The anatomy of a trade website, page by page.
Eleven pages, each with one job. What every page is for, the mistake almost every trade site makes on it, and the nine quote form fields that convert.
A trade website that produces work has about eleven pages, and each one has a single job. Most trade sites have four pages and no jobs assigned to any of them, which is why they get traffic from the owner's own family and nobody else.
Here is the whole structure, page by page, with what each one is for and the mistake almost every site makes on it. The quote form at the end is the part worth reading twice, because it is the only page where money actually changes hands.
The page list
| Page | Its one job | The mistake almost everybody makes |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Say what you do, where, and what to do next | A headline about quality and craftsmanship that would fit any trade in the country |
| One page per service | Rank for that job and answer it completely | Nine services as bullet points on a single page called Services |
| One page per town | Be the local answer underneath the map results | The same page published eight times with the name swapped |
| Finished work | Prove you can do it | A gallery of uncaptioned photos nobody can interpret |
| Reviews | Let strangers vouch for you | Screenshots of reviews, which cannot be read or indexed |
| What it costs | Screen out the enquiries that were never going to become jobs | Refusing to publish anything, so everybody phones to find out |
| How it works | Remove the fear of the unknown | A four-step graphic that says consult, plan, build, enjoy |
| About and the crew | People hire people | A company history nobody asked for and a stock handshake |
| Licensing and insurance | Clear the final objection | Burying it in the footer in six-point type |
| Questions | Answer the twelve things you are asked on the phone | Five questions written by somebody who has never answered a phone |
| Contact and quote | Convert | A form with eleven required fields and no phone number |
Eleven pages. If you only build five, build the home page, your two highest-margin service pages, the reviews page and the quote page, and add the rest monthly.
The home page
Its job is to answer three things on the first screen, before anybody scrolls: what you do, where you do it, and what happens next.
That means a headline naming the trade and the area, a phone number that dials when you tap it, and one obvious next step. Not two competing buttons of equal weight. One primary action and one secondary.
The home page is not where you rank for your services, so stop trying to make it do that. It is a junction. Its other job is to send people quickly to the page about the thing they came for, which means your services need to be visible as links rather than as a dropdown nobody opens on a phone.
What to cut: the slider, the long welcome paragraph, the mission statement, and any sentence that would still be true if you worked in a different trade.
One page per service
This is where the work comes from, and it is the single biggest structural gap on trade sites.
Each service page covers one job type and covers it completely:
- What the job actually involves, in plain words.
- What is included and what is not. The second half prevents arguments later.
- How long it takes, and the lead time to get booked.
- What it costs, or a band, or at minimum what moves the price.
- Your own photos of that exact work. Not the service in general. That job.
- The three questions people ask about this specific service.
- One next step, repeated at the bottom.
Write for the way a customer says it rather than the way your trade says it. Panel upgrade, not electrical service capacity modification.
If you do nine things, that is nine pages, and the reason is mechanical rather than stylistic: a page is the unit a search engine can rank, and a bullet point is not a page. The full diagnosis of what that costs you is in why your website is not ranking.
One page per town
Underneath the service layer, a page for each town you genuinely serve, each carrying something only true of that town. Done badly this is the most discredited tactic in local search and done properly it still works, which is the whole of do location pages still work.
The proof pages
Two of them, doing different jobs.
Finished work. Six to ten jobs, each with its own short write-up: what the customer wanted, what was awkward about it, what you did, and three or four photos. The write-up is what turns a gallery into evidence. An uncaptioned photo grid proves you own a camera.
Reviews. Put the text of your reviews on your own site, as text, with the first name and the town, and link out to the profile so people can verify them. Screenshots are the standard mistake: an image of a review cannot be read by anybody using a screen reader and carries nothing into search.
The page about money
Publish a range. This is the page that the rest of your trade will not build and the one customers want most.
Its job is filtering. Somebody with a $2,000 budget for an $8,000 job finds out on the page rather than on a site visit you drove to. Everybody who phones after reading it has already accepted the band.
A useful shape: the two or three job sizes you typically do, a real range for each, the four things that move the number, and a plain statement of what you will not quote without seeing. If you genuinely cannot publish numbers, publish the arithmetic instead: what the day rate covers, what materials typically run, what a callout costs.
The page about what happens next
Known territory beats unknown territory. Write out the sequence from the first phone call to the final invoice: who comes out, how long the quote takes, what the deposit is, how scheduling works, what happens if it rains, how you handle change orders, when you invoice, what the warranty covers.
