Websites for tradespeople: services, service area and an enquiry in two clicks

What do customers expect from a trade business website?

• Your services by name: ‘bathroom renovation’, ‘heat pump’, ‘exterior painting’ – not ‘everything from a single source’.
• Whether you come out to their town: a service area with place names and a travel radius.
• How quickly you can help: waiting times for appointments, whether you offer an emergency service, how fast you respond to enquiries.
• Whether they can trust you: master craftsman's business (Meisterbetrieb), guild membership (Innung), insurance, years in business, photos of real work.
• How to reach you: a phone number they can tap, WhatsApp and a form with three fields.

Why is a page per trade and location worth it?

Customers do not search for your company name but for a service and a place: ‘roofer Friedberg’, ‘electrician wallbox Königsbrunn’. A catch-all ‘Our services’ page matches none of these searches exactly. A separate page for each trade – and, if you cover a larger area, for each town as well – answers exactly that question and gets found for it.

I built this structure for the cleaning company DARMEL: ten services in five towns, which makes 51 separate pages. Each page needs real content about the place and the service – pure copies with the place name swapped are treated by Google as spam.

What belongs in a trade business's Impressum?

Besides name, address and contact details, the Impressum (the legal notice required in Germany) of a trade business usually has to contain further information under § 5 DDG (the German Digital Services Act) if the trade needs a licence to practise: the responsible chamber of crafts (Handwerkskammer), the entry in the register of craft businesses (Handwerksrolle), and the professional title – for example Elektrotechnikermeister (master electrician) – together with the country in which it was awarded. On top of that come the VAT identification number and, for a GmbH (limited company), the commercial register entry and the managing directors.

I build the Impressum and the privacy policy as separate pages and fill in the details you give me. I am a web developer, not a lawyer – please have the legal texts checked by a law firm or your chamber.

How do you get good photos without booking a photographer?

• Photograph finished work in daylight, with tidy surroundings and at eye level.
• Before-and-after shots taken from the same position say more than any description.
• A photo of the team in front of the company van builds more trust than ten stock images.
• Simply send the photos via WhatsApp – I resize them and convert them into modern image formats so that the page loads quickly on a phone.

How do customers use the website on the go?

Most of your customers search on their phone, often in an urgent situation: the heating is off, a pipe is leaking, a storm has caused damage. What matters to them is that the phone number is at the top and dials with one tap, that the emergency service is easy to spot and that the page loads immediately even with poor reception.

I test every page with Lighthouse on a simulated mid-range phone with a throttled connection. My own pages currently score 99 to 100 for performance there.

How does the website help you find skilled workers?

If you have to turn down jobs because you are short of staff, you need applicants as well as customers. A careers page with genuine insights into your business and a short application that can be sent from a phone can be planned in from the start – more on the page recruiting websites for the trades.

Are there references from the trades?

To be honest up front: I have not yet completed a client project in this sector that I can show here as a reference. What I can show are the building blocks – service pages, enquiry forms, protected areas and loading times – from my projects for DARMEL and YachtBrokerBid.

How does the project fit around your day-to-day work?

• An initial meeting of about an hour – at your premises if you like, otherwise by video.
• After that, the fixed-price offer. I work in milestones: a deposit before the project starts, then one payment after each accepted milestone.
• You send your services, photos and service area; I write the texts from them and send you a draft. Even the starter website gets a custom design, not a template.
• One round of corrections, then the site goes live. We bring your Google Business Profile into line with it at the same time.
• After completion you receive the full repository; code and content belong to you.

Prices at a glance

You receive a binding fixed-price offer after the free initial call. All prices are final prices; as a small business under § 19 of the German VAT Act, no VAT is charged. All packages at a glance

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