Five signs your trade website is costing you jobs

You can be the best electrician in town and still lose the job to someone who is not, because the first version of you most customers meet is your website. Someone gets your name from a neighbour, looks you up on their phone, and decides in a few seconds whether to call. If the site feels wrong, they quietly move on to the next name on the list. You never find out.

That is what makes a weak website expensive. It does not send you angry feedback. It just costs you jobs you never knew existed. Here are five problems we see on trade websites all the time, what each one looks like to a customer, and what it looks like to Google.

1. The site is dead, suspended or half broken

It happens more often than you would think. Hosting lapses, a card expires, and the site is replaced by a suspended account notice or a parking page full of adverts. Sometimes the site is technically up, but the photos are broken and half the links go nowhere.

To a customer, this does not read as an admin slip. It reads as a business that has stopped trading. Nobody books a builder whose website says the account has been suspended.

To Google, a site that keeps failing to load eventually stops being worth showing. Once your pages drop out of the results, you are relying entirely on word of mouth again, whether you meant to or not.

2. The copyright line is years out of date

Scroll to the bottom of your site. If the footer names a year long past, customers notice, even if only half consciously. A stale date suggests nobody has looked at the site in a long time, and that raises quieter doubts. Is the phone number still right? Are the prices current? Is the firm still going at all?

Search engines make a similar judgement. A site that has not changed since it launched gives Google little reason to look at it twice, while a competitor who keeps adding useful pages slowly builds a stronger case for every local search you both want to win.

3. It is painful to use on a phone

Someone who needs a tradesperson urgently is usually searching on a phone, often standing next to the problem. If your site was built for desktop screens, they get a shrunken postage stamp of a page: tiny text, pinch to zoom, buttons too small to press with a thumb.

The technical culprit is often a missing mobile viewport setting, a single line of code that tells a phone how to display the page. Without it, the browser pretends it is a desktop monitor. To the customer, the site just feels ancient.

Google now judges your site by its mobile version first. If the phone experience is broken, that is the experience your ranking is built on.

4. There is no page for the work you actually want

Plenty of trade websites are a single homepage that says something like "all work undertaken, no job too small". Friendly enough, but it gives people and search engines nothing to hold on to.

Google matches specific searches to specific pages. When someone types "boiler installation Chelmsford", it looks for a page about boiler installation in Chelmsford. If you do not have one, someone else does, and their phone rings instead of yours.

Customers respond the same way. A page that describes exactly their job, in their town, with photos of similar work you have done, is far more convincing than a general promise that you do a bit of everything, everywhere.

5. The address bar says "Not secure"

If your site still runs on http rather than https, browsers show a warning next to your address instead of a padlock. On some screens it literally says "Not secure".

Picture a customer about to type their name and phone number into your contact form with that label at the top of the page. Many will stop right there. Google has also treated https as the expected standard for years, so an unencrypted site starts every ranking comparison a step behind. The fix is an SSL certificate, which is quick to set up and often free.

The five minute check

Pull out your phone, open a private browsing tab and look your business up the way a stranger would. Then ask:

• Does the site load at all, with no warnings and no broken images?
• Does the footer year look like this year?
• Can you read every page without zooming?
• Is there a page for the work you most want more of?
• Is the padlock showing in the address bar?

If you spot one of these problems, you can be fairly sure customers already have. The difference is that you can fix it, and none of the fixes are exotic. Fixing all five is exactly what our websites for trades are built around.