How to make a carpenter website: the seven steps, in the order that works
Nearly every carpenter builds their website in the wrong order. They pick a template on a Sunday night, fill it with words about craftsmanship and attention to detail, and leave the photographs until last, which is the point at which the job stalls and the site sits half-finished for a year.
Of the 36 UK carpenters and joiners in my audit notes, twenty had a live site that was visibly dated, and the same phrase comes up again and again in what I wrote about them: no project photos despite a visual craft. That is not a design failure. It is an order of operations failure. The photographs are the product, and they were treated as decoration.
So here is the sequence I use when I build one, with the decisions in the order they actually have to be made. Seven steps, and the first two happen before anybody touches a domain name.
To make a carpenter website, decide who places the order, gather thirty to forty photographs of finished work, then map seven pages: home, gallery, two job-type pages, about, areas and contact. Write the British towns you cover in plain words, choose a build route, send the enquiry to your phone, and connect Google Business Profile last.
Step 1: decide who places the order, before you buy a domain
A site built to win direct commissions from homeowners and a site built to back up subcontract work for builders are different websites, and picking the wrong one wastes the whole build.
If your work arrives from two or three regular builders, the site's job is confirmation. Somebody has your name already, they type it in, and the site has to look like a real business that has been trading for years. That can be one page. It needs to load fast and it needs a phone number at the top.
If you want bespoke commissions from homeowners, the site's job is comparison. That customer is looking at three joiners and choosing on finish. Everything below is written for that version, because it is the harder one and the one carrying the money. If you are not sure which you are, count where your last twenty jobs came from, which is the test I set out in whether carpenters need a website at all.
Step 2: gather the photographs first, because they are the product
Carpentry has no register a homeowner recognises, so unlike a Gas Safe plumber or an NICEIC electrician, every ounce of your credibility has to come out of photographs of finished work.
Aim for thirty to forty usable shots before anything else happens. That sounds like a lot until you realise it is six to eight per job type across four or five types, and most carpenters have twice that scattered across a phone, a van laptop and a Facebook page nobody has scrolled since March.
What actually needs to be in the frame
Finished work, in the room it was made for, in daylight, with the clutter moved. Then the detail: the mitre, the grain match across two doors, the scribe against a wall that was never straight. The wide shot proves you finished the job. The detail shot proves you are a maker rather than a fitter, and it is the one that gets a bespoke enquiry.
What to leave out
The van, the tool wall, the timber rack and the mid-job shot with the packaging still on. They tell the customer you are a carpenter, which they already assumed when they searched for one. They do not tell them your finish is good enough for their hallway.
Step 3: map seven pages, and no more than seven
Seven pages is the shape that works for a UK carpentry business: home, gallery, two job-type pages, about, areas and contact. Anything beyond that is a page nobody will ever open.
The reason to split at all is search. A homeowner does not type "carpenter". They type the job plus the town, "fitted wardrobes Horsham" or "bespoke staircase Brighton", and a page can only rank for a job it is actually about. One page covering nine job types ranks properly for none of them.
| # | Page | Its one job | Photos |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Home / | Six best photographs, what you make, the towns, a call button above the fold | 6 |
| 2 | Work /work/ | The full gallery, grouped by job type and never by date | 25 to 40 |
| 3 | Biggest money job /fitted-wardrobes/ | Rank for that job plus your towns, and answer what it involves | 8 |
| 4 | Second money job /kitchens/ | Same again for the other half of your income | 8 |
| 5 | About /about/ | Your face, the years, the workshop. The reason a stranger trusts you | 2 |
| 6 | Areas /areas/ | The towns in writing, because half of enquiries die on "do you come out this far" | 0 |
| 7 | Contact /contact/ | Click-to-call, a form that reaches your phone, and an honest lead time | 0 |
Pages three and four are the ones carpenters skip and the ones that earn. Pick the two job types that pay best rather than the two you do most often. A separate page per job type also gives the gallery somewhere sensible to point, which is the structure I go through in more detail in what a carpenter's website needs to win bespoke work.
