A customer landing on your website has almost made up their mind. One doubt remains. And that doubt is not about your talent, which they cannot judge through a screen. It comes down to details they notice within seconds, often without realising it.
We have taken over plenty of websites for tradespeople and local businesses, and the same five details come up every time. Spend ten minutes checking yours tonight. Even if you never work with us, this list will help.
1. A phone number visible from the first second
Most of your visitors arrive on a phone. Someone looking for a plumber on Sunday evening will not dig through a menu to find a contact page. They want to tap a number and hear it ring.
Put your number at the top of every page and make it clickable. If people have to scroll, zoom or copy the digits by hand, some of your calls go to the competitor next door. Not because they are better, but because their number was easier to tap.
2. A website that loads quickly, even on 4G
Test your website on your phone outside your home, using mobile data. Not at your desk on Wi-Fi. That is how your customers see it: in their car, in a waiting room or on the pavement.
A restaurant whose menu takes several seconds to appear loses bookings without knowing it: the customer opens the next tab, finds the restaurant opposite and books there. Nobody tells you it happened, and that is exactly the trap.
3. Photos of your actual work
Generic stock photos are immediately recognisable, and they create more doubt than confidence. An impossibly perfect hair salon, with models appearing on ten other websites, makes it look as though you are hiding something.
A hairdresser has more to gain from ten phone photos of real clients in their own salon than from a polished gallery that looks nothing like their business. The same goes for a landscaper: before-and-after shots of a real garden beat any generic image. Customers want to see what they are buying, not a backdrop.
4. Say what you do in one sentence, right at the top
Open your homepage and read the first sentence. Would a stranger understand your trade, your town and what to do next in three seconds? ‘Independent garage in Melun, servicing and repairs for all makes, call for a quote’: that is a sentence that works for you.
‘Tailored solutions for all your projects’, on the other hand, says nothing. Visitors do not make the effort to guess. They leave and do not return.
5. Recent reviews, visible without clicking
Before calling an unfamiliar beauty salon, a customer reads the reviews. If your website shows none, they return to Google to find them, passing your competitors along the way.
Show your latest Google reviews directly on the website, with their dates. Three reviews from last month are more reassuring than a perfect rating whose latest comment is two years old. And reply to every one, including negative reviews: your response says more about you than the review itself.
Here is what to check tonight, in order:
- Open your website on your phone using 4G and count the seconds before you can read anything.
- Look for your number: if it is not clickable at the top of the page, make it so.
- Count your real photos: fewer than five photos of your own work is not enough.
- Read your opening sentence aloud: if it does not say your trade and town, rewrite it.
- Check the date of your latest displayed review: if it is over six months old, follow up with recent customers.
To see what your website could look like with these five details fixed, request your €0 mockup: we send it within 48 hours, with no commitment and nothing to pay. Compare it with your current website, then decide.
