The short answer: a tradie’s website has one job: turn a search on a phone into a phone call. That means your trade and your area in the first line, a tap-to-call number at the top, a plain list of what you do (and don’t), real photos of real jobs, your reviews, and how you charge. One good page does it. Sites like that already exist for more than 130 NZ trade and auto businesses, and each owner can see theirs free before paying anything.
Why trades are the most under-served businesses online
New Zealand runs on small trade businesses. MBIE’s 2025 small-business factsheet counts 81,249 construction firms, 98.1% of them with fewer than 20 staff, and across the whole economy 74% of businesses have no employees at all. Most sparkies, plumbers, painters and mechanics are one van and one phone.
That’s also why so many have no website. InternetNZ’s 2025 research found 47% of NZ businesses have no website, and the main reason owners gave was that the nature or size of their business doesn’t need one. For a tradie with a full book that feels true, right up until the customer who was referred to you searches your name, finds nothing, and rings the next name Google shows instead. Nearly three-quarters of consumers in the same survey called a business’s website the most important tool for engaging with it, well ahead of social media.
What a tradie website has to do, and nothing else
Trade customers don’t browse. They have a leaking pipe, a dead hot-water cylinder, a warning light, a deadline. They search from a phone, usually with a place name attached, and they want three questions answered in about five seconds:
- Are you the right trade? “Electrician” in the heading, not “Powering Otago’s future”.
- Do you cover my area? Named suburbs and towns in plain text: “Based in Mosgiel, covering Dunedin, the Taieri and down to Milton.” Machines can’t infer a travel radius, and neither can the customer.
- Can I reach you right now? A phone number in the first screen that dials when tapped, and an honest line about hours and after-hours.
Everything else on the page supports those three. The order matters. Of the nine mistakes we see most on NZ small-business sites, the two that hurt tradies hardest are a hidden phone number and a hero image with no words on it.
The page, top to bottom
| Section | What goes in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| First screen | Trade, area, tap-to-call number | Answers the three questions instantly |
| Services | A short list of what you do, and what you don’t | Stops the wrong calls, invites the right ones |
| How you charge | Call-out fee, hourly rate or “free quotes”, whichever is true | The second-most-asked question; answering it filters tyre-kickers |
| Proof | Real job photos, your Google rating, a few review lines | Trust is the whole sale for a trade |
| Credentials | Registrations and memberships you actually hold | Say them in words; don’t leave them to a badge image |
| Contact | Phone, email, hours, service area again, a map if you have a workshop | The close |
Two notes on the proof section. Photos of your own work beat every stock image ever taken, even when they’re phone snaps from a muddy site. And reviews now do double duty: customers read them, and so do the AI assistants people increasingly ask. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 45% of consumers had used an AI tool for local business recommendations in the past year, and 97% of those users sometimes double-check what the AI says against real reviews. Google’s own local-ranking guidance lists replying to reviews and adding photos among the things that help.
Mechanics and workshops: the extra bits
Auto is the biggest single group in our trade builds, and workshops need two things vans don’t: a street address with parking and drop-off notes (customers arrive in a car they’re about to leave with you), and what you service in plain words: WOFs, servicing, brakes, diagnostics, European, EVs, whichever apply. If you book by phone only, say so; if you take a booking tool, link it.
Under the bonnet, a workshop site should be marked up as exactly that. On our builds a mechanic’s page carries AutoRepair schema.org markup rather than a generic “business” label, with the address and opening hours in the same machine-readable block. It’s one of the reasons an AI assistant can answer “mechanic in Wānaka open Saturday” with a real name. Wanaka Auto Repairs, Stirling Auto Repairs in Invercargill and Gordon Road Vehicle Services in Mosgiel are three you can open right now; view the page source and search for ld+json to see it. A plumber’s page carries Plumber, an electrician’s Electrician, a building supplier’s GeneralContractor; open Vic Nicholson Plumbers or Solcel Electrical to check. Here’s the full list of what ships on every site, and how to check it.
What it should cost a tradie
Not much, because the site is small and the job is clear. Published NZ prices for a one-page build run roughly $749 inc GST to $2,000 ex GST, then hosting, domain and upkeep on top (the full national price picture). Our LaunchPad plan is $1 a day, $365 + GST a year ($419.75 incl. GST), with the build free during launch, the .co.nz domain registered in your name, hosting, SSL, Google + AI-search setup and five updates a year included. That’s new prices, a new van photo, a changed call-out fee, done by email.
What you can skip: a blog, a “projects” gallery with forty photos, a live-chat widget, a booking system if you don’t already use one, and any plan that meters your edits by the quarter-hour.
The two-minute version
More than 130 trade and auto businesses across Otago and Southland already have a one-page site built and waiting, made from their public details and checked by a person. Type your business name on the home page. If yours is there, you’ll see it in seconds, and you can send us the fixes (photos, prices, the areas you’ll actually drive to) before it goes live on your own domain.