In short: A website for trade businesses is measured against a different bar than a corporate site. It has to get you called, show your service area, prove you're reliable, and bring in applications. Five pages usually cover it. At Okapi Digital in Frankfurt, a site like that starts at €999 and goes live in 5 to 10 days; the version with individual service pages, SEO and a careers page is €3,490 and takes 3 to 4 weeks. The piece with the fastest effect costs the least: a maintained Google Business Profile and an automatic reply to missed calls.
Here's how it goes on an ordinary Saturday morning. Water is coming out of a radiator in a flat in Bockenheim. The tenant types "emergency plumber Frankfurt" into a phone, opens the first three results, and calls the one with a number at the top, photos of real job sites, and Bockenheim named as part of its area. The other two businesses lose the job in under a minute and never hear the phone ring.
That is the whole difference between a site that exists and a site that works, and it rarely comes down to design. It comes down to four things that have to be visible on a phone within the first five seconds.
Why Does a Trade Business Need a Different Website Than an Office Company?
A B2B company site accompanies a long decision. Someone reads, compares, downloads something, discusses it internally, and gets in touch weeks later. That site is allowed to explain.
Trades work the other way. The decision takes minutes, usually on a phone, often under pressure, and almost always ends in a call. Four practical requirements follow from that:
- The phone number sits at the top of every page, on subpages too, and dials with one tap.
- The service area is written out as place names. Frankfurt, Offenbach, Hanau, Bad Homburg, Bad Vilbel. People call when they read their own town, and "Rhine-Main and surroundings" answers nothing.
- Proof is pictures and reviews. Every business writes "reliable and professional" about itself, so nobody believes it.
- The form is short enough for one hand. Name, phone, what's wrong, attach a photo. Everything else gets sorted on the call.
Each trade also sells differently. For a plumber the emergency decides, for a roofer last night's weather, for a painter a date a few weeks out, for a joiner the look of the finished piece, and for an electrician often a regulation or a renovation. One site built the same way for all five leaves something on the table in every case.
Website for Trade Businesses: Which Five Pages Do You Actually Need?
A website for tradespeople doesn't need twenty pages. It needs five that do their job.
Page 1, the home page. One sentence at the top saying what you do and where. Below it the number, below that three pieces of proof: a review count, a project photo, something like the founding year or a master craftsman qualification. Then services as tiles, then a form. Everything else belongs on a subpage.
Page 2, one page per service. This is where most sites stop and where the jobs start. People search for the service, not the company: bathroom renovation, boiler replacement, electrical safety check, exterior painting, gutter repair. Each of those deserves its own page with its own text, photos and price ranges. Six service pages give you six doors instead of one.
Page 3, projects. Individual jobs belong here: what the problem was, what you did, how long it took, in which town. A carousel of client logos does none of that. Five honestly documented projects carry more weight than thirty stock photos.
The Pages That Carry Trust
Page 4, about the business. Faces, names, founding year, qualifications, trade association membership, vehicles. This is where clients decide whether they want someone in their home. A photo of the team in front of the van does that better than three paragraphs of company philosophy.
Page 5, careers. There is a section on that below.
Contact, imprint and privacy pages come on top. In Germany the last two are legally required, and they're skipped or copied from an old site surprisingly often.
What Does a Trade Website Cost and How Long Does It Take?
Search for trade website cost and you'll get ranges from zero to twenty thousand euros, which helps nobody. So here are our prices, the same ones we quote on a call.
| Package | Price | Timeline | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launchpad | from €999 | 5–10 days | 1–3 pages, one trade, first proper site |
| Ascent | from €3,490 | 3–4 weeks | 4–6 pages, service pages, careers page, full on-page SEO |
| Apex | from €8,490 | 6–8 weeks | 10+ pages, several trades or locations |
| Local SEO setup | €790 one time | 1 week | Visibility across your region |
| Google Business Profile setup | €290 one time | a few days | Maps, reviews, calls |
| Missed call text back | €290 setup + €79/month | a few days | Calls that get lost on site |
| Essential care plan | €49/month | ongoing | Hosting, backups, security updates |
Three things move the price: how many service pages you need, whether usable photos already exist, and whether you write the copy or we do. Spend two hours walking through your last few jobs with a phone camera before the project starts and you'll save a four-figure sum at the end. Every package and what's in it is on our website development page.
