The website checklist for plumbers, electricians and cleaners

A local trade website has one job: when someone has a leak, a tripped panel or a house to clean, they should be able to call you within ten seconds and trust that you are real. This checklist covers what a trades site needs, in priority order, with the reasoning for each point so you can judge it yourself.

1. Make the phone call effortless

Put the phone number in the header as a tel: link, so one tap calls on a phone. ServiceTitan's guide to plumbing websites also lists click-to-call buttons and contact forms as essentials.
Add a sticky call bar at the bottom of the screen on mobile. Most urgent searches happen on a phone.
Show opening hours, and say clearly if you do emergency call-outs. A badge that says "Open now" or "Closed, leave a message" removes a guess.

2. Keep the quote form to three fields

Name, phone and what is wrong. Every extra field loses people. Label every field with visible text, show errors next to the field, and tell people what happens next ("we reply within one working hour"). If the form is not connected to anything yet, do not publish it.

3. Show proof that you are real

Licence number and insurance, if your trade requires them, near the top of the page.
A real address or service area, a real phone number and a photo of you or your team.
Link to your real Google reviews. Do not invent testimonials: fake reviews are misleading, and Google and consumer-protection rules treat them as a violation.

4. Get the local SEO basics right

Claim your Google Business Profile and keep name, address and phone identical on your site. For "near me" searches this matters more than the site itself.
Add LocalBusiness structured data with the most specific type (Plumber, Electrician). Google requires name and address and recommends telephone, geo, opening hours and price range. Use our free schema generator.
Write one real page per service. Make a service area page only for places you actually serve, with details a stranger could not guess. Near-copies that differ only by town name are doorway pages and can be demoted.

5. Keep it fast

Google's Core Web Vitals "good" thresholds, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits, are Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less. A trades site does not need sliders, video backgrounds or five web fonts. A page of plain HTML, one stylesheet and a few kilobytes of script meets all three without effort. Test with PageSpeed Insights on mobile.

6. Make it accessible

Text contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background.
Tap targets comfortably large (at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels is the WCAG 2.2 minimum; 44 is kinder to thumbs).
A visible focus outline and a menu that works with the keyboard.
Every image has alt text; form fields have labels.

7. Privacy and honesty

If you collect names and phone numbers, say what you do with them in a short privacy page, and avoid trackers you do not need. A site with no cookies and no third-party scripts needs no cookie banner in most places, but check the rules where you operate.

Skip the starting point work

The Callout Kit is a plain HTML, CSS and JS starting point that already follows this list: three complete trade sites, a go-live checklist, and a licence for client sites. Look at the live demo first to see if the style suits you. The checklist above is free to use either way.