Checkatrade's advice for tradespeople, marked
Checkatrade runs one of the largest free advice libraries for UK tradespeople. Guides on growing a business, digital marketing, pricing, expansion, profitability. It is well organised, it is written for people who actually run trade businesses, and a lot of it is better than what the rest of the industry gives away. I read a stack of it properly rather than skimming for something to be annoyed about.
The finding is not that it is wrong. It is that on one specific question, every route through the material arrives at the same destination, and it is the destination the publisher sells. That is worth understanding if it is where you get your business advice.
Checkatrade's trade advice is largely accurate on how UK customers research, why reviews matter and what makes a business look credible. Its structural limit is that guidance on growth resolves toward directory membership, because the publisher sells it. The missing comparison is membership against owning your own site, measured over years on cost per booked job.
What it gets right, and it is not a small list
The material on customer research behaviour, review collection, photography and professional presentation is accurate, useful and applies whichever route a tradesperson takes.
The argument that word of mouth alone no longer carries a trade business is correct, and Checkatrade makes it clearly. Customers do check before they ring. Reviews do decide close calls. Photographs of finished work do more than any amount of copy about being reliable and professional. None of that is self-serving, it is just true, and a tradesperson who acts on it will be better off whether they ever pay a directory a penny.
The presentation advice is good too: complete your profile properly, keep information current, respond to reviews, show real jobs. Swap "profile" for "website" and the same checklist applies unchanged. That is a sign the underlying advice is sound rather than engineered.
Where every road leads
Across separate guides on growth, expansion and profitability, the recommended mechanism is consistently the platform's own product, which is the predictable shape of advice published by a company selling that product.
| The question | The answer given | What is not weighed |
|---|---|---|
| How do I grow? | Join a trade directory | Building demand you own |
| How do I get found? | A profile carries search visibility | Whose domain the visibility sits on |
| How do I look credible? | Reviews and photos on your profile | Who keeps them if you leave |
| How do I expand? | Use the profile to show testimonials | Cost per booked job against alternatives |
Read one guide and this is invisible. Read six and the pattern is unmistakable. It is not deception, it is a boundary: a company cannot publish the guide that concludes its customers should spend the money elsewhere.
The borrowed-visibility problem
A directory profile does give a UK trade real search visibility, but that visibility is rented from a domain with years of authority behind it, and it ends when the membership does.
This is the point where the advice is most accurate and least complete at the same time. Checkatrade's domain genuinely ranks. A new sole trader in Brighton and Hove with no website and no reputation gets more immediate reach from a profile than they could build alone in a year. That is a real benefit and pretending otherwise would be daft.
What is not spelled out is that none of the authority accrues to you. Two years of good work makes their domain stronger and leaves yours exactly where it started, because you do not have one. The equivalent two years spent on a site you own compounds in your direction instead. Both are legitimate strategies. Only one of them is described in the material.
The reviews question they cannot ask
Reviews earned on a directory remain with the directory, so the trust a tradesperson spends years accumulating is not portable, and no guide published by the platform is going to open with that.
A hundred and forty five-star reviews is a genuine business asset. It is also, on a directory, an asset held by someone else. Leave and you start again from zero somewhere else, which is the strongest possible incentive not to leave, and it is doing quiet work in every renewal decision a member makes.
Again, this is not a scandal. It is how the model works and it is disclosed in the terms. It is simply never the subject of a guide, and it is the single fact that would most change how a tradesperson weighs the decision. The full version of that argument is in whether you own your Checkatrade reviews.
The number that does most of the persuading
Search volume figures published by a platform describe demand on that platform, which is a genuine measure of reach and not the same thing as work you would not otherwise have won.
Platforms cite large search numbers, and they are usually real. What a headline figure cannot tell you is how much of that demand was already coming to you by another route. A customer who would have found you through a recommendation, a van, or a search for your name, and instead found you through a directory, has not generated new work. They have changed which channel gets credited for it, and in some models charged you for the privilege.
This is not a flaw in the statistic, it is a limit on what any platform-side number can show. The only way to settle it is your own records: ask every customer how they found you, write the answer down for three months, and see what the split actually is. It is dull and it beats every published figure, including the ones on this site.
Who the advice genuinely serves well
A tradesperson in their first year, with no reviews, no photographs and no reputation in the area, gets more from directory advice than from anything else free on the British internet.
Worth stating plainly, because the criticism above could be read as dismissal. If you qualified last spring and nobody in your town has heard of you, the advice to complete a profile properly, gather reviews quickly and photograph everything is exactly right, and the platform giving it is offering a faster route to being visible than you can build alone. Take it.
The advice serves you less well the longer you have been going. At year five, with a reputation and repeat customers, the same guidance keeps recommending the same purchase, because it has no mechanism for telling you that you have outgrown it. Nothing in the material fires a warning at that point, and that is the moment most worth a second opinion.
The test, applied to me
Every argument above applies equally to a website builder writing about lead platforms, so the honest instruction is to check the incentive of anyone giving you business advice, including this page.
I sell websites to tradespeople. I have an obvious interest in you concluding that owning your own site beats renting a profile. You should read this piece with exactly the suspicion I have applied to theirs, and you should notice that I have not told you directories are a waste of money, because they are not.
For a lot of trades the sensible answer is both: a directory for reach while you are building, a site you own as the thing that lasts. What decides it is your own numbers, and the honest way to settle it is cost per booked job across every channel, worked out on your figures rather than anyone's marketing.
How to read any of it, including this
Treat facts about customer behaviour as reliable and recommendations about where to spend money as claims to be tested, whoever is publishing them.
Data on how British customers search and decide is usually accurate from any source, because nobody gains from getting it wrong. Conclusions about where your money should go are different, and deserve a second opinion from someone who does not receive it.
The practical version: when you read growth advice, find the sentence where a specific purchase is recommended, then ask who is paid if you follow it. If the answer is the publisher, the advice is not worthless, it is just one side of a case. Then go and find the other side. That habit is worth more than any single guide, mine included, and it is the same instinct that serves you well when the diary thins out and everyone starts selling you solutions, covered in what to fix before the quiet months.
The version with no directory in it
I build websites for UK trades where the enquiries come to you, the reviews you gather are yours, and nothing disappears if you stop paying me. I will make a free mockup of your actual business first, before any money changes hands. If you want it, £600 to build, split £300 to start and £300 on final approval, then £20 a month for hosting, SSL, security, domain renewal and unlimited small edits. Rolling, cancel any time, live in about a week. If you are local, see trade website design in Brighton and Hove, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.