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Trades in practice

Electrical contractor websites: inspections, solar, charging

Which service pages an electrical contractor actually needs: recurring inspections, charging points, solar with storage, consumer units and call-out service.

15 min read ElektroPhotovoltaikLadepunkteLeistungsseitenHandwerk

In short and in plain language

This article is about the website of an electrician. A firm does many things today. Each service needs a page of its own.

These include checks, car charging points and solar with storage. The meter box and the call out service belong here too.

Checks often come back. That way you stay in touch with your customers.

Firms want to know other things than private customers. Write a separate text for each group.

On the call out page, the phone number is at the top. People should be able to tap it right away.

We build websites for trade firms at a fixed price.

An electrical contractor rarely does just one thing any more. In the morning somebody relocates a consumer unit in a house built in 1968, in the afternoon a wall box goes live in a double garage, in between a property manager calls about the inspection of portable electrical equipment that is due, and in the evening a quotation for a solar installation with storage is still open. What the website usually says is: „electrical installation, repairs, advice“. Three words for four completely different jobs, four different groups of customers and four different price brackets. This article works through the services of an electrical contractor one by one — which of them deserve a page of their own, which questions customers want answered before they pick up the phone, which details a business customer needs and a private customer does not, and how all of that can be arranged in a layout that works on a phone in the van as well as on a screen in the property manager's office.

Key takeaways

  • Six service pages carry an electrical contractor's website: recurring inspections, charging infrastructure, solar power with storage, consumer units and grid connection, call-out service, and building technology. Each speaks to a different group of customers.
  • 94 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses run their own website. Having a site therefore no longer sets anyone apart; the depth of the service pages behind it does.
  • Recurring inspections bring predictable revenue and repeated contact with the same customer. Even so, on many electrical websites they appear only as a passing mention under „other services“ — if at all.
  • Business customers look for inspection records, named contacts, response times and framework arrangements. Private customers look for a price bracket, a date and possible subsidies. Putting both into one text produces a page that reaches neither group.
  • The call-out page is decided in a few seconds: the phone number as a dial link right at the top, the service area, the hours, and a note on what the caller can check before anyone drives out.

Why an electrical website works differently from the one next door

A painting business essentially sells one service in several variations. An electrical contractor sells at least six services to three groups of customers that have almost nothing in common: private households with a one-off concern, commercial businesses with recurring obligations, and property managers and developers who ask about capacity and reliable dates before they ask about price. Serve all three with the same text and you end up with a text that is slightly too general for each of them.

Simply having a website no longer distinguishes anyone: 94 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses run their own website. At the same time 89 percent (Bitkom 2025) of businesses report that customers increasingly expect individual offers — and an individual offer does not begin at the appointment, it begins with whether the website makes clear that this business carries out precisely this service on a regular basis. The competition has therefore shifted from „website or no website“ to „which pages are in it“. What that means for the structure of the whole site is set out in detail in our services overview.

There is also a linguistic point that many businesses underestimate. Customers do not search for „electrical installation“. They search for „have a wall box installed“, for „electrical inspection appointment“, for „consumer unit replacement cost“, for „emergency electrician“ and for „retrofit solar battery storage“. Those are five different reasons to search with five different levels of urgency. A single service page cannot serve all five at once, because each of them asks a different first question.

The home page is not a list of services

On the home page the services belong as six clearly named entry points with one sentence each — not as running text that lists everything. A visitor should find the point that matches their concern within seconds and move from there to a page that deals with nothing else.

Recurring inspections: the page that brings predictable revenue

For business customers, the inspection of portable and fixed electrical equipment is not optional but an employer's duty, with intervals derived from the risk assessment. For the electrical contractor that is exactly the interesting part: whoever has inspected once knows the stock, holds the records, knows the contact person and is usually called again for the next cycle. It is the only service in the electrical trade that comes back by itself, without anyone having to sell anything.

On websites this service is missing surprisingly often. The reason is understandable: inside the business it is so self-evident that nobody thinks of explaining it. Yet the administrative manager of a care home or the workshop supervisor of a vehicle fleet searches for exactly that — and finds three businesses in the region, one of which has a page about it and two of which do not. There are private occasions too: selling a property, a requirement from the building insurer, a handover after a conversion.

