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The plan type a one-person trades site belongs on, and what the higher tiers actually change.
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Web Hosting for Handyman Businesses
This is the page that tells you to buy less. Web hosting for handyman businesses has to do three things: prove you are real, show you work in this area, and get you the phone call. Almost everything else sold alongside it is decoration you will pay for monthly and never use.
What somebody is actually checking when they look you up
Picture the moment your website gets used. A neighbour has given somebody your name, or you left a card, or your listing came up in a search. They type your business name into a phone while standing in the room that needs fixing. They are not shopping. They have already half decided to call you.
What they are doing in those thirty seconds is checking that you exist. Is this a real business. Does he work near me. Does he do this kind of job. Is there a number I can press. That is the entire transaction, and it is over before a slideshow on your homepage has finished loading.
Once you accept that, most of what gets sold to one-person trades businesses stops making sense. A booking calendar does not answer any of those four questions. Neither does a blog, a live chat window, or a plan with more storage than a hospital records room.
The most damaging thing a handyman website can do is look abandoned. A copyright line four years out of date, a phone number that no longer works, a page that says "coming soon". Any one of those sends the caller back to the search results.
Photographs of finished work, sized right
Most handyman sites are one gallery and a phone number, and the gallery is what wins the call. We will resize what you have, get it loading fast, and leave the rest of the site alone.
The four things the site has to carry
Everything below fits on one page. Some of the best handyman sites we have worked on are exactly one page, and they get more calls than the five-page versions that replaced them.
1. Your name, and that you are a person
First name, a photograph of you, how long you have been doing this, and where you are based. People hiring somebody to come into their house are hiring a person, not a company. A stock photo of a smiling model in a hard hat does the opposite of what you want, because everybody recognises it.
2. What you do and what you do not
A plain list. Doors that stick, deck boards, grab bars, drywall patches, gutter cleaning, mounting televisions, replacing storm windows. Be specific enough that somebody can see their job on the list. Say what you do not take on too, because the calls you turn down cost you time. If you do not touch gas or do full electrical rewires, put it in writing.
3. Where you work
Name the towns. Not "Western New York" but the actual places you will drive to, and roughly how far out you go. This is the single most useful sentence on most trades websites and the one most often left off.
4. A number that can be tapped
The phone number in the header, in real text, marked up so a phone dials it when it is pressed. Not inside an image. Not only in a contact form. Most of these visits end in a call or they end in nothing.
That is the site. If you want a contact form as well, fine, but treat it as a second option rather than the main route. People who want a handyman today will phone.
Why entry-level web hosting for handyman businesses is enough
A handyman website is one of the smallest things anybody puts on a server. A few pages of text, a contact form, and a set of photographs. It changes maybe twice a year. Nothing runs in the background. Nobody logs in except you.
Shared hosting at its entry tier covers that comfortably, and it will keep covering it as you grow, because growth in this trade means more jobs, not more web traffic. Doubling your workload does not double the load on the site.
The upsells you will be offered mostly solve problems you do not have:
- Extra storage. Your entire site, photographs included, is likely to be measured in tens of megabytes. Storage is not your constraint.
- A managed plan. Managed tiers exist to look after complicated software. A small site does not need managing, it needs leaving alone.
- A security product. Security products protect logins, payments and customer records. A site with none of those has very little to steal.
- Higher tiers sold on visitor numbers. A local trades site does not get the sort of traffic those tiers are designed for.
There are two things worth paying for that often get skipped instead. One is a business email address at your own domain, because an estimate arriving from a free webmail address reads as less serious than the same estimate from your own name. The other is backups, so that the day something breaks you have a copy from before it broke. Both are cheap. Neither is a tier upgrade.
If you want the whole picture of what running a small site costs in a year, the breakdown on what a website costs to run lists every line, including the ones people forget.
Photographs of finished work beat every other kind of content
You already carry the best marketing asset in this trade in your pocket. Before and after photographs of jobs you have finished do more for a handyman site than any amount of written copy, because they answer the only real question a customer has, which is whether you leave a room looking better than you found it.
Twelve good photographs beat fifty mediocre ones. What makes them good is dull and practical.
- Take the before shot. It takes four seconds and it is the half that makes the after shot mean something.
- Turn a light on and open the blinds. Phone cameras are fine in decent light and terrible in a dark basement.
- Tidy the frame. Move the coffee cup and the tool bag out of shot before you take the after photo.
- Get the whole thing in. A close-up of a hinge means nothing. The door in its frame, closing properly, means something.
- Ask before photographing inside somebody's home, and never post anything that shows an address, a lockbox or an alarm panel.
Resize them before they go on the site
This is the one technical thing that matters here. A photograph straight off a modern phone is several megabytes and far wider than any screen. Put twenty of those on a page and the site crawls, especially on the mobile connection your customer is using. Resized to a sensible width, the same photographs load instantly and look identical.
When a trades site is slow, this is almost always why. It is not the hosting plan and a bigger plan will not fix it.
