Web design for plumbers
Web design for plumbers who’d rather be on the tools.
Plumber website design built around one job: getting somebody who needs a plumber to pick up the phone. I was one for 15 years, so you will not be explaining the trade to me.
In short
What does a plumbing website need to do?
Convince a stranger standing in a wet kitchen that you are a real plumber who covers their street, and let them ring you without hunting for the number. It has to open fast on a phone with two bars of signal. Nothing else on it matters anywhere near as much.
The problem
Most plumbing websites are a business card that nobody sees.
Built once, years ago, by somebody who has since gone quiet. One page listing every service in a paragraph. A contact form that may or may not still send anywhere. A stock photo of a tap.
It is not that they look bad. Plenty of them look fine. It is that they are not built to be found, and they are not built for somebody standing in a wet hallway with one hand free.
Those are different problems with different fixes, and the first conversation is usually about working out which one you have.
What you get
What is actually in it.
The same for every plumbing job I take on. There is no cut-down version, because a site missing any of this does not work.
- A page for every job worth having
- Emergency call-outs, bathrooms, boiler installs, boiler servicing, drainage, whatever you actually want more of. One page listing all of it wins none of it. This is the single biggest difference between a plumbing site that brings work in and one that sits there.
- Built for a phone, outdoors, in a hurry
- Almost nobody looks for a plumber at a desk. They are stood over the problem with one hand free, so the mobile layout is the one I build properly and the desktop one follows it. Responsive is the bare minimum, not the goal.
- Your number where a thumb lands
- Somebody with water coming through a ceiling has one hand free and no patience. One tap to call, on every page, without scrolling. A contact form is no use to that person at all.
- The areas you cover, named
- The suburbs and towns you will genuinely drive to, written down. That is what a search with a place in it has to match against.
- Your own work, not stock photos
- Photos off your phone of jobs you have finished beat a stock image of a smiling man with a wrench every single time. People are checking whether you are real.
- Set up so Google can read it
- Every service page named after the job people actually search for, not the words your last web designer preferred. It costs nothing extra at build time and saves paying somebody to unpick it later.
- The logins are yours
- Your domain, your analytics, your Google listing, all in your name and handed over on request. Hosting runs through me, which is what keeps it fast, but the site itself is yours and can be moved. I have met plenty of tradespeople stuck with whoever built their last one.
Absolute legend to deal with! Makes things super easy, is honest, efficient and has helped us achieve everything he ever said he could! Don't look past Stu!!!
What it costs
Priced on how many services you sell.
Count the jobs you want more of and give each one a page. For most plumbing companies that comes out at five or six pages all in.
Home, about, contact and one page per service is usually five or six. Not sure? Leave it and we will work it out.
- Website, first page$900
- 4 more pages × $300$1,200
One-off, to build it
$2,100 + GST
NZD. A fixed price, agreed in writing before anything starts.
Get an exact quoteThis is an estimate. Tell me about your business and I will give you an exact figure in writing.
The honest bit
A website alone will not fill your diary.
You can have the best plumbing site in the city and still hear nothing, because nobody has been sent to it yet. Getting found is a separate job, and ads cover the months before that work lands.
It will not fix quotes that take a fortnight or a phone nobody answers either. Plenty of plumbing businesses are losing work there and not on the website at all, and I will say so before you spend.
Questions
Things plumbers ask me.
How much does a plumber website cost?
Mostly down to the number of services you want a page for, and whether you are writing the words or I am. Put your numbers into the calculator above for a close estimate. You get one fixed figure in writing before any work starts, and it does not creep.
How many pages does a plumbing website need?
Usually a home page, an about page, a contact page and one page for each service you want more of. For most plumbing companies that lands somewhere between five and eight. If you do emergency work, bathrooms and boilers, that is three service pages on its own.
Will it work properly on a mobile?
It is designed on mobile first, which is not the same as a desktop site that shrinks. Most people looking for a plumber are on a phone, often on poor signal, so it is built to load fast and put your number under their thumb before they scroll anything.
How long does it take?
A few weeks. The bottleneck is almost always photos: I will ask for pictures of finished jobs, and most plumbers have hundreds sitting on their phone already. Send those over early and it moves quickly.
Will I be able to update it myself?
With Ask EightySixOS added, yes. Change your call-out rates, swap in photos from last week's job, add a service, all from a chat box on the site itself. Anything structural still comes back to me, on purpose.
I already have a website. Can you fix it instead?
Often, yes, and for plumbing sites the fix is usually smaller than people expect: break the one services page into several, get the number visible on a phone, speed the thing up. Send me the address and I will tell you which job it is.
Will I lose my Google rankings if you rebuild it?
Not if the old addresses are pointed at the new ones before it goes live. That mapping is a standard part of the build here. Where businesses get hurt is a rebuild that quietly drops the old pages and nobody notices until the calls dry up.
Do I need a website at all if I get work from word of mouth?
Word of mouth still ends with somebody looking you up before they ring. If they find nothing, or something that looks abandoned, you have lost the advantage the recommendation gave you. The site does not have to win the job, it has to not lose it.
Let’s talk
Send me your plumbing website, or tell me you haven’t got one.
Tell me what plumbing work you want more of and I will tell you what the site needs to do differently to get it.