Website Checklist For Glasgow Tradespeople Before Launch
A tradesman website wins or loses on three things above the fold: the trade you do, the area you cover, and a phone number big enough to tap with a work glove on. Everything else on this website checklist for tradesmen matters, but if those three aren't settled in the first screen, the rest is decoration.
What follows is an open, skimmable pre-launch audit for electricians, plumbers, roofers, joiners, builders, landscapers and anyone else running a trade business around Glasgow. No email gate, no download form. Work through it section by section, tick what's done, and note what's missing. If you're reviewing an existing site rather than building a new one, the same checklist works as a teardown.
Test your site on mobile data, standing outside
Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data, standing outside. That's the real test environment. Most trade enquiries come from someone who found you on Google while standing in a flooded kitchen or looking at a cracked roof tile.
- Trade and area in the first heading. "Electrician in Glasgow and surrounding areas" beats "Quality you can trust" every single time.
- Click-to-call in the header. Your number should be a tappable tel: link, not plain text someone has to copy out.
- Loads in under three seconds on 4G. If you're watching a hero image fade in while you count, it's too slow.
- No stock photo of a smiling man in a hard hat. Readers clock these instantly and discount everything around them.
- Contact details identical to your Google listing. Same business name, same address format, same phone number.
If all five pass, you've already beaten a lot of trade sites in the local results. Now work through the detail.
Homepage must answer what you do, where, and how to reach you within the scroll
You've got a few seconds before someone hits back and calls the next number on the search results page. The homepage needs to answer three questions without scrolling: what do you do, where do you do it, and how do I reach you.
Be specific about the trade. "Property maintenance" tells a homeowner with a leaking radiator nothing useful. "Gas Safe registered heating engineers covering the Southside and East End" tells them to pick up the phone. Specificity is not a limitation here, it's the whole mechanism by which a stranger decides you're the right call.
- Headline names the trade plainly
- Subheading names the service area, with real place names (Glasgow, Paisley, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire)
- Phone number visible without scrolling, on mobile and desktop
- One primary action, repeated: call, or request a quote. Not five competing buttons
- A real photo of your work or your team in the first screen
- Emergency or out-of-hours availability stated if you offer it
One thing worth sorting early: if your logo, colours and van livery don't match the website, the site feels borrowed. Trade customers notice when the van outside looks nothing like the site they booked from. Getting the basic rules for your brand written down before the build saves rework later.
Each service type needs its own page, not a single services list
A single page titled "Our Services" with eight bullet points is the most common structural mistake on trade sites. Google has nothing to rank, and the customer has nothing to read.
Give each core service its own page. For an electrician that might be rewires, consumer unit upgrades, EICR testing, EV charger installation and emergency callouts. Each page gets its own heading, its own description of what the job involves, its own photos and its own quote button. Five pages of 400 words each will out-rank one page of 400 words covering everything, because each one matches a different search.
Different trades need different emphasis, and the generic "contractor website" advice floating around online tends to flatten this:
| Trade | What buyers look for first | Page that earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Electrician | Certification and safety | EICR / testing and certification page |
| Plumber / heating | Speed and availability | Emergency callout page with response expectations |
| Roofer | Proof the work lasts | Before-and-after project gallery with dates |
| Joiner / builder | Finish quality and scale of job | Detailed case studies with scope and timeline |
| Landscaper | Visual outcome | Seasonal portfolio sorted by garden type |
Add a service area page or a short paragraph on each service page naming the towns and neighbourhoods you cover. Keep it truthful. Listing thirty areas you'd never drive to produces thin pages and wasted enquiries.
Project photos with captions outperform image galleries without context
Photos of finished jobs do more for a trade site than any amount of copy. But a grid of twenty untitled images is a gallery, not proof. Each project needs a short caption: what the job was, where it was, roughly how long it took, and what the challenge was.
