Start with what a customer actually needs to see
Before you touch a website builder, write down the five or six jobs you most want more of. A domestic installer chasing consumer unit upgrades, EV charger installs and EICRs needs a very different site from a firm doing commercial fit-outs and landlord compliance. Your homepage should name those jobs in plain language, not "electrical solutions".
The single most important thing on the page is your phone number, visible without scrolling, and tappable on a mobile. Roughly three quarters of trade website visits come from phones, and a number the customer has to copy out by hand is a lost job. Add a WhatsApp link if you actually answer it, and be honest about hours: "calls answered 7am to 6pm, emergency callouts until 10pm" beats a vague promise of 24/7 you cannot keep.
- A page per main service, not one long list
- Your working area named properly (towns, not just "the North West")
- Photos of your own work, including tidy consumer units and cable runs
- A short about section with your face on it
- Clear next step: call, text, or request a quote
Prove you are qualified, because customers now check
Electrical work is one of the few trades where the customer has been told to check credentials. Put your registration front and centre: your scheme (NICEIC, NAPIT, ELECSA, SELECT in Scotland), your registration number, and a line explaining what Part P notification means for their building control paperwork. If you are registered, your details are searchable on the Electrical Competent Person register, so let people verify you rather than hoping they take your word.
Also state your public liability cover amount, whether you carry a valid ECS card, and what certification the customer receives at the end: an Electrical Installation Certificate, a Minor Works Certificate, or an EICR with its C1, C2, C3 and FI codes explained in one sentence each. That last bit is genuinely useful content, and it is the sort of thing people search for at 9pm after a survey has come back.
Get found locally: the bit most sites skip
A website on its own rarely ranks. The heavy lifting for local work is done by a Google Business Profile, properly filled in, with your service area, categories set to "Electrician" plus any relevant secondary ones, and real photos uploaded regularly. Link it to your site and make sure your name, address and phone number match exactly everywhere they appear, including Checkatrade or Rated People listings if you use them.
On the site itself, build one solid page for each town or borough you genuinely cover, and write it properly: the sort of housing stock there, typical jobs you have done, response times. Ten thin pages with the town name swapped out will do nothing. Three or four real ones can bring in steady enquiries.
Speed matters too. If your site takes more than about three seconds to load on 4G, a chunk of visitors leave. Compress your photos before uploading them, and be wary of page builders that load half a megabyte of scripts to display a phone number.
DIY or pay someone: an honest comparison
Building it yourself on Squarespace, Wix or WordPress is entirely realistic and costs roughly £150 to £400 a year once you have a domain, hosting and a template. The real cost is your time: expect a couple of full weekends to do a decent job, plus the ongoing habit of adding photos and updating pages. If evenings are already spent on quotes and certificates, that is a genuine constraint.
Paying a designer for a small trade site in the UK typically lands somewhere between £800 and £3,000 as a one-off, or £50 to £150 a month on a build-and-maintain arrangement, depending on how many pages and how much ongoing work is included. Whichever route you take, insist on owning the domain and having access to the hosting account. Plenty of tradespeople discover, years later, that they cannot move their site because someone else holds the keys.