We will resize the job photos for you
Send us your photographs and whatever site you have now. We will get the images down to a sensible size, put your phone number and town list back in front of people, and tell you if your current plan is already fine.
Getting found without renting leads
Lead services sell you the same job three times over to three different contractors and charge each of you for the privilege. They can work, particularly when you are starting. They are not a substitute for the two things below, and the two things below are free apart from your time.
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Claim and fill in your Google Business Profile
For local trades this is the front door, not your website. It is where the map pin, the reviews and the call button live. Fill in every field, list the towns you cover, and upload the same job photographs you put on the site. Most handymen do half of this and stop.
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Point it at a website you own
The profile needs somewhere to send people, and that somewhere should be your own domain rather than a social page or a directory listing. A profile linked to a site you control is the whole setup. Everything after this is refinement.
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Ask for reviews out loud, on the day
The moment to ask is when you are packing up and the customer is happy. Not by text a week later. Reviews are the closest thing this trade has to a ranking factor you can influence directly.
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Put your town names in your own words on the site
One honest paragraph naming the places you work is enough. You do not need a separate page for every town, and a set of near-identical town pages generally does more harm than good.
Choose a domain you can say over the phone without spelling it twice. The guide to choosing a domain name covers the traps, mainly hyphens and clever misspellings that nobody can type.
Who should not spend more, and what to skip
Almost nobody in this trade needs anything above an entry plan. If a proposal you have been sent runs to more than one page of line items, go through it and ask what each line is for. Ask specifically what it does for a business where the customer phones.
Things that are usually a waste of money for a one-person handyman business:
- A booking system. You are one person with a van and a schedule that changes when a job runs long. An online calendar either overbooks you or sits empty. The phone is faster.
- A blog. Writing it consistently is a part-time job. An abandoned blog whose last post is from two summers ago actively makes the site look dead.
- Live chat. It is a promise to answer instantly, made by somebody who is up a ladder.
- Online payment on the site. If you invoice on completion, take payment the way you already take it.
- A five-page site where one page would do. More pages means more places for the phone number to go stale.
There are real reasons to spend more, and they are worth naming so this does not read as blanket advice. Buy the bigger version when you have crews rather than yourself, and the site has to carry a hiring page and job scheduling. Buy it when you stock and sell parts online. Buy it when you are running paid ads at volume and need landing pages that change weekly. Buy it when you are a franchise and the branding is not yours to decide.
One more honest case. If you are taking over a site somebody else built and nobody can find the login or the domain, the work you need is not a bigger plan, it is an afternoon of untangling. That job is described on taking over a website.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and one-person trades businesses are a large part of that. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, which means we have no reason to talk you into a tier you will not use. If the plan you are already paying for is the right one, we will tell you so.
If you are starting from nothing, the launch checklist is the order to do things in, domain first, and it will stop you paying for hosting months before you have anything to put on it. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what you have got so far.
Common questions
Handyman website questions
I am one person with a van. Do I need a website at all?
You need somewhere that proves you are real, and it should be a domain you own rather than a social page or a directory profile. Beyond that the answer is honestly small. One page with your name, your photograph, what you fix, the towns you cover and a tappable phone number does the job. That fits on the cheapest hosting there is.
Should I put a booking calendar on my site?
Usually not. A booking system assumes your day is predictable, and a handyman's day is not. A job that runs two hours long turns every confirmed slot after it into a phone call anyway. Unless you have a crew and a dispatcher, the phone is faster for you and for the customer.
My site is slow to load on a phone. Do I need a bigger plan?
Almost certainly not. On trades sites the cause is nearly always job photographs uploaded straight from a phone camera at full size. Twenty of those is tens of megabytes of images on one page. Resize them to a sensible width before uploading and the same page loads instantly on the same plan.
Is it worth paying a lead service instead of building a site?
Lead services sell the same enquiry to several contractors and charge each of you, so you are buying a race rather than a customer. They can be useful when you are starting out and have nothing else. They do not replace a filled-in Google Business Profile pointed at a site you own, which costs an evening and then keeps working.
Should I build a page for each town I drive to?
No, and building them often backfires because the pages end up near-identical with the town name swapped. One honest paragraph naming the places you actually drive to, on a page a person would read, does more. Keep the same town list on your Google Business Profile so the two agree.
Do I need an SSL certificate if I do not take payments?
Yes, and it should come with the hosting rather than as a separate purchase. Browsers now warn people about sites without it, and a warning screen in front of your phone number costs you the call. It is not about the payments, it is about not looking broken. There is more on the SSL page.
Related
Launch Checklist
The order to do things in when you are starting from nothing, domain first.
See the checklistBusiness Email
Why an estimate sent from your own domain reads differently to one from free webmail.
Read about business emailEvery trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Ivan Radic, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Buy the smallest thing that works
Send us the proposal you have been given, or tell us what you are paying for now, and we will go through it line by line. If the answer is that you already have enough, that is what we will say.
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Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.