Three strong projects with context beat thirty photos with none. The structure for turning a phone camera roll into something persuasive is covered in detail in this walkthrough of building a portfolio page that sells the work, and the same logic applies whether you're a roofer or a bathroom fitter.
At least six completed projects with captions
Before-and-after pairs where the transformation is visual
Photos taken in daylight, landscape orientation, no clutter in frame
Location named at town or area level
Images compressed before upload (a 6MB phone photo will sink your load time)
Reviews on your site and Google listing serve different trust functions
Trades buying decisions are risk decisions. Someone is letting a stranger into their home, often paying thousands, often without a second quote. Every trust signal you can show reduces the perceived risk.
Reviews on your site build confidence. Reviews on your Google listing build rankings. You need both, and they do different jobs.
Put the hard credentials where they're seen, not buried in a footer. Accreditation logos (SELECT, Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark, SNIPEF, whatever applies to your trade) belong near the top of the relevant service page as well as sitewide. Include the registration number as text, not just the badge image, so people can check it.
Trade body registrations with numbers shown
Public liability insurance confirmed, with cover level
Three to six written testimonials with first name and area ("Sarah, Shawlands")
A visible link through to your Google reviews
Your actual face and name on an About page, with how long you've been trading
Guarantee or warranty terms spelled out plainly
The About page is undervalued on trade sites. A homeowner comparing three quotes will read it. A short paragraph about who you are, how you got into the trade and how you work does more than another paragraph of service copy.
Four-field forms capture more enquiries than eight-field forms
Most trade sites lose enquiries at the form. Every field you add is another reason to abandon. Name, phone, postcode, and a box for "what do you need" will capture almost everything you need to call someone back and qualify properly on the phone.
Resist the urge to ask for budget, preferred start date, property type and how they heard about you. You can ask all of that in the first ninety seconds of the call. The form's only job is to get the conversation started.
- Quote form with four fields or fewer
- Photo upload option, so people can send a picture of the problem
- Click-to-call and WhatsApp as alternatives to the form
- Thank-you message that says when you'll respond ("same day, usually within two hours")
- Form submissions tested and arriving in your inbox, not a spam folder
- A floating or sticky call button on mobile, so the number follows the scroll
That last one is worth building properly rather than bolting on. A persistent call-to-action banner that stays in view means the number is never more than a thumb away, no matter how far down a service page someone has read.
Test the whole path yourself. Submit a form from your phone. Time how long the reply takes. If it's a day, no checklist item will save you, because the person has already called someone else.
Mobile pages under three seconds, compressed images, thumb-sized tap targets
Trade search is overwhelmingly mobile and often urgent. A site that takes six seconds to paint has lost the job before it rendered. The usual culprit is images straight off a phone, followed by too many third-party scripts.
- Pages load at speeds that vary depending on network and device conditions
- Images compressed and correctly sized before upload
- Tap targets big enough for a thumb, no pinch-zooming required
- Text readable without zooming, 16px minimum body size
- SSL certificate active, site serving over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings
- 404 page that routes people back to your services rather than dead-ending
If you're on Squarespace and the site feels sluggish, the fixes are mostly mechanical and worth doing in order of impact. There's a prioritised breakdown of what to strip out of a slow site first that saves a lot of guesswork.
High contrast text and logical heading order open up older customers
Almost no trade website checklist covers accessibility, and it's a genuine gap. Beyond the legal position, it overlaps heavily with things you want anyway: readable text, logical heading order, descriptive link text, keyboard-friendly forms. An older homeowner with failing eyesight is a very common trade customer, and low-contrast grey text on a white background loses them.
Check your colour pairings against WCAG contrast ratios before launch. The practical method, including how to test pairs and fix failures without wrecking your palette, is laid out in this guide to getting colour contrast right on a website.
Google Business Profile and consistent NAP across directories drive local search
A website checklist for tradesmen is incomplete without the local search layer, because for most trades the site and the Google listing work as one unit. The listing drives the clicks; the site converts them.