Step 4: write the towns and the jobs in plain words
Naming your towns in ordinary sentences on the page is the single cheapest local search improvement available, and most carpentry sites carry no town name anywhere except the footer.
Not a list of forty place names in small grey text at the bottom. That is the 2011 version and it does nothing now. Write them the way you would say them: the workshop is in Burgess Hill and most jobs are within about forty minutes, so Haywards Heath, Lewes, Brighton and Horsham, and further for a full staircase.
Say what you do not do
Turning work away in writing is a trust signal and a filter. If you do not fit flat-pack, do not hang doors as a single job, or will not travel past the M25, put it on the areas page. Every enquiry it stops is an evening you get back, and British customers read it as confidence rather than rudeness.
Step 5: choose the build route with your own hourly rate in the sum
There are three real routes for a UK carpenter, and the honest comparison is not price against price, it is price against how many of your own evenings the route consumes.
| Route | Up front | Ongoing | Your time |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | £0 to £150 | £10 to £25 a month | Four to eight evenings, then forever |
| Freelancer | £600 to £1,500 | Hosting plus edits billed | A week of back and forth |
| Agency | £1,500 to £5,000 | Hosting extra | Meetings |
| Done for you (mine) | Nothing | £50 every four weeks | Send photos, approve it |
The agency and freelance figures are typical British ranges rather than quotes. On my side there is no build fee: £50 every four weeks covers the site, hosting, the domain, SSL and unlimited small text and photo changes, and after twelve months the website is yours with the domain and files transferred. Four weekly billing is thirteen payments a year, so £650 across a year rather than £600, and I would rather write that down here than have you work it out later.
Paying for a logo before the site exists. The gallery is what sells; a wordmark in a decent typeface will do for a year. Buying a domain through the designer's own account. If it is not registered to you, you cannot move it, and Nominet lets you check who holds any .uk domain in a minute. Commissioning a blog on day one. Seven pages that are finished beat twelve that are half written.
Step 6: make the enquiry land somewhere you will actually see it
Bespoke joinery enquiries arrive in the evening, which is exactly when a carpenter is not reading email, so the form has to reach the phone in your pocket.
A click-to-call number in the header, a form that forwards to your mobile as a notification, and a WhatsApp link if you use it for work. Three routes, all visible without scrolling. The one to avoid is a contact page that offers only a form pointing at an address you check on Sundays.
Reply speed does less here than in other trades
Nobody commissions a fitted wardrobe in a panic, so the two hour response that wins emergency plumbing work matters less. What replaces it is the shortlist: a homeowner picks two or three makers whose galleries looked closest to what is in their head, and rings those. Being fast does not get you onto the shortlist. The photographs do.
Step 7: connect it to Google, then leave it alone for a month
A new site is not in Google until Google knows it exists, and the three things that fix that are a Google Business Profile, a submitted sitemap and Search Console, all of them free.
Claim or create the Google Business Profile first. It is free, it takes about twenty minutes, and it is what puts a carpentry business on Google Maps for a "near me" search. Add the same photographs, the same towns and the same phone number as the site, because inconsistency between the two is a real ranking drag.
Then submit a sitemap. Google's own sitemaps documentation explains the file, and Search Console is where you hand it over and later find out which searches you are appearing for. Any decent build route does this for you. If yours will not, that tells you something.
What the first three months look like
The build is about a week once the photographs exist. Indexing takes days. Actual search enquiries take one to three months across most of the UK, and longer in a town where two established joinery firms have held the first page for a decade. Direct traffic starts immediately though, because every referral who Googles your name now finds something. That gap between launch and the first search enquiry is the part carpenters give up during, and it is the reason I prefer a done-for-you arrangement where somebody else is still working on it in month two.
Bottom line: the order is photographs, structure, words, then build. Get those first two right and almost any build route produces a site that wins work. Get them wrong and the best build in Britain is a nicely typeset page with nothing on it. If you would rather see the finished version before doing any of it, that is what my carpentry and joinery builds are for.