This page quietly answers twenty objections nobody will ever voice to you. Write it as a sequence of real steps with real durations rather than four icons with verbs underneath.
About, and the trust page
The about page is not your company history. It is the crew. Names, faces, how long they have been doing this, and one sentence that sounds like a person wrote it.
Then put licensing, insurance, certifications, association memberships and your warranty somewhere findable with a heading, not in the footer at six points. If you are licensed, say the trade and the body. If you carry liability coverage, say so. Those are the last things a cautious customer checks before calling, and they are usually the hardest things to find on a trade site.
The questions page
Twelve questions you are genuinely asked, each answered in a paragraph. Do you charge for quotes. How far do you travel. Are you insured. How long until you can start. Do you take care of permits. What payment do you take. Do you offer financing. What happens if it is worse than expected once you open it up.
Write them down for two weeks before you build the page. The ones that repeat are the page.
The quote page, and the form that converts
Every other page exists to deliver somebody here, so this is the page to get right.
Three things sit on it. A phone number, large and tappable, because a serious proportion of people would rather call. The form. And a single line saying when they will hear back, which is the cheapest conversion improvement available to anybody.
The field list
This is the list we build. Nine fields, four of them required, in this order.
- Name. One field. Not first and last as two.
- Phone. Required, set as a telephone field so a phone shows the number pad.
- Email. Required.
- Town or postal code. Required. It qualifies travel before you reply and it costs the customer two seconds.
- What do you need. A dropdown whose options match your service pages exactly. This single field is what lets you see which services actually generate enquiries.
- When do you need it. A dropdown: emergency, this week, this month, planning ahead. The most useful field on the form and the one nobody includes. It sorts your morning.
- Tell us about the job. Optional free text. People who write here are your best leads.
- Photos. Optional upload, limited to a few files. For most trades this cuts a site visit out of the quoting process entirely.
- How did you hear about us. Optional, last, and worth more than any analytics report you will ever read.
Behind those, invisibly, record the page the form was submitted from and the campaign or referrer. Without the first one you cannot tell which service page is earning its place, and without the second you cannot judge any advertising.
Four rules about the form
Four required fields is the ceiling. Everything else is optional. Every required field you add is a person who closes the tab.
Never require the long description. Make it optional and most people fill it in anyway.
Label the button with what happens. Send my job details, or Get my quote. Not Submit.
Then test the plumbing. Submit it from your own phone. Confirm it arrives in an inbox a human opens, confirm the customer gets a confirmation, and confirm a copy goes somewhere that survives one person being on holiday. Forms that silently stop arriving are the most expensive fault on a trade site and nobody notices for weeks.
The footer, which is doing more than you think
The footer carries your business name, address or service area, phone number as a tappable link, hours, your service list and your town list. As text, never baked into an image.
It is also where your identical name, address and phone details live for local search, which matters more than its appearance suggests. The surrounding work is in the local SEO checklist for trades.
What to leave off
- A blog you will abandon by March. The reasoning is in does my business need a blog.
- A chat widget nobody answers. Worse than no chat.
- A slider. Nobody has ever reached slide three.
- Stock photography of a different crew in a different country.
- A newsletter signup. You are not a publisher.
- Embedded social feeds, which are usually heavier than the page holding them.
- Anything that autoplays with sound.
Eleven pages, built properly, beats thirty pages built to look busy. If you want this structure scoped against your own services and towns, that is the first conversation in any web design and development project we take on.
We build this shape because it is the one that produces enquiries, and we would rather argue about which eleven pages you need than sell you forty. Tell us what you do and where and you will get a page list and a fixed number for it.
About eleven, each with a single job: home, a page per service, a page per town, finished work, reviews, pricing, process, about, licensing, questions and the quote page. If you can only build five, build home, two services, reviews and the quote page.
Nine, with four required: name, phone, email, and town or postal code. Then a service dropdown, a timing dropdown, optional job details, optional photos, and how they heard about you. Record the page it came from invisibly, so you know which page earns.
Publish a range. It screens out the people who were never going to buy, and everybody who phones afterwards has already accepted the band. If you cannot publish numbers, publish the arithmetic: what a callout covers, what moves the price, what you will not quote unseen.
Yes, if you want to be found for it. A page is the unit a search engine can rank and a bullet point is not. Nine services on one list is one page about everything, which is why those sites turn up for the business name only.
A blog you will abandon, a chat widget nobody answers, a slider, stock photos of somebody else's crew, a newsletter signup, embedded social feeds and anything that plays sound. Each one costs you loading time or trust, and none of them produce an enquiry.