The text on this page may well be sober. Anyone commissioning an inspection wants clarity rather than atmosphere: the procedure, the duration, the interruption to operations and the form of the record. Those four points are what otherwise costs twenty minutes on the phone. If they are on the page, the enquirer calls with a quantity already in hand instead of working it out with you.

  • Which equipment is inspected: portable appliances, fixed installations, machines, ladders and steps if the business offers that as well.
  • What the procedure on site looks like: notice, labelling, how equipment currently in use is handled, and what happens to items that fail.
  • How long it takes and how far operations are interrupted — the most common unspoken worry on the customer's side.
  • In what form the record arrives: a report per item, an inspection label, a summary list, digital or on paper.
  • How the next cycle is handled: does the business send a reminder, and if so, how.
  • An enquiry form that asks for location, approximate number of items and preferred period, rather than only „your message“.

Charging infrastructure: two groups of customers, two texts

The wall box in a single garage and the charging infrastructure in a staff car park are technically related and commercially two different worlds. The private customer wants to know whether the house connection is sufficient, what registering with the grid operator involves, whether a new cable has to be run and roughly what it will cost. The fleet operator or property manager wants to know how many charging points can run at the same time, how load management is arranged, how billing works and who looks after the installation when a charging point fails.

Fitting both onto one page produces a text that swings between two registers. Two clearly separated sections on one page work better, or two pages outright if the business works seriously in both areas. The separation has a side effect that shows up in visibility: each section can use the words its group actually types, without the two diluting one another.

PointPrivate customer, detached houseBusiness customer, several charging points
First questionIs my house connection sufficient?How many points run at once without a load peak?
FormalitiesNotification or approval by the grid operator, depending on connected loadCoordination with grid operator, landlord and possibly the works council
Technical contentCable route, residual current protection, charging powerLoad management, metering concept, room to expand
BillingNot an issue, household electricity paysUser identification, metering law requirements, allocation per vehicle
After installationInstruction and handoverSupport, fault reporting, spare parts
Decision pathOne or two people, a few daysSeveral parties, comparison of quotes, weeks to months

The last row is the telling one. A business customer usually reads the page more than once and forwards it internally before calling. That means the page has to work without a conversation, has to print cleanly and should name a contact person. A private customer, by contrast, decides on the phone or at the kitchen table — for them the date, the price bracket and the impression that somebody here has done this many times are what count.

Solar power and storage: the page still read after the quote

Among electrical services, solar has the longest decision period. Months often pass between the first search and the signature, with several quotes side by side, neighbours consulted and a good deal of reading done online. This page is therefore not visited once but repeatedly — including while your quotation is already on the table. It is less an advertising text than a reference point that makes the quotation intelligible.

What helps in that role: the order of the steps from roof survey through system sizing to commissioning, an honest statement about which roofs and grid connections tend to be straightforward and which need preparatory work, and an explanation of what storage capacity depends on. 87 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses observe markedly greater price sensitivity — with solar that means in practice that quotations are compared line by line. A business that explains on its website why an item appears in the quotation loses less often to a cheaper sheet of paper.

For subsidies a simple rule applies: state that programmes exist, do not phrase the current position as a firm commitment, and promise no figure that can change. A sentence such as „which programmes come into question in your case is something we clarify before the quotation“ holds up better than a percentage that is wrong next quarter. Subsidy and tax questions belong to a professional review of the individual case in any event.

The page does not win the job, it holds it

With solar, contact often arises through a recommendation or a search, but the decision is made while several quotes are compared. A page that explains how your own quotation is built works in exactly that phase — it reaches the enquirer while you are standing on another site.

Consumer unit and grid connection: the topic nobody searches for and many need

Hardly anyone types „replace consumer unit“ for pleasure. People search because a wall box cannot be connected, because the solar installation needs an up-to-date meter position, because a conversion is coming or because the grid operator has asked for it. That is precisely why the page belongs on the website: it is the junction between two other jobs and is usually commissioned together with them.

