Website must-haves by trade

1. Search for your trade, or narrow by the kind of business you are.
2. Pick your trade from the results. If yours is not listed, the closest relative is usually close enough.
3. Read the services list — name these individually on your site, not as a paragraph.
4. Check the enquiry word. 'Request a quote' and 'Book a table' are not interchangeable.
5. Read the pricing and service-area notes; these are the two places trades differ most.
6. Follow the link to the full guide for your trade if you want the long version.

If your trade is missing, use the nearest relative. What customers look for varies far less within a category than between categories — a lash technician and a barber want much the same things from a website.

Every guide to small business websites says the same things: be clear, add reviews, make it mobile-friendly, have a call to action. All true, all impossible to disagree with, and none of it tells a specific business what to actually put on the page.

The concrete decisions differ enormously by trade. A restaurant's homepage needs a menu and hours above everything else, and a reservation route. A roofer's needs a service area and proof of insurance, and a quote form. A therapist's needs credentials, an explanation of what a first session involves, and a booking route that feels private. Those are three completely different pages.

They also differ in what the customer is anxious about, which is the thing generic advice never addresses. A homeowner hiring a tradesperson worries about being ripped off and about the person in their house. Someone booking a restaurant worries about whether it will be right for the occasion. A parent choosing a tutor worries about their child. The page has to answer the specific worry, and the worry is trade-specific.

Every trade has a natural word for the thing a customer is trying to do. Quote. Booking. Reservation. Consultation. Appointment. Enrolment. They are not synonyms and a customer notices when the wrong one is used.

"Request a quote" on a restaurant page reads as a mistake. "Book now" on a roofing page reads as presumptuous — nobody books a roof, they ask what it will cost. In both cases the reader hesitates, and hesitation at the button is exactly where you cannot afford it.

It matters more than it sounds because the button is the last thing between interest and contact. Everything else on the page has done its job by that point; the wrong word introduces a half-second of friction at the worst possible moment.

The field is in this lookup because most website templates default to "Contact us", which is the safest and weakest option available. It works everywhere and persuades nobody, because it describes an action rather than an outcome.

Some trades publish full price lists as a matter of course — hair, beauty, fitness, tutoring. In those, a site with no prices reads as evasive and loses enquiries to competitors who show them.

Others cannot sensibly quote in advance because every job differs — plumbing, roofing, electrical, most construction. There the convention is a call-out fee, a starting-from figure, or a statement that estimates are free. Publishing invented fixed prices in those trades produces enquiries you have to walk back, which is worse than saying nothing.

A third group sits in between, where a range and an explanation of what moves it is the right answer: photography, catering, legal, accounting. The customer needs to know whether they are in the right ballpark before they invest in a conversation.

The universal mistake, in every trade, is saying nothing at all. Even in trades where fixed pricing is impossible, some indication — a minimum, a range, an explanation of what drives the number — outperforms silence, because it lets the customer self-select and saves you the calls that were never going to convert.

For most local businesses the Google Business Profile carries the map pin, the reviews and the phone number, and the website carries the full service list, the service area in your own words, the proof and the enquiry form. The profile gets you found; the site converts the person who wants to know more.

How that balance sits depends on the trade. For an emergency service, the profile does most of the work — the customer taps to call from the map and never sees your site. For a considered purchase like a wedding photographer or a solicitor, the profile is the introduction and the website does nearly all of the persuading.

That should change where you spend your effort. An emergency trade with a mediocre website and an excellent profile is well optimised. A wedding photographer in the same position is not.

The note in each trade's entry says which side of that line it sits on, which is a more useful thing to know than a generic instruction to do both well.

These entries are derived from the vertical playbooks behind our trade pages — assembled from how businesses in each trade actually present themselves, what their customers search for, and what the conventions of the trade are. That is a reasonable basis for orientation and it is not research.

Where the dataset is thin for a trade, the interface says so rather than showing a shorter list as though it were complete. That matters: an incomplete list presented confidently is worse than an incomplete list labelled as one.

What is not covered at all is anything genuinely regulated. Licence numbers you must display, allergen information, insurance disclosures, professional body requirements — all of these vary by jurisdiction and by trade, and none of them are here. Check those with your trade body or regulator, not with a website tool.