Do I need a website for my plumbing business if I am on Checkatrade?

Checkatrade and MyBuilder are worth keeping, so start there. They vet you, they carry your reviews, and they put work in front of you on the weeks the phone is quiet, which is a real job and they do it. This reads the same if you're an electrician or a builder, because all three of you are on the same platforms. What none of them is built to do is bring you the person who has water coming through a ceiling at eleven at night and no idea who you are.

That person types emergency plumber near me into Google, and Google gives back websites. Your Checkatrade profile sits on checkatrade.com in the same layout as every other trade in your area, one of a stack the platform is ranking against each other. Google can show that page, but it's showing the lead site, not you. And the lead itself is often sent to three or four trades at once, so you pay to quote against the others whether or not the job ends up yours. MyBuilder works the other way round, a free profile and a fee when a homeowner shortlists you, and you're still one name on a list somebody else is choosing from.

Why your own site finds new customers

Search and AI read the open web. Google, ChatGPT and Claude fetch pages at addresses like yourtrade.co.uk. A profile inside a platform's app is mostly not something they can fetch. If the only description of your business out there was written to Checkatrade's template, that's the version anything reading about you has to work from.

Own the site and you own the words people search with. Boiler repairs. Bathroom fits. Full rewires. Burst pipe on a Sunday. Landlord gas safety certificate. Each of those can be its own page, written the way a homeowner would say it rather than the way a trade directory categorises it, and each can say which streets and postcodes you actually cover.

Which is the whole point. Somebody searching for a plumber has already decided they need one. They are not browsing, they are picking, usually off the first page they open that looks like it does their exact job in their exact town. A call that comes off that page costs you nothing to receive, win or lose, which a lead does not.

How we make it simple

We build the site from your Google Business Profile. The phone number, the hours, the area you serve and the reviews Google already shows become the foundation, so the number a burst pipe rings is the right one and you never typed it twice.

From the services on that listing we make a page each, and an FAQ out of the questions your reviews keep raising: call-out charges, how fast you get there, Gas Safe registration, whether you do weekends. If you want a page for landlords, or for the first-time buyer who has never had to call anyone about a boiler, that's the kind of page a site of your own can carry, and it goes up in the language a worried homeowner uses rather than the language on an invoice.

The technical work an SEO firm would quote you three figures a month for is part of the build. The site is written to be indexed by Google and read by ChatGPT: pages of real text, structured data describing the business and where it works, a sitemap, and the whole lot submitted to Google and Bing on the day it goes live. Google can show a page at your address, under your business name.

It's live a couple of minutes after you put the name in, off a van and a phone if that's where you are, with nothing to write first and nobody to brief. Change your hours or add a service on the Google listing and the site follows, so the one place you already keep current is the only place you have to keep current.

How they work together

The lead sites keep sending leads. When one comes in you quote it and win it the way you always have, and nothing about that changes: the vetting and the reviews you've built up there are worth having and they stay where they are. Your own site takes the other kind of work, the search that starts with a problem rather than a form, and the call lands on your phone directly off a page with no other trades anywhere on it. Nobody else is being sent that job at the same time, and there's no fee attached to answering it.

Your van, your cards and your Instagram bio point at the site instead of at a listing. So does the website field on your Google profile, which is the link most people press once Google has shown them your name.

What you pay

£30 a month, and that's the whole bill. A real site with a page for each job you do, built from your Google listing, on your own .co.uk or .com, with hosting and updates in the price and no invoice when a phone number changes. The first version is live in a couple of minutes and free to read before you decide anything. Cancel any month, and the domain stays yours.

Put your business name into our page for trades and we'll build one from your Google listing, free to look at.