Less than you think, and one thing that matters
Most tradespeople who ask this are worried the website will become a second job: logging in, updating things, fixing things, being told to "just add a blog post". It should not be. A well-built trade website needs about three hours of your time before launch, one photo per job from your phone afterwards, and nothing else. Everything technical is someone else's job. Here is exactly what is yours.
Before launch: about three hours
A forty-five minute call. We ask about your trade, the services you want more of, the towns you cover, your registrations and insurance, how you like to be contacted, and the questions customers always ask. You talk; we write it down. That call is most of the content.
Photos you already have. Job photos from your phone, a photo of you and the van, your registration certificates. Send them in a folder or a message thread. No photographer needed unless you want one.
Your accounts. The domain, if you have one; your Google Business Profile login; your job management software if you use one, so the quote form can feed it. If any of these are in someone else's name, we help you get them back.
A look at the site before it goes live. On your phone, in a quiet twenty minutes. Does it look like your business, is the number right, are the towns right, does the quote form reach your phone. Tell us what is wrong in one message.
That is it. We write the service and area pages from the call, set up the booking or quote form, wire the tracking, and put everything in your name.
After launch: one photo per job
The site stays real and keeps ranking because of job photos. The routine:
- Finish the job.
- Take one photo of the finished work.
- Open the site's upload on your phone (a bookmark, or a shortcut on the home screen), pick the service and the town from two lists, type a few words ("Consumer unit, Pinner"), tap upload.
Thirty seconds. That photo appears on the service page, the area page and the gallery. Nothing else on the site changes. You cannot break anything from that screen; it is the only screen you have.
If even that is too much on a busy day, send the photo to whoever runs your office and they do it, or send it to us and we do it as part of the care plan.
What you never touch
- Settings, plugins, hosting, domain renewals, security, backups.
- Layout, menus, design.
- The quote form's wiring.
- Search settings, structured data, speed.
- Adding a new service or area page (you tell us in a message; it is done that day).
- Fixing anything that breaks.
All of that is the care plan or a message to us. You are not expected to log in to anything but the photo upload, and you are not expected to remember how anything works.
What the care plan does
Monthly: updates tested and applied, backups checked, security scanned, speed monitored, the quote form tested to your phone, Search Console read, and a short note telling you how many calls and quote requests the site produced and from which towns. Small changes (a new phone number, a price change, a new registration) done from a message. New service or area pages added when you ask. The renewals for domain and hosting on our calendar as well as yours.
What we need from you occasionally
- Tell us when something changes: a new service, a new town, a new registration, a new number, someone joining. One message.
- Ask customers for Google reviews. A card with a QR code helps; we can make one.
- Reply to quote requests the same day. The website brings them; you close them.
What the numbers look like
In the monthly note, three lines you can read in a minute: calls from the site, quote requests from the site, and the towns they came from. If one town is producing nothing, we look at why. If a service page is producing most of the work, we build it out. You do not have to look at analytics; the note is the analytics.
If you want to do more
Some tradespeople get interested and want to write a page about a job, or add an FAQ. The site lets you, with a login that can only change words and photos, not layout. A five-minute recorded walkthrough shows how. It is optional.
Where this sits
Every trade website we build is designed around the person who will own it not wanting to think about it: three hours before launch, a photo per job after, and a care plan for everything else. The website's job is to make your phone ring, not to become a thing you have to look after.