In short and in plain language
Many trade websites have small mistakes. Each one looks harmless. Together they cost enquiries.
Photos need a short caption. It says what the photo shows.
Your phone number must be text, not an image. Then people can tap it.
Name your service area. A form should confirm that it was sent. Legal texts copied from other sites often have wrong details.
Check your own site on your phone. We can help you with this.
Most trade websites do not fail because of one big mistake. They fail because of a dozen small ones that look harmless on their own. A gallery without a word of explanation, a phone number stuck into the header as an image, a form that goes silent after you press send, a team page listing colleagues who moved on four years ago. The business notices none of it, because nobody ever reads their own site the way somebody does at half past eight in the evening with a dripping radiator and a phone in their hand. This article closes the series and is therefore laid out as a checklist: twelve mistakes, each with its consequence and the countermeasure that removes it. At the end there is a self-check that runs in ten minutes — on a phone, not on the large screen in the office.
Key takeaways
- A gallery without captions shows work but no service. Anyone who cannot tell which trade, which place and which scope is on display will not connect the picture to their own project and simply scrolls on.
- A phone number embedded as an image cannot be tapped, cannot be copied and is not read out by screen readers. As a text link with a tel reference the same number costs exactly one tap.
- With no service area stated, visitors decide by feeling whether the business drives out to them at all. Towns, district and an approximate radius in the running text answer that question in a single sentence.
- A form with no visible confirmation after sending produces duplicate enquiries and callbacks. A confirmation page naming a contact person and the usual response time costs effort once and saves phone time permanently.
- Copying legal texts from another website leads to false statements about the controller, the supervisory authority and the technology in use — and it is a copyright question on top of that.
Why small mistakes on trade websites get expensive
94 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses run their own website. Having a site therefore no longer sets a business apart from anyone. The difference is made in the twenty seconds in which a visitor decides whether to call or go back to the results list. Nobody reads a text to the end in that time. They look for three things: the trade, the place and a way to get in touch. Every mistake in this checklist stops the visitor at exactly one of those three points — and none of them produces an error message that a business could notice.
On top of that the standard has risen: 74 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed find that customers have become more critical. Anyone with three websites open side by side does not compare the quality of the work — that cannot be seen — but the care taken in the presentation. A site with uncaptioned pictures, a number that cannot be tapped and a news item from four years ago looks, next to two well-kept sites, like a business that either does not need the work or no longer exists. The good news: most points on this list are writing work, not programming work, and the list is ordered by effect rather than by effort — anyone trying to change everything at once usually changes nothing.
How to read your own site like a stranger
Mistake 1: the gallery without a word of explanation
The most common image on a trade website is a grid of twelve, eighteen or forty pictures with no caption at all. For the business each one tells a story: the week on the shell construction, the customer who changed the plan three times, the detail at the eaves the master craftsman is proud of. For the visitor it is a row of fragments they cannot place. They see a wall, a pipe, a roof truss — but not whether this was a renovation or a new build, whether it took half an hour or three weeks, and whether the same thing would work in their house.
The consequence is quiet and costly at the same time: the gallery does not produce an exit, it produces indifference. The visitor scrolls through without the pictures providing any proof and reaches the bottom of the page with the same uncertainty they started with. References that prove nothing are not references, they are decoration. In a typical gallery of twenty pictures that means twenty missed opportunities, without anyone having done anything wrong.
The countermeasure costs two sentences per picture. Every shot gets a caption naming the trade, the place at district level, the scope and one point that cannot be seen in the picture. Pictures with no recognisable content are removed rather than captioned — a gallery of eight explained shots works better than one with forty silent ones. What sensible pictures taken with a phone look like is covered on our services pages.
- Trade and type of job: new build, renovation, repair, maintenance
- Place at district or municipal level, never the full address of the customer
- Scope in a measure a layperson understands: square metres, number of rooms, number of points
- Duration from start to handover, rounded to days or weeks
- One detail that cannot be seen in the picture: existing-building rules, heritage requirements, work during ongoing operations
- If people are recognisable: documented, voluntary and revocable consent
Mistake 2: the phone number as an image
It almost always starts with a good intention. Somebody put the number into the header image so it would look neat, or embedded it as a picture so it could not be harvested automatically and used for cold calls. The result is a number nobody can tap. On a phone that means: memorise it, switch apps, type it — three steps instead of one. Screen readers do not output an image at all; at best they announce the alternative text, if one was set. And an image cannot be copied either.
