What a home services website actually has to do

Nobody is browsing

The mental model most contractor sites are built on is a shop window: put the work out nicely and someone will stop and look. That is not what is happening. The person on your site has a problem right now, arrived from a map or a search, and is comparing you against two other tabs.

They are on a phone, probably standing up, possibly in the room the problem is in. Everything below follows from that.

Say what you do and where, in the first line

The most common failure is a homepage that opens with quality workmanship since 1998 and leaves the visitor to work out the trade and the area from the photos. Those are the two facts that decide whether they stay, and they are the two facts most often missing from the top of the page.

The first line should be legible without scrolling and should contain the trade and the place. Everything else on the page can wait.

The phone number has to be tappable

On a phone, a number that is an image, or plain text, or hidden behind a contact page, is a number that does not get dialled. It has to be a real tap-to-call link, and it has to be visible without hunting.

This sounds trivially obvious and is wrong on a large share of the sites in this trade, usually because the site was designed on a desktop where clicking a number does nothing anyway and the omission is invisible.

• Tappable on every page, not only the contact page.
• Visible without scrolling on a phone screen.
• The same number as your listing, so the caller ID and the reviews line up.

Show real work and real reviews

Stock photography is recognisable and it costs you the thing the page exists to build. A visitor who sees a model in clean overalls in a bathroom that is clearly not local has learned something about you, and it is not what you wanted them to learn.

Your own photos are better even when they are worse. A slightly badly lit shot of an actual boiler you actually installed does more work than any library image, because it is evidence rather than decoration. The same is true of reviews: your real ones, with the customer's own words, beat any claim you write about yourself.

One thing to do, not five

Pages in this trade tend to accumulate asks: call us, fill the form, join the mailing list, follow us, book online, request a callback. Each additional option lowers the chance any of them happens, because now the visitor has a decision to make on top of the one they came with.

Pick the way you would most like to be contacted and make it the obvious thing on every screen. Offer one alternative, quietly, for the people who will not use the first. That is the whole menu.

Answer the thing they are actually worried about

Almost every visitor to a home services site has the same short list of anxieties: do you cover my area, do you do this specific job, can you come soon, and are you going to invent a price when you get here.

A site that answers those four plainly, in ordinary language, outperforms a far prettier one that does not. Most of what fills the space on contractor sites, the history, the values, the stock team photo, answers none of them.

It has to be fast, because the alternative is one tap away

A page that takes several seconds to appear on a phone loses people who did not decide to leave, they just went back to the map and tapped the next result. Large uncompressed images are the usual cause, and they are usually the least valuable content on the page.

Speed is not a technical nicety here. It is the difference between being in the comparison and not being in it. It is also the single easiest thing on this list to check: open your own site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and count.

The other half of that test is what the page does while it loads. A screen that stays blank and then arrives all at once feels slower than one that shows the name and the phone number first and fills in the photographs after, even when both take the same time. What a visitor needs in the first second is the number.