SimpleWebflow

A plumbing website that gets the phone to ring

Most people who land on a plumber's site are standing next to something that is leaking. They are not browsing. They want to know you cover their street, that you can come today, and what it will cost before you arrive.

Free to see it finished Live the same day Address in your name
Build my website Free to see it finished. No card until you go live.

What a plumbing site is being asked to do

Two completely different people arrive at a plumber's website. One has a burst pipe and will call whoever answers first. The other is planning a bathroom and will read for ten minutes, compare three companies, and decide next week. A site that serves only the second one loses the emergency call, which is the more profitable of the two.

So the phone number goes at the top, as a link that dials when it is tapped, and it stays visible when the page scrolls on a phone. Underneath it goes the one sentence that decides whether the call happens at all: the hours you actually answer, and whether there is a callout charge. A visitor who has to hunt for either of those calls the next company instead.

The sections that matter for a plumber

A phone number you can tap
Not an image, not a contact form as the only route. A tel: link in the header, repeated at the bottom, so a wet hand and a cracked screen can still reach you.
The area you cover, by name
Towns, neighbourhoods and ZIP or postal codes, written out. "Greater Calgary and surrounding areas" tells somebody in Airdrie nothing, and tells a search engine nothing either.
Emergency versus booked work
Say which you do, when, and what a callout costs. Plumbers lose more calls to an unanswered price question than to a high price.
Your licence and insurance, in writing
Licence number, the state or province that issued it, and your liability cover. Licensed, bonded and insured is the phrase customers look for, and the number is what they can check.
Photographs of work, not of people
A finished bathroom, a replaced boiler, a re-piped kitchen. Stock photos of a smiling stranger in overalls are read as a sign that there is no real work to show.
A short list of what you do not do
It saves you the phone calls you cannot bill for, and it makes the list of what you do read as deliberate rather than as everything.

What a plumber's website costs

A local agency quotes somewhere between $2,500 and $6,000 for a plumbing site in the United States, or roughly $3,000 to $7,500 in Canada, and takes three to six weeks, most of which is spent waiting for you to send content. A freelancer is $800 to $2,500. A template on a builder is $200 to $600 a year, and the work of writing it and laying it out is yours.

Here it is $199 once, $15 a month for hosting, and the address from $35 a year. You see the finished site before any of that is charged. If you look at it and decide against it, you close the tab and nothing has happened.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.

How the build actually runs

You describe the business
The name, what you do, and anything a customer should know. One or two sentences is the whole brief. No sitemap, no wireframe, no discovery call.
The site is built and written
Design, words, layout and licensed photography chosen for your trade, composed into a finished page in about a minute. You see it before you spend anything.
You change what you want to
Click any line of text and type over it. Swap any photo for one of yours, which always looks better. Delete a section you do not want.
You pick the address and go live
Search for the address you want, we register it in your name, point it at the site, secure it with a certificate, and email you when it is live.

What one of these looks like finished

A plumbing company, built by the same code that would build yours. Nothing here is a mock-up: the frame below is a live page, rendered by the same code that builds a customer's site.

Riverbend PlumbingPlumber, Calgary. A fictional business, built to show the output. Open full size

What it costs

Free to look at the finished site. You pay when you want it live.

Website set-up One time. Designed, written, built. $199
Hosting Online, secured, backed up. $15/mo
Your web address Registered in your name, renewed yearly. from $35/yr
Today then $15/mo, or $150/yr to save two months $199
Free to see it finished No card to look Cancel whenever

Addresses cost different amounts by ending: a .com is cheaper than a .io. We charge what the registrar charges us plus a small margin, and show the exact figure before you pay.

Questions

Will it work properly on a phone?

That is the main case, not the afterthought. Somewhere around three quarters of the people who find a plumber through a search do it on a phone, usually while looking at the problem. The number is tappable, the text is large enough to read without zooming, and the page loads on a weak signal because there is almost nothing to download.

Can I list emergency callout prices?

Yes, and you should. Write the callout fee and the hourly rate, and say what happens after hours. You can change any of those figures yourself afterwards without asking us, so a price rise is a two minute job.

What if I cover several towns?

List them. Name the towns, the neighbourhoods and the ZIP or postal codes you actually travel to, in the words a customer would use. A page that names your real service area outranks one that says "nationwide" for every search that matters to you.

Do I need a separate page for each service?

Not at the start. One well-written page that covers emergency work, bathrooms, boilers and drains does more for a small plumbing company than six thin pages, and it is far less to keep up to date. Pages can be added later if one service grows enough to deserve its own.

Keep reading

Describe your business.
See what we make of it.

Free to look, and nothing to cancel if you decide against it.

Build my website