A plumbing website has one job, and it is narrower than most people building them realise. Someone has a problem right now, they search, they look at two or three sites for a few seconds each, and they ring one. Everything on your site is either helping that happen or getting in the way.
That is why the best plumbing sites are small. Five pages, built so a stranger standing in a wet kitchen can see your trade, your area, your registration and a button that dials you without scrolling. This post walks through the five pages, what goes on each one, and the three places plumbers usually lose the call.
Who is actually looking, and in what state?
Plumbing enquiries come in two flavours and they want different things from the same site.
The emergency. A leak, no hot water, a blocked soil pipe. They are stressed, they are on a phone, and they are not reading. They want to know you cover their town, you can come today, and what your call out is. If they cannot see all three in about five seconds, they press back.
The planned job. A new bathroom, a boiler swap, a rental property needing a landlord certificate. They will read more, compare three firms, and look at photographs of your work. They may sit on it for a fortnight. They want evidence you finish things tidily and turn up when you said.
The mistake is building the whole site for the planned job and leaving the emergency visitor to work it out. The homepage has to serve the person in the wet kitchen first, because that is the enquiry that arrives most often and it is the one that is lost most easily.
The five page shape that works
1. The homepage
Above the fold, before anyone scrolls: what you are (plumber, heating engineer, both), where you work (name the towns, not "the Midlands"), a tap to call button, and your Gas Safe registration number if you are gas registered. Underneath that, three or four short blocks for your main services, then reviews, then a photo or two of real work.
Keep the hero photo light and keep it yours. A stock picture of a smiling model holding a wrench does nothing, and a huge uncompressed one costs you the visitor before the page appears.
2. Emergency and call outs
The page most plumbing sites do not have, and the one that earns its keep. It answers the questions an emergency caller asks on the phone: what hours you actually answer, what the call out charge is or how it is worked out, how quickly you can normally get there, what to do right now to stop the water. That last bit, a plain paragraph on where the stopcock usually is and how to isolate a leaking appliance, is genuinely useful and people remember who told them.
3. Services
One page listing what you do, with a short paragraph each: boilers and heating, bathrooms, leaks and repairs, unblocking, landlord safety certificates, power flushing. If two or three of those are most of your income, give them a page of their own later. Do not write a page for every job you have ever done.
4. Areas covered
A plain list of the towns and villages you work in, and roughly how far you go. This is the page that tells a visitor whether to bother ringing, and it gives Google something to match against local searches. Real pages about real places, not the same paragraph with the town name swapped.
5. Contact
Phone number as a tap to call link, hours, a short form, and the postal area you are based in. Ask the right questions on the form: what the problem is, the postcode, whether it is an emergency, and the best number. Four fields is plenty.
The three places plumbers lose the call
The number is not tappable
It happens constantly. The phone number is typed as text, or sitting in an image, or buried in the footer. On a phone it should be a link that dials, it should be in the header, and there should be a floating call bar that stays on screen however far someone scrolls. That bar comes with every site we build, and on a trade site it is worth more than any design decision.
The site is too slow on a phone signal
Plumbing searches happen on mobile data in a hallway, not on office broadband. Six seconds of blank screen loses most of that audience. It is nearly always oversized photographs, and it is fixable in an afternoon. The detail is in why a slow website costs you work.
Nothing proves you are real
Anyone can put up a website saying they are a plumber. What settles it for a stranger is your Gas Safe number if you do gas work, a photograph of you or your van, reviews with first names and towns attached, and pictures of your own finished jobs. Ten photos off your phone beat any stock library, and they do not have to be beautiful. They have to be yours.
There is a fuller version of the trust list in what a trade business website actually needs.
Should a plumber put prices on the website?
Most plumbers do not want to, and the fear is reasonable: every job is different, and a number on a page becomes a number you get held to. But saying nothing at all costs you enquiries, because a visitor with no price information assumes the worst and rings someone who gave them something to hold on to.
The middle ground works better than either extreme. Publish the numbers you can stand behind and explain the rest:
- The call out charge, and whether it comes off the job if you do the work.
- Your hourly or half day rate, and what counts as an hour.
- Fixed price jobs where you genuinely have them: a landlord gas safety certificate, a boiler service, an outside tap.
- A from price on the big jobs, with a sentence explaining what moves it. "Boiler swaps from around this figure, depending on the boiler, the flue run and whether the system needs a flush."
- Out of hours, if you charge differently after six or at weekends. Say so plainly rather than surprising somebody.
Two practical notes. Keep prices somewhere you can change in a minute, because you will change them, and if changing them means paying your web designer you will leave them wrong. And date the page or say prices were correct as at a given month, so an old figure is not a rod for your own back.
What you will be asked to supply
Whoever builds it, the hold ups are nearly always on your side rather than theirs, and it is the same short list every time. Gather these first and a small plumbing site is a matter of days.
- Ten to twenty photographs of your own work. Finished bathrooms, tidy pipework, the van. Taken on your phone is fine. Before and after pairs are worth the most.
- Your registration numbers. Gas Safe if you do gas work, plus any scheme memberships you hold. These are the details a stranger checks.
- The list of towns you cover, and honestly where you stop. Do not claim a county you will not drive to.
- Your hours, and what you actually answer out of hours.
- Six to ten lines about you. How long you have been at it, who taught you, whether it is just you or you have a lad. This is the bit people read before they ring.
- Any reviews you already have, with the first name and the town.
If writing the words is the part you are dreading, write them the way you would say them on the phone and let someone tidy them up. There is a walkthrough in writing the words for your own website.
Do you need a website if you are booked out already?
Honestly, maybe not this month. If you are six weeks ahead on word of mouth, a website will not change your week. Two things still push most plumbers over the line eventually.
The first is that people who get your name from a neighbour still search you before they ring, and finding nothing at all reads as a small warning sign. The second is that word of mouth is not a tap. When a big contract finishes or a developer you relied on goes quiet, a site plus a properly filled in Google Business Profile is the thing you can lean on.
If you go ahead, keep it small. A three page site that exists and loads fast beats a ten page site you never finished.
Getting found for your towns
A plumbing website that nobody sees is a business card in a drawer. For a local trade, most of the work is not on the website at all: it is a properly completed Google Business Profile, with your real hours, your service area, photos and a steady trickle of reviews that you actually reply to.
The website's job is to back that up with pages that name the towns and the jobs in the words people type. "Emergency plumber in Grantham" does more for you than any amount of clever design. Start with getting found on Google when you only work locally, because for a one van business it matters more than everything else here put together.
What should a plumber pay for this?
A five page plumbing site is not a big build. In the UK you would expect roughly £500 to £2,000 as a one off from a freelancer or small studio, with hosting billed separately afterwards, or somewhere around £50 to £150 a month on a rental or pay monthly arrangement. An agency will quote more, and for a one van plumbing business that is usually buying design time the job does not need.
Whichever way you go, the number that matters is the five year total including hosting, renewals and the fee for changing a price when it changes. That is where a cheap build sometimes turns expensive, and we added it all up in what website maintenance actually costs in the UK.
Where we fit
We rent small business websites monthly, which suits a lot of plumbers because there is nothing to find up front and nothing to maintain. A three page site is £79 a month and a five page site is £99 a month, both excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. Hosting, SSL, business email, the gallery, the reviews section, the floating call bar and a yearly redesign are included, one design revision comes with the build, and content changes are unlimited and free, so putting your prices up is an email rather than an invoice.
If you want to see what your own five pages would cost, price up your website and it will tell you straight away. And if a local freelancer builds you something good for a fixed fee, that is a perfectly sound answer too. Take the five page list above with you when you go.