The consequence hits the most valuable group of all: anyone looking for the number has already decided. They have judged the site to be a match and now want to talk. Demanding three extra movements at exactly that point is the most expensive piece of friction on the whole site. For an emergency service the same mistake bites harder still, because there nobody browses — they dial.
The countermeasure is one line of text: the number sits in the header as a text link with a tel reference, is repeated at the foot of every page and additionally appears in full notation with the country code so it can be saved cleanly into contacts. Protection against cold calls does not come from an image but from a clear way of answering the phone and from objecting to unwanted advertising — the image mainly keeps customers away. How availability is built into a trade site is covered on our services pages.
Not tappable is more than inconvenient
Mistake 3: services as a word cloud
On a great many trade sites the services heading is followed by a list of twelve to thirty terms: plumbing, heating, bathrooms, maintenance, consulting, planning, customer service, solar, drinking water, emergency service. For the business that is a complete list of what it can do. For the visitor it is a cloud of words in which they cannot find their own problem, because they do not think in trade terms. They think: the kitchen tap has been dripping for three days and I do not know whether the thing gets replaced or repaired. The consequence is twofold: the visitor leaves because they make no connection between their concern and the word list, and the site is found by hardly anyone through such single terms, because there is no answer behind a word with no content. A keyword is not a service page, it is a table of contents without chapters.
The countermeasure is: fewer terms, more sentences. Thirty keywords become four to eight service pages, each with a description in the customer's language, a typical sequence of steps, an honest indication of the order of magnitude and a route to an enquiry. Anything not worth at least one paragraph does not belong in the list. How services can be structured per trade is covered on our services pages.
| Keyword on the page | What the customer actually asks | What the service page should say |
|---|---|---|
| Plumbing | The tap is dripping, does it have to come out? | When a fitting is replaced and when it is repaired, what an appointment usually covers, how quickly an appointment is normally possible |
| Bathrooms | Roughly what does a new bathroom cost? | Orders of magnitude by bathroom size, what is included in a quotation, how long the home is without a bathroom |
| Maintenance | Do I have to have my system inspected every year? | Which systems at which interval, what is checked, what a maintenance agreement covers and what it does not |
| Solar | Is it worth it on my roof? | Which roof shapes are suitable, which preliminary check is needed, which steps lead to commissioning |
| Emergency service | Will somebody still come this evening? | Hours, service area, what is needed on the phone, how billing works outside business hours |
Mistake 4: site photos shot against the light
The picture happens in passing: the fitter stands in the doorway, the window behind him, the finished installation in front. On the display it looked passable; on the website half the picture is a white patch and the other half a dark silhouette. The same thing happens under the midday sun on a roof, with a hard shadow across the working area, and in a cellar with a single ceiling light that turns everything yellow. The consequence is an impression nobody voices: the business may work cleanly but looks careless. Pictures are judged faster than text, and badly exposed shots read like something done without attention. It stings most when the work in the photo is genuinely good — then the picture costs more than no picture at all.
The countermeasure needs no equipment. Light comes from behind, over the shoulder of the person taking the photo, not from the front into the lens. Two minutes of tidying before the shutter is pressed do more than any later editing. Every subject is shot twice, once landscape and once portrait, because one cannot be derived from the other afterwards. And a before-and-after only counts if both shots are taken from the same position with the same framing.
Light behind you
The person taking the photo stands with their back to the light source. Windows, doors and open roof areas belong behind the camera, not behind the subject.
Not at midday
The first hour after work starts and the last two hours before knocking-off time give soft light. Midday sun produces hard shadows and burnt-out bright areas.
Two minutes of tidying
Coffee cups, packaging waste, an open cable drum and the stranger's van in the background leave the frame before the shutter is pressed.
Shoot it twice
Every subject once landscape and once portrait. Landscape carries wide image bands, portrait works on a phone and in galleries.
A sense of scale
A folding rule, a door or a tool in the frame shows the size. Without a reference every close-up stays an abstract surface.
Obscure what is not yours
Number plates, doorbell labels and house numbers are made unrecognisable. Other people's property appears only with the owner's consent.
Mistake 5: no service area on the page
The business knows how far it drives. The website says so nowhere. Instead of a statement the visitor finds an address in the legal notice and has to work out whether thirty kilometres is still within range. 88 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses rely on entries in online directories — those usually name a place, but no radius. Anyone who does not answer the question on their own site leaves it to the customer's guesswork, and guesses go against the business when in doubt.
