What a tradie website should actually do in 2026

Someone just got your number from a neighbour. Before they call, they Google you. What they find either wins you the job or hands it to the next name on the list. Most trade websites lose that moment in about five seconds, and this post shows you how to check if yours is one of them.

Your website has one job

Turn a visit into a call or a booking. That's it. Not to look nice or show off your logo, and definitely not to host a gallery of decks you built in 2019. A customer lands, decides you're legit, and taps one button. Everything on the page either pushes them toward that tap or gets in the way.

Judge every element by that standard. The image slider nobody watches? Decoration. The paragraph about your passion for quality workmanship? Decoration. The button that says Book a job, with a tappable phone number right beside it? That's the website. The rest is paint.

The five second test

Open your site on your phone. Not the office computer. Your phone, on mobile data, standing in the driveway. Count to five. In that time a customer decides two things. Can I trust this business? Can I book them right now?

Trust looks like real photos of your work, your service area, a licence number if your trade uses one, and reviews they can see without scrolling. Booking looks like a number they can tap and a button that says what happens next. If either answer is "not sure", they hit back and try the next result. You never find out it happened.

The leak checklist: run it on your site right now

Six leaks kill most trade sites. You can check all of them from your ute in five minutes.

Score yourself honestly. One leak, fix it this week. Three or more, the site is actively working against you.

• Slow on a phone. Load your site on mobile data and count. Three seconds or less. Any longer and people leave before they see your name.
• No booking button on the first screen. If a customer has to scroll or dig through a menu to contact you, most of them won't.
• Phone number buried. It belongs in the header, tappable. If it's an image, or hiding on a contact page, it's costing you calls.
• No reviews visible. You've got five stars on Google and the site shows none of them. Put three on the homepage with names and suburbs.
• Last updated years ago. A 2022 copyright line, or a holiday closure notice from two Christmases back, tells customers you might not be trading.
• Not mobile friendly. If you pinch and zoom to read it, so does every customer, and most of them arrive on a phone.

"We get all our work from word of mouth" still leaks

Good. Word of mouth means the work is good. But a referral is not a booked job. It's a name on someone's fridge. Before that name becomes a call, most people Google it. They want your number, they want to see the work, they want to check you're still around.

What they find decides what happens next. A sharp site with visible reviews confirms the recommendation. A dead site plants doubt. No site at all, and they're staring at a competitor's ad above your Google listing. What's one referred job worth to you? Now ask how many referrals checked your site last year and quietly moved on. You can't know. That's the problem.

If you fix nothing else, fix the booking path

No budget, no time, one afternoon. Spend it on the path from "I need this fixed" to "I've contacted them". Four moves.

A customer standing under a leaking sink will not fill out ten fields. Make contacting you the easiest thing on the page and the site starts paying for itself.

• Make the header phone number tap-to-call. One thumb, one ring.
• Put one button on the first screen that says what happens: Call now, or Book a time.
• Cut your contact form to four fields: name, phone, suburb, what's the job.
• Promise a response time next to the form, then keep it. "We call back the same day" beats silence.

Build it yourself or pay someone: the honest answer

DIY builders work. Wix and Squarespace templates are decent, hosting is handled, and a careful owner can ship something solid in a few weekends. The catch isn't the tool. It's you in August, booked solid, with a half-built site sitting in a browser tab you haven't opened since the school holidays.

Where DIY falls short for busy trades: the copy, because writing about your own business is harder than it looks. The booking plumbing, because calendars, confirmations and follow-up texts don't come in the template. And upkeep, because someone has to notice when the site breaks, and that someone is you at 9pm on a Sunday.

So here's the test. Have you got four spare hours a week for the next two months, and will you spend them on this instead of quoting? If yes, build it yourself and use the checklist above as your standard. If those hours are already sold, pay someone who builds trade sites for a living and hold them to the same checklist. Sakaevo puts a new front end live in about 10 business days on a managed month-to-month plan. Either way, the checklist is the bar. Don't accept a site that misses it.