Web Design for Plumbers
Your website has two jobs, and they pull in opposite directions.
The emergency and the refit are different businesses
A blocked drain is £215. A leak repair, £235. A shower installation, £840. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A full bathroom refit, £1,850.
The top and bottom of that list have almost nothing in common.
The person with water coming through their kitchen ceiling at half past nine at night is not reading anything. They’re scanning for a phone number that looks local and some sign that a human will pick up. If they have to scroll, tap twice, or wait for a hero image to load on patchy mobile data, they’ve already gone back and rung the next one. You lost that job in about four seconds and you’ll never know it happened.
The person planning a bathroom has been thinking about it for months. They’ve got tiles saved on their phone and a rough budget they’re slightly embarrassed about. They want to see bathrooms you’ve actually finished, and they’ll read for ten minutes before filling anything in.
Build the site for one and you lose the other. Most plumbers build for the emergency — big number, dark background, “24/7” — then wonder why the higher-value refit work goes elsewhere. A few build a portfolio site and quietly lose the emergency calls because the number’s in the footer.
How to build for both
Split the paths above the fold. Emergency one way, planned work the other, decided in the first two seconds by the customer rather than by you. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it.
The emergency path has to be brutally fast. Click-to-call, sticky on mobile, no carousel, no cookie wall sitting over the number. Speed here isn’t an SEO nicety, it’s the entire job — someone panicking on 4G will not wait four seconds for your homepage.
The refit path needs finished bathrooms. Not one photo of a chrome tap. Whole rooms, properly lit, several angles, ideally with a note of what it cost and how long it took. Bathroom customers are frightened of exactly two things: hidden costs, and being without a bathroom for a month. Answer both in writing and you’ll convert people who were leaning towards someone else.
Show the registrations. Gas Safe at around £310 a year if you do gas, plus WIAPS, CORGI HomePlan or APHC. On the emergency path a badge is reassurance. On the refit path it’s a qualification check.
Do not make the emergency customer read. Every word between them and your phone number costs you jobs.
What we’d actually build
Homepage with a hard split — a call button and an “emergency, today” route on one side, “planning a bathroom or a new boiler” on the other.
Emergency side: one page, extremely fast, with the call-out fee stated, your actual hours (honestly, not “24/7” if you don’t answer at 3am), the areas you cover, and what to do while you’re on your way. That last bit — how to find the stopcock, how to isolate the boiler — costs nothing and earns enormous goodwill.
Planned side: a bathroom gallery built as full projects rather than single shots, a boiler page covering brands, warranties and finance if you offer it, and a plain page about what happens week by week during a refit. Bathroom customers pick the plumber who made the process feel manageable.
Shared: registrations, service area, reviews pulled in automatically, and two separate forms so an emergency never sits in the same queue as a refit enquiry.
The mistakes we see most on plumbers’ sites
A slow homepage. More emergency work is lost to load time than to price. A big hero image and three tracking scripts will cost you calls every single week and you’ll never see it happen.
No call-out fee anywhere. People assume the worst and ring someone who tells them. Publishing it costs you the odd job and wins you far more.
One photo of a tap. If you want bathroom work you need finished bathrooms. If you haven’t got them, that’s the first job before anything else.
“24/7” when it isn’t. Somebody rings at 2am, gets voicemail, and leaves a review about it. Publish your real hours — honesty converts better than an unmet promise.
Burying the phone number on mobile. Test your own site on a phone, at night, on 4G, the way your actual emergency customer does. Most plumbers have never done this and are quietly horrified when they do.
What’s a job actually worth?
Average job £840 · jobs won per month 12 · enquiries 30
Four in ten. Get to six and it’s £36,000 a year.
Every enquiry lands in Gaffer
Emergency calls log against the customer automatically, so a repeat caller isn’t a stranger. Bathroom enquiries route into opportunities and follow themselves up — which matters, because refit customers take weeks to decide and most plumbers chase once and give up. Quote from a template, invoice off the job.
Questions plumbers ask
I don’t want emergency work anymore.
Then we’d build the opposite site — no 24/7 messaging, refit portfolio front and centre, phone number deliberately less prominent. Legitimate strategy, different site.
Everyone claims 24/7. How do I stand out?
By being honest. “We answer until 10pm and we’ll tell you straight away if we can’t get to you tonight” beats a 24/7 claim nobody believes and half the trade doesn’t honour.
Should I list prices?
Call-out fee, always. It’s the single most common reason people don’t ring. Bathroom refits, no — too variable.
How important is speed really?
For emergency traffic it’s the most important thing on the page. Everything else is second.
Can I do bathrooms without a showroom?
Yes, and the gallery is how. Six finished bathrooms shot properly does the job a showroom would.
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