The consequence is an enquiry that never happens: no exit anyone could measure, no call that gets cut short. Conversely, enquiries arrive from places far too distant and cost time in turning them down. Both are avoidable, because both hang on the same missing statement.
The countermeasure is one sentence in the running text plus a short list of places: the base, the main towns nearby, the district and an approximate radius, together with a note that larger jobs are possible beyond it. The same statement belongs in the business profile so that the details match each other. Location pages with a swapped-out town name and otherwise identical text are no substitute for that sentence.
One sentence that saves travel and refusals
Mistake 6: the form that goes silent after sending
The visitor fills in five fields, clicks send, and the page reloads. Sometimes there is a grey line right at the top that they no longer see once they scroll. Sometimes the form simply sits there still filled in, as if nothing had happened. For the sender the state afterwards is unclear: has the enquiry gone out? Should they do it again? Should they call? The business sees only the result — the same enquiry twice in the inbox, or a call asking whether anything arrived. The consequence is work nobody needs, plus a loss of trust at the most sensitive point: somebody has just handed over their phone number and a description of water damage and gets no acknowledgement. That is the moment an otherwise good site looks unserious, and it is entirely avoidable.
The countermeasure consists of four parts: a dedicated confirmation page instead of a line of text, an automatic acknowledgement by email, an honest statement of the usual response time without promising a deadline, and a note on what the sender can do instead in an urgent case. Consent in the form, with the purpose and a deletion period, belongs with it. Which fields qualify an enquiry without deterring anyone is a subject of its own; the confirmation is the part almost everyone forgets.
Confirmation page with its own address
After sending, a page of its own appears with a heading, a contact person and the phone number. Its own address also makes the confirmation measurable without anyone counting enquiries by hand.
Automatic acknowledgement
The sender receives a short email containing their enquiry, the name of the business and the number for questions. That is also their own proof that the enquiry went out.
Response time without a promise
A wording such as usually within one working day says what to expect without committing to a deadline. A fixed promise that cannot be kept in summer does more harm than good.
A route for the urgent case
One sentence states what to do when there is water in the cellar or the heating has failed: call rather than write, with the number right beside it and the hours when it is answered.
After sending, a page of its own appears with a heading, a contact person and the phone number. Its own address also makes the confirmation measurable without anyone counting enquiries by hand.
The sender receives a short email containing their enquiry, the name of the business and the number for questions. That is also their own proof that the enquiry went out.
A wording such as usually within one working day says what to expect without committing to a deadline. A fixed promise that cannot be kept in summer does more harm than good.
One sentence states what to do when there is water in the cellar or the heating has failed: call rather than write, with the number right beside it and the hours when it is answered.
Mistake 7: legal texts copied from the web
The pattern is always the same: somebody looks for a legal notice, finds one on another trade website, swaps the name and address and leaves the rest standing. With the privacy policy it is the same movement, only with worse consequences, because that text contains sections about tools which are not used on the site at all — while the ones actually in use are missing. After that the policy describes somebody else's website, and the business has signed off on it as its own.
The consequence has two sides. In substance the page carries false statements about the controller, the supervisory authority, retention and the technology in use; that is not a formality but a false statement to every visitor. Legally the question of authorship of the text comes on top. Both are awkward without a customer ever noticing — it is usually noticed by somebody looking for it on purpose.
The countermeasure is a sober one: write the legal notice from your own trade register and craft entries, align the privacy policy with what actually runs on the site — form, fonts, map, statistics, embeds — and look at both once a year and whenever something on the site has changed. This is not legal advice but a description of your own site; a specific case remains a matter for professional review.
What a copied legal text typically gets wrong
Mistake 8: nothing said about availability
85 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed see a clear expectation of constant availability among their customers. Websites frequently say nothing about it — no hours, no note on when somebody picks up, no statement about what happens outside office hours. For a business with no staffed office, where everyone is out on site, that matters especially: the caller reaches voicemail and does not know whether the callback comes in ten minutes or in two days. The consequence is an enquiry that moves on to the next business, often without a message left at all. Anyone who does not know whether it is worth waiting for a callback dials the next number on the results list. For an emergency service this is the most expensive point on the whole list, because there nobody tries twice.
The countermeasure is a short, honest statement right beside the phone number and again on the contact page. Honest means: do not state hours that will not hold in summer. It is better to say that the phone is answered in the mornings and callbacks happen the same day than to claim round-the-clock availability nobody can keep up.