The text should name openly what the customer is in for: downtime during the work, coordination with the grid operator, access to the service room, possible follow-on work in older buildings where cabling or protective measures no longer match today's standard. That honesty costs no work. It prevents the unpleasant version in which the surprise happens on site — and it also filters out the enquiries where the customer would not carry the order of magnitude anyway.

Pictures instead of attempted explanations

A photo of an old and a new consumer unit side by side explains in two seconds what three paragraphs cannot. Your own shots from your own site work considerably harder than bought motifs, and a phone camera is entirely sufficient for them.

Call-out service: the page that has to work in seconds

When the residual current device trips at night and will not reset, nobody reads a paragraph about company history. The call-out page is the only page of an electrical business built purely for the exceptional case — and it is read on a phone, often in a half-dark hallway, often by somebody who is not calm at that moment. Everything between opening the page and tapping the number is superfluous.

85 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses encounter the expectation of constant availability. That does not mean a business has to drive out around the clock. It means the website has to say when it does and when it does not. A clearly named time beats a vague promise: somebody who reads that at weekends you only come out where there is immediate danger is less disappointed than somebody calling in vain at two in the morning.

  • The phone number right at the top as a dial link, in large type, with no detour through a form.
  • Hours in plain words: when somebody answers the phone, when you drive out, when the next regular appointment is possible.
  • The service area with place names rather than a radius in kilometres — callers think in towns, not in radii.
  • Brief self-help: the two or three points a caller can check before anyone drives out. That saves journeys and reads as competence rather than salesmanship.
  • A note on what a call-out and work outside regular hours costs — the order of magnitude, not the cent.
  • What the caller should have ready: address, location of the consumer unit, how long the fault has existed, whether one circuit or everything is affected.

An emergency page has exactly one job: to get the thumb onto the phone number as fast as possible. Everything else is decoration that gets in the way when it matters.

Guiding principle for call-out pages in the electrical trade

Which service pages are worth it for an electrical contractor

The following split has proved workable in projects with electrical contractors. It is not a law — a business working mainly on new builds weights things differently from one that lives on existing customers and maintenance. But it shows which six topics each yield enough substance to fill a page without text being written merely as filler.

Recurring inspections

Procedure, duration, interruption to operations, form of the record, next cycle. The page speaks to commercial customers, property managers and landlords — and brings contacts that return by themselves.

Charging points and wall boxes

Kept apart for detached houses and multiple charging points. House connection, notification to the grid operator, load management, support after commissioning.

Solar power and storage

The sequence from roof survey to commissioning, system sizing, storage capacity, grid registration. Read long before and long after the quotation.

Consumer unit and grid connection

The job that makes other jobs possible in the first place. Downtime, coordination with the grid operator, typical follow-on work in existing buildings.

Call-out service

The number as a dial link, the hours, the service area, brief self-help and the order of magnitude of costs outside regular working hours.

Building technology and lighting

Bus systems, lighting design, retrofitting in existing buildings, door entry. This page lives on pictures of finished work, not on lists of manufacturers.

Alongside those come the pages that are not about a trade topic but accompany every enquiry: a page about the business with the people on it, a page with the service area, a contact page with directions and office hours and — if skilled staff are wanted — a careers page. How that basic structure can be designed for an electrical trade is shown in our services overview.

What business customers need and private customers do not

The biggest avoidable mistake on electrical websites is addressing both groups with the same text. A private customer wants to know whether you will come, when you will come and roughly what it costs. A business customer wants to know whether you can look after them permanently — and checks things for that purpose which would never interest a private customer.

In concrete terms: a technical manager looks for a named contact with a direct line, for a statement on whether framework arrangements exist, for a sense of response times, for the question of whether your business can observe site inductions and safety rules during a plant visit, and for the form in which inspection records are supplied. None of that belongs on the home page. All of it belongs on a page that this one reader will find.