- Google Business Profile claimed, verified and fully filled in
- Business name, address and phone identical across site, profile and directories
- Page titles that include trade plus location ("Emergency Plumber Glasgow | Company Name")
- A review request built into your job completion routine, by text with a direct link
- Local schema or at minimum a clear address block in the footer
- Photos uploaded to the Google profile, not just the website
Reviews are the single biggest lever here and the one most trades neglect because asking feels awkward. Send the link by text the same afternoon, while the customer is still pleased. The groundwork for the listing itself is covered in the rundown of setting up and using a Google business listing.
Quarterly updates and certificate renewal prevent decay after launch
Launch day is not the finish line, and this is the part most checklists skip entirely. A site left untouched for three years starts leaking: certificates expire, plugins break, the phone number on the footer is the old one.
- SSL certificate auto-renewing
- Backups running, and you know how to restore one
- Platform and any plugins updated quarterly
- Contact details and pricing checked every six months
- New projects added to the portfolio at least quarterly
- Analytics installed so you can see which service pages pull enquiries
Quarterly portfolio updates are the highest-return habit on that list. Fresh project photos keep the site looking alive, give you something to post socially, and signal to Google that the pages are maintained.
Should you fix the old site or start again?
Rebuild if the site isn't mobile-friendly, if the platform is no longer supported, or if you'd be embarrassed to send the link to a customer. Those are structural problems and patching them costs more than starting clean.
Fix the existing site if the bones are sound and the gaps are content: missing service pages, weak photos, a form nobody fills in. Most of the items on this checklist are content and configuration, not code. A reasonable rule is that if more than half the checklist fails and the failures are structural, rebuild.
On cost, be realistic rather than optimistic. A DIY build on a template platform costs you time rather than money, and for a sole trader with evenings free that can be the right call. Hiring a designer buys you the strategy, the copy structure and someone who has made these decisions before. Platform subscription costs change regularly, so check the provider's own pricing page rather than trusting a figure quoted in a blog post. For design work, get a written quote with a fixed scope, and ask what happens when you need changes in year two.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages does a tradesman website need?
Six to ten for most trades: a homepage, a page per core service, a portfolio, an about page, a service area page and contact. Anything less and you're underserving search; much more and you're creating pages you'll never update. A good website checklist for tradesmen is less about volume and more about each page having a clear job to do.
Do I need a website if I get all my work from word of mouth?
Yes, because referrals still check you online before calling. Someone passes your name to a neighbour, the neighbour searches it, and a dead or non-existent site introduces doubt at exactly the wrong moment. The fuller comparison of whether a site or a social page serves trades better is worth a read if you're weighing the two.
What's the single biggest conversion mistake on trade sites?
A long quote form. Every extra field drops completions, and trade customers in a hurry will not fill in eight boxes. Four fields and a photo upload captures almost everything useful.
How often should I update the site?
Add new projects quarterly, review contact details and service descriptions every six months, and run the technical items (SSL, backups, updates) on the same quarterly cycle. It's maybe an hour a quarter once the habit is set.
Which features drive the most enquiries?
Click-to-call, a short quote form, visible reviews and real project photos, roughly in that order. There's a ranked breakdown of the features that turn visitors into booked jobs if you want to prioritise a limited budget.
A Website Checklist for Tradesmen: Start with the Enquiry Form and Homepage, Then Tackle Proof and Speed
Print this website checklist for tradesmen, or keep it open in a tab, and mark every item as done, partial or missing. The missing ones are your build brief. Start with the enquiry path and the homepage clarity items, because those change the number of calls fastest, then work back through proof, speed and local search.
If the website checklist for tradesmen comes back mostly red and you'd rather hand it to someone who builds trade sites for a living, that's what the website design service is for. Either way, run the ten-minute pass on your phone first. It tends to tell you more than you expect.
