Plasterer website design: winning the jobs photos sell
A plasterer sent me eleven photos for his new site and every single one was taken straight at the wall, in a room lit by the ceiling bulb, after the decorator had been in. They were photos of nothing: flat rectangles of magnolia that could have been anybody's work, or nobody's. He had spent fifteen years getting good at a trade whose entire value is a surface you can only judge in raking light, and then documented it in the one way that makes it invisible. That is the whole problem with plastering online, and it is fixable in an afternoon. The craft is real, the customers are searching, and the gap between the two is almost always the photographs and the order things appear in on the page. Here is how to close it.
A plasterer's website lives or dies on its photographs. Shoot along the wall in daylight so the light rakes across the surface, include a corner or reveal for the eye to judge against, and lead with a gallery rather than a welcome message. Then list your finishes, your towns and a realistic starting price, and keep the phone number within a thumb's reach on every screen.
Photograph it so the finish is visible
Plastering is the one trade whose finished work is nearly impossible to photograph badly on purpose and nearly impossible to photograph well by accident, because a flat wall shot head-on in artificial light shows the camera absolutely nothing.
The trick is raking light. Stand at one end of the wall and shoot along it, with daylight coming from the side, and the surface reveals its own quality: any wave shows up, and so does the fact that there is not one. Head-on under a ceiling light does the opposite, flattening everything into a beige rectangle. It is the difference between a photo that proves something and a photo that fills a slot.
Six habits, none of which cost anything, and between them they turn a phone camera into the strongest sales argument you own. If you want the general version of this for any trade, it is worth a read alongside how a website wins better jobs.
List the finishes, because customers search for them by name
People do not search for "plasterer" nearly as often as they search for the specific thing they want doing, so a page that names skimming, artex removal, rendering and dot and dab catches enquiries that a page saying "all aspects of plastering" never sees.
"All aspects of plastering, no job too small" is the most common sentence in the trade and one of the least useful. It matches nothing anybody types. Naming the actual jobs does two things at once: it gives search engines something to match, and it tells a nervous homeowner that you have done their specific problem before.
| Job | What the customer is really asking | Worth its own page? |
|---|---|---|
| Ceiling skim | Will it crack again, and how long is the room out of use | Yes |
| Artex removal or covering | Is it safe, and will it look flat afterwards | Yes |
| Dot and dab boarding | How much room do I lose, and is it as good as wet plaster | Yes |
| Rendering, external | Will it match, and how long before it needs doing again | Yes |
| Patch repairs | Will the patch show once painted | Mention on the main page |
| Venetian and polished finishes | Can you actually do this, with proof | Only with photos |
Note the middle column, because that is the copy. Each of those questions is the thing the customer is privately worried about, and the page that answers it plainly wins the call over the page that lists services.
Say where you work, in words people use
Name your towns. Not "the Midlands", not "50 mile radius": the actual places, the ones on the road signs. Somebody searching for a plasterer in Kidderminster wants to see Kidderminster on the page, and a list of six real towns will out-perform a vague radius every time. If you genuinely travel, list the towns you actually want to work in rather than every settlement within an hour, because the enquiries you attract are the ones you named, and a job forty minutes away in traffic is rarely the one you wanted at seven in the morning.
Artex, and the question nobody asks out loud
Any plasterer working on pre-2000 properties will meet textured coatings that may contain asbestos, and being straightforward about that on your website is both a safety matter and a genuine trust signal.
Older artex can contain asbestos, and the rules on handling it are not a grey area. The Health and Safety Executive publishes clear guidance on where it is found and what is required (HSE, asbestos), and a short paragraph on your site explaining that you check first, and what you do when it needs testing, does more for a customer's confidence than any amount of "fully qualified professional". They have usually been quietly worrying about it since they googled their ceiling.
What goes first on the page
The order that works for plastering is proof, then service, then area, then price, because the visitor arrives already wondering whether you can leave a wall flat and everything else is secondary to answering that.
Most trade sites open with a welcome paragraph. Yours should open with a wall. A strong photograph, your trade and area in plain words, and a phone number, all visible without scrolling. Then the before-and-afters, then the finishes, then the towns, then a realistic starting price, then reviews.
Realistic starting prices are worth the discomfort. A homeowner with a cracked ceiling has no idea whether they are looking at two hundred pounds or two thousand, and that uncertainty stops more calls than a high number would. Give a typical figure for a standard ceiling or a small room, say plainly that the real price depends on the state of the walls, and you will get fewer wasted callouts and better-qualified enquiries. The wider argument for painters and decorators applies almost word for word to plasterers, in do painters and decorators need a website, and the finish-focused version of the same design thinking is in painter and decorator website design.
The reviews that do the most work
For plastering, a review that describes the mess is worth three that say "great job", because the customer's real fear is not a bad finish, it is a fortnight of dust through the whole house.
Ask yourself what a homeowner is actually nervous about before they book a plasterer. Not craftsmanship, in most cases: they assume you can plaster. They are worried about dust in the carpets, whether the furniture gets covered properly, whether you turn up on the day you said, and how long the room is unusable. A review that happens to mention "you would not have known anyone had been in" answers all four at once.
So when you ask, do not ask for a review. Ask a question. "Would you mind mentioning how we left the place?" gets you the sentence that sells the next three jobs, and it is a perfectly honest thing to ask. Get those on your Google Business Profile as well as your site, since that profile is what appears in the map results and it is the single most valuable free thing a local trade owns (Google, Business Profile help).
Put three or four of them on the site itself, in full, with a first name and a town. Not a scrolling carousel of five-star ratings with no words: a handful of real sentences from real people nearby. A customer reads two and stops. Make sure the two they read are the ones about dust sheets and finishing on time.
The lead time question, and how to use it
Plastering is one of the few trades where being booked up is a selling point rather than a problem, so publishing your rough lead time converts better than pretending you are available tomorrow.
"Currently booking about three weeks ahead" tells a customer two things: you are in demand, and you are organised enough to know your own diary. Both are reassuring. It also filters out the people who need someone this week, which saves a phone call you were never going to convert. The only rule is to keep it current: a lead time that has said "two weeks" since last autumn does the opposite job.
I build these sites for trades, and plastering is one where the difference is immediate, because the raw material is already on your phone and nobody has ever asked you to shoot it properly. I do a free mockup of your actual business first, with your photos and your towns, before you pay anything. A one-off £600 to build (£300 to start, £300 when you approve it), then £20 a month for hosting, security, renewals and unlimited small edits, cancellable any time. See what a finished trade site looks like at painter and decorator website design, or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.