Here is the thing about a plumber’s website. The person on it already has a problem. Water on the floor, a dead outlet, a breaker that will not stay on. They are not being persuaded to want a plumber. They want one. All the website has to do is not get in the way. And yet most of them do, in the same seven ways.
The phone number is somewhere else
It is on the contact page. Or it is in the header, but as text, not a link, so on a phone you have to copy it. Or there are three numbers and no indication which one to use. Put one number in the header of every page, make it dial when tapped, and make it big. This alone fixes more sites than everything else on this list combined.
The page is about you, not about the leak
“Family owned since 1994, we pride ourselves on quality workmanship.” That is fine in paragraph three. In paragraph one the visitor wants to read the words “water heater” or “no power” or “same day,” because that is what they typed into Google. Lead with the problem. The pride can come after.
You list every service you have ever done
Forty services in a grid looks thorough and reads like a phone book. A homeowner in Monessen with a tripping breaker does not want to hunt through “commercial lighting retrofits” to find “panel repair.” Group them. Five headings, the common jobs first, the rare ones under a link.
There is no mention of money anywhere
Nobody expects a price for a repair they have not described yet. They do expect a signal. “Service calls are $X and we tell you the price before we start” is a signal. So is “financing available on jobs over $1,000.” A site with no numbers at all makes people assume the worst and call the competitor who put a number on the page.
Nobody says where you actually go
An electrician in Charleroi who covers Belle Vernon, Monongahela, Donora and California should say so in words on the page. “Serving the Mon Valley” is a start. Naming the towns is better, both for the homeowner and for Google, which is trying to work out the same thing.
The form asks for too much and answers too slowly
Name, phone, what is wrong. Nothing else. No dropdown of twelve service types, no “how did you hear about us,” no address field. And when it comes in, somebody calls back within the hour during the day. A form is a promise that you will respond. Most of the ones we audit have nobody assigned to them.
The site is slow on a phone with two bars
Cell coverage across Fayette and Greene is patchy. A site that takes eight seconds to load on a weak signal is invisible, because the visitor gave up at four. Big hero images, a slider, a chat widget and a video background are the usual culprits. Cut them and the site loads before they change their mind.
The fix, in an afternoon
Move the number to the header and make it dial. Rewrite the first paragraph around the three most common calls. Add a line about the service call fee. Name the towns. Shorten the form to three fields and put a name on who answers it. Delete the slider. That is a Saturday’s work on most sites and it changes what the phone does on Monday.
If the site is old enough that it cannot be changed without the person who built it, that is a different conversation, and it is one we have most weeks.