You paid for a website. It looks alright. The phone still is not ringing. In our experience it is rarely the design. It is usually one of five practical faults, and you can check all five yourself in about five minutes on your own phone.
We build sites for roofers, drainage firms, pavers, builders, fencers and tree surgeons, and we see the same five faults again and again. Here they are in the order they cost you work.
1. It is slow on a phone
Most people who need a trade are standing in the garden or the kitchen looking at a problem, on 4G, with one hand. Google puts the line for a good loading score at two and a half seconds. Google on Largest Contentful Paint, read 15 September 2026. If your homepage takes five or six seconds, you are well the wrong side of it. They go back to the results page and ring the next firm.
Slowness is usually caused by the same few things. Huge photos straight off a phone camera, uploaded at full size. A page builder loading a dozen scripts before it draws anything. A video that plays whether the visitor wanted it or not.
You can test this without any technical knowledge. Put your address into Google PageSpeed Insights, pick the mobile tab, and read the top number. That is Google's own tool and it is free. If the mobile score is poor, that is not a matter of opinion.
2. Your town is nowhere on the page
People do not search for "drainage". They search for "blocked drain Wakefield" or "drain unblocking near me". If the words a customer actually types are not on your page, Google has very little reason to show it to them.
Open your homepage and read it as a stranger would. Does it name your town in the heading? Does it name the villages and suburbs you actually cover? A page that says "we serve the local area" tells Google nothing. A page that names Ossett, Horbury, Sandal and Outwood tells it a great deal.
3. There is no proof you have done the job before
A homeowner about to spend four thousand pounds on a driveway is nervous. They are looking for a reason to believe you. Stock photos of somebody else's American house do the opposite of that.
Proof means your own photos of your own jobs, before and after, with the town named. It means reviews with real names. It means your company number, your insurance, the accreditations you actually hold. Nothing invented, nothing borrowed. If you have sixty jobs on your camera roll, that is sixty reasons for somebody to pick you over the firm with four stock images.
4. Your number is hidden
This one is almost funny, except for how much it costs. On a lot of trade sites the phone number is in small grey text at the bottom of the page, or only inside a contact form, or only in the header on desktop and nowhere on mobile.
Pick up your own phone. Load your site. Without scrolling, can you tap something that starts a call? If the answer is no, you are asking a person with a burst pipe to work for it.
The number should be tappable, not typed as plain text. It should sit in the top bar and be repeated at the end of every page. If you take out-of-hours work, say so next to it. If you do not, say that too, because a missed call at midnight that was never going to be answered is worse than an honest line saying when you pick up.
5. Nothing filters out the wrong jobs
A contact form with a name, an email and a message box gets you two things: tyre kickers and spam. You then spend your evening ringing back people who wanted a price for something you do not do, thirty miles outside your patch.
What works better is a short set of questions that a customer is happy to answer because it feels like progress. What is the job. How urgent is it. What kind of property. What is the postcode. A photo if they have one. By the time that lands in your inbox you already know whether it is worth the drive, and you can ring back the good ones first.
That is the difference between a website that generates admin and one that generates work.
Five minutes, your phone
Check your own site now
- Load your homepage on 4G with wifi off. Count the seconds before you can read your business name.
- Search your own trade and town in Google. Where does your site come, and does the listing name the town?
- Read your homepage heading. Does it say what you do and where you do it, in words a customer would type?
- Count the photos that are genuinely your jobs. Not the supplier ones, yours.
- Without scrolling, try to tap your phone number. Time how long it takes.
- Fill in your own enquiry form as a customer. Ask yourself whether the result tells you enough to quote.
What to fix first
If you only do one thing, make the number tappable and put your town in the heading. That is an afternoon of work and it moves the needle on two of the five faults at once.
Speed and proof are the next two, and they usually need somebody to go into the site properly. If the site was built on a page builder and it is slow because of the builder itself, no amount of compressing photos will rescue it. That is the point at which a rebuild is cheaper than the tinkering.
We put a live demo together before anyone pays anything, so you can see your own trade, your own town and your own photos in place and judge it for yourself rather than taking our word for it.