What to put on a one-page trade website

Most trade websites fail because they are too big, not too small. Five pages of thin waffle, a blog with two posts from 2023 and a gallery that takes half a minute to load will lose, every time, to one page that answers the only three questions a customer has: what do you do, do you cover my area, and can I trust you. A one-page site has one job, turning a look into a call, and it needs exactly five sections to do it. Everything else is decoration. The trades getting this right are winning enquiries with sites that would fit on a beer mat, while competitors with sprawling ten-page builds wonder why the phone has gone quiet. This is the full checklist: the five sections in the order they should appear, the trust signals that do the heavy lifting, what you can safely leave out, the mistakes that quietly kill enquiries, and a worked example of a plumber's one-pager from top to bottom.

The five non-negotiables, in the order they appear

A one-page trade website needs five sections in a fixed order: who you are and where you work, the services you sell, photos of finished jobs, proof you can be trusted, and a contact route that takes one tap.

The order matters as much as the content. A visitor reads a one-pager top to bottom on a phone, usually in under a minute, and each section has to earn the scroll to the next one. If you want the multi-page version of this checklist, it lives in what a tradesman website should include; this is the stripped-back single-page cut.

The first screen decides everything

Before any scrolling, a visitor should see your name, your trade, the area you cover and a phone number that dials when tapped. "Gas Safe registered plumber covering Chelmsford and mid Essex" plus a call button beats any slogan ever written. No sliders, no video backgrounds, no "welcome to our website". The customer arrived with a job in mind; tell them in one screen that you are the person for it.

Services: list the work you want, not everything you can do

Six to eight lines, plain names a customer would actually search: boiler repairs, bathroom fitting, landlord certificates. Leave off the jobs you take reluctantly. A services list is a filter as much as a menu, and the work you advertise is the work you get asked for. One short sentence under each name is plenty; nobody reads three paragraphs about radiator flushing.

One contact route, repeated

Pick the way you actually answer, usually the mobile, and put it at the top, after the photos and at the bottom. A short form with name, number and a message box catches the evening browsers who won't ring at 9pm. Skip the live chat widgets: an unanswered chat bubble does more damage than no bubble at all.

Which trust signals actually turn a look into a call?

The trust signals that convert are the checkable ones: Google reviews a customer can read for themselves, a Gas Safe or NICEIC registration number they can look up on the official register, and photos of real local jobs rather than stock images.

Customers in 2026 verify rather than believe. A claim they can check builds trust; a claim they can't is wallpaper. That is why "fully insured, all work guaranteed" in italic does nothing, while a registration number does a lot.

Reviews they can verify

Pull three or four real Google reviews onto the page, with first names and job types, and link to the full list on your profile. Reviews hosted on your own site alone read as hand-picked; reviews that click through to Google read as earned. If your review count is thin, fix that before you worry about anything else on this list.

Accreditations that check out

If you are registered, show the number, not just the logo. Customers can and do check the Gas Safe register and the NICEIC find-a-contractor tool, and a number that resolves to your name is worth more than any badge graphic. The same goes for NAPIT, CIPHE or your public liability insurer: name them specifically. A logo strip with no numbers behind it is decoration.

Real photos beat stock every time

Four to six photos of your actual work, taken on your phone in decent light, with a recognisable local street or house style in the background. A customer in Chelmsford recognises Chelmsford. Polished stock photography of a model in a hard hat signals the opposite of what you intend: it says there was nothing real to show.

What can a one-page site safely leave out?

A one-page trade website does not need a blog, an endless gallery or a page for every town; it needs the five core sections done properly, and extras should only be added once the page is already winning calls.

Half the cost and most of the delay in trade websites comes from building things that never get read. Cutting them is not settling for less, it is spending the effort where the enquiries come from.

The blog you were told you need

A blog helps when it is fed regularly with posts that target real searches. Written twice and abandoned, it actively hurts, because a last post dated two years ago makes a live business look like a dead one. Skip it on day one. If you want search traffic later, treat it as a proper second stage with its own plan.

Town-by-town pages, later

Separate pages for every town you cover can work well for search, but they are a multi-page strategy. On a one-pager, a single line listing your main towns does the job for customers and gives Google the geography. When you are ready to chase several towns or services separately, that is the signal to move up from one page, not to bolt ten sections onto it.

The endless gallery

Six strong photos beat sixty middling ones. Big galleries slow the page down, and slow pages lose visitors before the gallery is even seen. Choose the handful of jobs you are proudest of, caption them with the job and the town, and rotate them a couple of times a year.

The mistakes that kill enquiries on a one-pager

The four enquiry-killers on a one-page trade site are a phone number that needs hunting for, jargon written for other trades instead of customers, a page that loads slowly on a phone, and no clear sign of where you actually work.

These are the faults I see most when a tradesman sends me a site that "gets visits but no calls". None of them are design taste; all of them are fixable in an afternoon.

Burying the number

If the phone number lives only in a footer, or worse in an image, you are losing calls to whoever put theirs in the header. On mobile the number should be a button that dials. A visitor who has decided to ring you is the most valuable person your website will ever meet; do not make them work for it.

Writing for the trade, not the customer

"First and second fix", "S-plan conversions" and "EICRs" mean nothing to most homeowners. They search for "electrician to fit an EV charger" and "plumber for a leaking tank". Use the words customers use and translate the jargon in brackets where you must keep it. The page is for the person paying, not for impressing other trades.

Slow on mobile is invisible

Most trade-site visits happen on a phone, often on mobile data at the kitchen table. Google's own page experience guidance is blunt that slow, jumpy pages lose both visitors and rankings. Heavy builders, oversized photos and plugin bloat are the usual culprits. A hand-coded one-pager is a handful of small files and loads in about a second, which is one of the quiet reasons it out-earns prettier, heavier sites.

A worked example: a plumber's one-pager, top to bottom

A working one-page plumber site runs: name, area and phone in the first screen, six services, four photos of real jobs, a review strip with a Gas Safe number, then a short contact form, and it can be live in about a week.

Here is the whole page for a fictional "DM Heating, Chelmsford", screen by screen, so you can hold your own site up against it.

Screen by screen

Screen one: "DM Heating. Gas Safe registered plumber covering Chelmsford and mid Essex", call button, WhatsApp button. Screen two: six services from boiler repair to landlord certificates, one line each. Screen three: four photos, each captioned with the job and the town. Screen four: three Google reviews linking to the profile, the Gas Safe number, the insurer's name. Screen five: "Get a quote", a three-field form and the phone number again. Nothing else. That page answers every question a customer has and takes about forty seconds to read.

What it costs and how long it takes

Done for you at Sitework, that page is the Starter plan at £50/month: built, hosted and kept updated, with SSL, security and unlimited small edits included and no setup fee. A full multi-page site is £100/month. How that compares with builders, freelancers and agencies is broken down on the tradesman website cost page, and the cheapest routes are ranked honestly in the cheapest trade website that doesn't look cheap. On timing, a one-pager typically goes live in about a week; the full breakdown of where the days go is in how long a trade website takes to go live.

Start with a free mockup

The easiest way to see whether one page is enough for your trade is to look at yours. I build a free mockup of your actual business first, your trade, your towns, your photos, before you pay anything. If you like it, it goes live from £50/month; if you don't, you have lost nothing.