- Hours when somebody actually picks up, separated into working days and Saturday
- What happens outside those hours: voicemail, a callback commitment without a fixed deadline, an emergency number
- Whether a callback on the same day is usual or on the next working day
- Which other routes remain open: form, email, a message asking for a callback
- Company holidays and shutdowns, with dates and cover arrangements, while they apply
- For emergency service: area covered and time windows, so that nobody dials in vain
Mistake 9: the team of the day before yesterday
The team page lists seven people, three of whom have worked elsewhere for years, the apprentice in the photo has long since qualified, and the news item beneath is from a year one would rather not work out. For customers that is a signal about the state of the business. For applicants it is a reason to rule it out — and that weighs more heavily, because 75 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed see the shortage of skilled workers as a central problem, while 80 percent (Bitkom 2025) use digital channels to address new talent directly.
So the consequence lands twice. A prospective customer reads an outdated page as a sign that nobody looks after this any more. An applicant who wants to know who they would work with finds colleagues who are gone and no vacancy — even though the business is searching urgently. The countermeasure is a fixed date rather than good intentions: once a quarter, go through the team list, vacancies, company holidays and news items. Anyone who cannot or would rather not maintain a team page shows no list of names at all and instead the number of staff, the trades in house and a current picture of the work. An honest short version beats a well-kept untruth.
Anything that carries a date promises the visitor that it is being looked after. Whoever shows a date has to keep it — otherwise it takes more credibility from the site than it ever gave it.
Mistakes 10 to 12: three that are rarely reported
The tenth mistake is operation on a phone: type below a legible size, buttons sitting too close together, menus that open only with a mouse, text over a busy photograph. Legally: businesses with fewer than ten people and no more than 2 million euros (BFSG) in annual turnover or balance sheet total are micro enterprises within the meaning of the German Accessibility Strengthening Act, and for micro enterprises that offer or provide services (BFSG) the accessibility obligation does not apply. This is not legal advice and a specific case remains a matter for professional review — above all, it is not a free pass: anyone who cannot operate the site with cold fingers on a building site does not call.
The eleventh mistake is the missing review. 72 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed see online customer reviews as a major opportunity to win new work and build trust — yet nothing of that appears on their own website. Invented voices are not an option, neither legally nor practically. The route runs through genuine reviews requested after handover and through a visible reference to them. Until then, verifiable details carry the page: year of founding, number of staff, master craftsman status, guild membership, inspection authorisations.
The twelfth mistake is the quiet one: nothing changes. The site runs, nobody is responsible, and at some point a form breaks during a technical migration without anyone noticing. Responsibility here does not mean a full-time job but a name and a date. Ongoing maintenance costs 49 euros per month and hosting in Germany 15 euros per month, both cancellable monthly with no minimum term.
The self-check in ten minutes
The check happens on a phone, over mobile data, in a private window, with a stopwatch beside it. Ten minutes are enough, because the point is not to assess everything but to touch each of the twelve points once. Only what stands out gets noted, in keywords and without judgement. Anyone who starts changing things along the way never gets through the list.
- Open the home page and check without scrolling: does it show the trade, the place and a tappable phone number?
- Tap the number and cancel again. If the dialler opens, mistake 2 is settled.
- Scroll to the gallery: does every picture carry a caption naming trade, place and scope?
- Look at three pictures: can anything be made out, or is half of it white or black?
- Look for the service area: is there a radius or a list of places in the text, not just in the legal notice?
- Look at the services: does every term lead to a page with at least one paragraph of explanation?
- Send the form with test data: does a confirmation page appear, does an email arrive?
- Read the legal notice: do address, register details and supervisory body match your own business?
- Skim the privacy policy: does it mention the contact form, and are tools listed that do not exist?
- Look at the team and news pages: does everyone named still work here, is the latest date less than a year old?
- Look for availability: does it say beside the number when somebody picks up and what applies outside those hours?
- Finally, operate the site with one hand: can everything be tapped without zooming?
The list of notes turns into an order of work: first the points that directly prevent an enquiry — a tappable number, the service area, the confirmation after sending. Then the points that cost trust: captions, pictures, team, availability. The legal texts come last, because they need care rather than haste. Most businesses get through in two afternoons. If what remains looks more like a rebuild than a correction, the question is no longer the checklist but the structure. A new website at a fixed price starts at 1,490 euros net, a relaunch that carries over the existing content at 2,900 euros net. Anyone who first wants to know which of the twelve points applies to their own site can send the address through the contact form and receive a structured reply.
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