How Important Is the Google Business Profile for Tradespeople?
Very, and often more so than the home page itself. A large share of searches for tradespeople end in the map view rather than on a website. Category, opening hours, service area, photos and reviews decide who gets called there. The website is the destination that profile links to, and it carries the evidence the profile has no room for.
What belongs in it and in what order to tackle it is in our Google Business Profile checklist. Three points do most of the work for trades: the right primary category instead of a generic one, a service area listing the towns you actually work in, and a steady stream of new photos from real jobs.
Reviews are the second lever. Trades run on recommendation, and Google reviews are recommendation made visible. The only thing that matters is asking systematically rather than intending to. An automated system that sends a review request after every completed job costs €340 setup and €99 per month with us.
Why Do Real Photos of Your Work Belong on the Site?
Because a website for a trade business with no real pictures proves nothing. Stock photos do the opposite of what they're meant to. A smiling man in a hard hat from an image library tells the visitor there's nothing real to show.
Shoot it yourself instead, on a phone, and do it consistently:
- Before and after from the same position. It's the strongest image type in the trades.
- The finished detail, not just the wide shot. The clean silicone joint, the straight edge, the tidy connection.
- The business at work: van, tools, team. That doubles as material for the careers page.
Ask the client first whether you can use the pictures, especially inside private homes, and don't show faces without consent. If the site also needs to win larger contracts, a professional photo day is worth it; ours start at €720.
How Do You Win Staff and Apprentices Through the Site?
The careers page is the part most trade businesses leave out, and with skilled labour as short as it is, it's the part worth the most. Someone who hears about you through a job ad or a recommendation looks at your site first. If there's nothing there, they apply elsewhere.
What belongs on it:
- Open roles in plain words, apprenticeships included, with a start date.
- What the job actually offers: hours, pay or pay scale, vehicle, tools, workwear, training, whether there's travel involved.
- What a day in the business looks like, in pictures rather than phrases.
- An application form with file upload that works on a phone. An address like jobs@ isn't enough, because nobody assembles a PDF application after a shift.
Apprentices decide on a phone and in a few minutes. Someone who finds faces, vans and a working form gets in touch. Someone who finds a contact form from 2015 doesn't.
What Happens to Inquiries When Nobody Can Answer the Phone?
This is the biggest gap in the trades, and it has nothing to do with design. You're up a ladder, in a crawl space, or under a sink. The phone rings, and twenty seconds later the caller dials the next number.
An automatic fallback channel fixes it. Missed call text back sends every missed caller an instant SMS with a short reply and a booking link, from €290 setup plus €79 per month. How it works in detail and what it brings back in a month is in our piece on missed calls.
On the site itself, three things belong with it: a form that takes under a minute, a WhatsApp button for people who'd rather type than talk, and a clear line about when you call back. If you want to automate further, online booking starts at €390 setup plus €99 per month, and a chatbot that qualifies overnight inquiries starts at €490 setup plus €149 per month.
Conclusion
A trade business website is judged on whether the phone rings the next day. Five pages, real photos, a service area written in place names, a maintained Google profile and a fallback channel for missed calls cover that. It isn't a big project either: from €999 in 5 to 10 days, or €3,490 in 3 to 4 weeks once service pages and a careers page come in.
If you want to know which version is enough for your business, we'll look at your current site and your Google profile together. Book a free discovery call and you'll get a concrete recommendation with a price and a timeline, even if you end up going elsewhere.