Detail on the websitePrivate customerBusiness customer
Price bracket for standard servicesvery importantsecondary, negotiated individually
Named contact with a direct lineunimportantvery important
Response times and availabilityimportant in a faultcontractually relevant, checked in advance
Form of inspection records and documentationhardly relevantdecisive for the selection
References from the same sectorsecondaryimportant, often decisive
Photos of finished workvery effectiveeffective, but of second rank

The table also explains why a shared page rarely works. What is the most important criterion for one group is decoration for the other — and decoration lengthens the page at exactly the point where the reader expects an answer. Two shorter pages beat one long one that tries to be both.

Accessibility: what the German act requires of whom

Under the German Accessibility Strengthening Act, micro-enterprises are businesses with fewer than ten people and no more than 2 million euros (BFSG) in annual turnover or balance sheet total; for micro-enterprises offering or providing services the obligation expressly does not apply. That exempts nobody from the legal notice and privacy policy, and it is no reason for a site that cannot be operated with a thumb. Whether the exemption applies in a given case is a matter for professional review.

The questions customers ask before they call

Every business knows the questions that come up on the phone again and again. Those questions are the best content for the website, because they show what the audience actually wants to know — not what one would like to tell them. Collecting them takes no effort: note for one week what callers ask first and you have the content for three pages.

What is striking is how stable those questions are across businesses. In projects with trade businesses the same six points come up in the electrical field again and again, usually in this order:

  1. Do you even do that? — The question sounds trivial but is the most common. It arises when the service is not named clearly on the site.
  2. Do you come to me? — The service area with place names, not a radius. Anyone who does not read their own town assumes they are not included.
  3. Roughly what does it cost? — A bracket or an example is enough. Naming no figure at all is the answer that most often leads to a closed tab.
  4. When could you do it? — An honest statement about current workload beats silence, even if it reads „several weeks at present“.
  5. Who comes and how long does it take? — Names and faces in the team work harder here than any phrasing about reliability.
  6. What do you need from me? — A photo of the consumer unit, access, presence, site power. Knowing that in advance means being prepared on the day.

Careful with commitments in the text

Phrases such as „on site within 24 hours“ or „always reachable“ are open to challenge as advertising claims and hard to keep in everyday practice. Statements with a qualifier hold up better: „as a rule within one working day, faster in a fault“. It reads more honestly, and it is.

From layout draft to a finished electrical website

Before any text is written, a draft helps, because structure can be judged on it. For the electrical trade there is a ready layout draft that can be clicked through — with a home page, service entry points, a call-out band and an enquiry form. On a draft like that, the question of whether inspections deserve a page of their own is settled in five minutes; on a written description the same discussion takes an hour.

First write down what the business actually does, and next to it what it would like to do. The six to eight pages emerge from that list. Services that make up hardly any turnover and that nobody searches for stay as a paragraph on another page.

Anyone working from an existing site takes the same route with one additional step: the existing addresses have to be kept or redirected cleanly so that the visibility built up so far is not lost. How a relaunch runs is a topic in its own right — the order of the service pages does not change because of it.

What the website costs and who maintains it afterwards

For an electrical business with six to eight service pages, a call-out band, an enquiry form and a service area, a new website with us starts at a fixed price of 1,490 euros net. Where an existing site with existing content and addresses is taken over, a relaunch starts at 2,900 euros net. The full breakdown is on our services overview.

After that comes the part many underestimate. A website does not age visibly, it ages in the details: a service is added, a colleague leaves, office hours change, a new van stands in the yard. Hosting in Germany starts with us at 15 euros per month, support with updates and small changes at 49 euros per month, each cancellable monthly with no minimum term. Anyone wanting local visibility looked after continuously starts at 290 euros per month, and broader search visibility support at 490 euros per month — likewise cancellable monthly, no minimum term.

Whether those recurring items are worth it depends on the business. An electrical contractor who is busy through recommendation and only wants to be found when somebody knows the name needs little more than hosting and occasional maintenance. A business that wants to build up commercial inspection work or establish charging infrastructure as a second pillar keeps working on its business profile and service pages permanently. Both are legitimate — the decision should simply be a conscious one, and not the result of nobody looking at the site again after launch.

This article is based on data from: Bitkom, Digitalisation of the Skilled Trades — study 2025; German Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG), section 2 no. 17 and section 3 (3).

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