing as an error. Both got fixed because someone was looking. If you’re replacing an old site, make sure every old page that still gets visits points to its new one, or you throw away what it built up.

Check your own site in 5 minutes

Do this on your phone, on mobile data rather than your home wifi:

1. Open your home page and count. If you can’t read the top of it within a couple of seconds, it’s too slow.
2. Tap your WhatsApp and call buttons. Does WhatsApp open with a message written? Does the number ring?
3. Scroll every main page. Look for words cut off, boxes sticking out, or the page sliding sideways.
4. Look for proof. Can you see a real customer’s words and a photo of your own work without scrolling far?
5. Read it as a stranger. Is it clear within five seconds what you do and which towns you cover?
6. Search “Google page speed test”, paste in your address and check the mobile scores.

If two or more of those fail, the site is probably costing you calls.

Want someone to do it for you?

That’s what our websites for tradesmen service is. We write every page from a short chat, build it with all nine points above, and keep improving it every week. Nothing goes live until you approve it.