Web Design · · 5 min read
The average Exeter trades website: five problems we keep finding
As part of our study of 50 Exeter business websites, we looked closely at 30 trades: five each of plumbers, electricians, roofers, builders, landscapers and cleaners, taken from Google Maps on 5 October 2026. Most were well rated: 22 of the 30 had 4.5 stars or more on Google. Their websites kept tripping over the same five things.
1. The website on the Google listing doesn't exist
3 of the 30Google listings linked to a website whose domain no longer works. Someone taps “Website”, gets an error, and goes back to the next business on the list. It usually happens when a domain lapses or a site moves and nobody updates the listing.
The fix: open your own Google Business Profile, tap the website link, and check where it goes. Two minutes.
2. It's slow on a phone
We tested the 27 working sites the way Google tests mobile: a mid-range phone on slow 4G.
| On a phone | Sites |
|---|---|
| Main content in 2.5 seconds or less (good) | 1 of 27 |
| Main content after more than 4 seconds (poor) | 23 of 27 |
| Typical time to show the main content | 9.7 seconds |
The person searching “emergency plumber” with water coming through the ceiling is not going to wait ten seconds.
The fix:it's often images. Photos straight off a phone camera are often several megabytes each. Resized and compressed, they look the same and load in a fraction of the time.
3. You can't tap to call
On 7 of the 26 homepages we could read, there was no tap-to-call link. For a trade, the phone call is the conversion. If the number is plain text, the customer has to copy it out by hand on a small screen.
The fix: make every phone number on the site a tel:link and put one at the top of every page. It's a five-minute change.
4. Google isn't told who you are
Search engines and AI assistants read a site's code as well as its words. We checked for the basics:
| Check | Sites |
|---|---|
| No business details for Google (LocalBusiness schema) | 19 of 26 |
| Page title too long to show in full in Google (over 60 characters) | 13 of 26 |
| No meta description (Google writes its own snippet) | 6 of 26 |
The fix: a clear page title (trade, town, business name), a one-line description, and a block of schema with your name, address, phone, area and hours. Invisible to customers, very visible to Google.
5. The text is hard to read
Only 6 of 27sites passed the colour contrast check. The usual culprits are light grey body text, or white headings laid over a bright photo of a finished job. It looks fine on a designer's screen and disappears on a phone in daylight, which is where your customers read it.
The fix: darker body text, and a dark overlay behind any words on a photo.
None of this is expensive
Every fix above is small, and most are cheap. Most of the businesses in this study had earned good ratings. Their websites were losing some of the customers those ratings brought in. Book a free 15-minute consultationand we'll show you what we'd fix first, or ask for a free auditif you'd rather have it in writing. If you would rather start again, here is how we build websites for trades, and here is what we do for businesses in the city: web design in Exeter.
How we did it
The 30 trades are the plumber, electrician, roofer, builder, landscape gardener and cleaner groups from our Exeter study: the first five in each on Google Maps with an EX1 to EX6 postcode, their own website domain, and no national chain. Each homepage was checked once, by reading its HTML and with Lighthouse 12 on mobile settings. Three sites didn't resolve, and one refused our HTML check but loaded in Lighthouse, so the counts cover 26 or 27 sites as stated. No business is named.
Every enquiry, straight to the right person.
Not sure what your website is costing you? Book a free 15-minute consultation and we'll show you what we'd fix first. No obligation.