What a plumber's website needs to convert

A plumber's website gets exactly two kinds of visitor, and they want opposite things. Get this right and the site pays for itself; get it wrong and it is an expensive business card.

The emergency visitor

The first visitor is standing in a flooding kitchen. It is 7am, they are on a phone, and they are working down Google's list until a human answers. For this visitor, your website is a phone number.

What that means in practice:

• The number is huge, tappable, and visible without scrolling on a phone.
• The call-out charge is stated next to it. "£95 including the first hour" converts better than a mysterious number, because it removes the last reason to hesitate.
• The hours are honest. If you do not answer at 3am, say 7am to 10pm. An unanswered "24/7" line costs you a review, not just a call.

This visitor will never read your about page. Every second the number takes to find is a job going to the next result.

The planned-work visitor

The second visitor is thinking about a boiler, a bathroom or a cylinder. The job is worth ten or fifty times the emergency call-out, and they are comparing three local firms in three tabs.

Their comparison is entirely about trust:

1. Gas Safe number, displayed and linked. Not a logo in the footer: a number they can tap and verify on the public register. For anything gas, this is the single decisive element on the page.
2. Real photos of real jobs. Thirty photos of bathrooms you actually fitted, with a sentence each on what was done. Stock photos of wrenches achieve nothing; everyone recognises them.
3. Named areas with honest coverage. "Bramford, Fen End, Riverside, same-day or next morning" beats a list of forty postcodes, because it reads as true.
4. A price-shaped answer. Not fixed quotes for bespoke work, but brackets: "boiler swaps from £1,850". The firm that gives a number gets the enquiry; the firm that says "contact us for pricing" gets closed.

The quote flow that saves your evenings

The most useful feature on a plumbing site is a quote form that takes photos. A picture of the existing boiler, the bathroom as it stands, the leak itself: that turns a twenty-minute phone interrogation into a two-minute read, and most jobs come back priced or bracketed without a visit.

Photos also tell you who you are dealing with. The landlord with eight properties looks different from the tenant with a dripping tap, and you know which one you are driving to before you start the van.

What not to bother with

A blog about plumbing tips. Nobody searches "how to bleed a radiator" looking for a plumber, and the three posts from 2021 signal neglect, not expertise. Spend the effort on one good page per service and one per town instead: those are the searches that bring in paying work.

For everything a plumbing site can include (call buttons, Gas Safe display, photo quotes and area pages) see website development for plumbers, or click through the live demo to see it working.