A Trades Business That Was Losing Jobs to a Slow Website
A local heating and plumbing business had a site that looked fine on a desktop screen but was slow, hard to use on a phone, and gave visitors no obvious next step.
The Challenge
Most enquiries for an emergency call-out or boiler quote come from someone searching on their phone, often outside normal office hours. The existing site was built on a generic template: it loaded slowly on mobile data, buried the phone number and quote form below several scrolls of stock photography, and gave no indication of coverage area or response times. Visitors arriving from local search were leaving before they found a way to get in touch.
Our Strategy
Rather than a like-for-like redesign, we treated the homepage as a single decision: can this visitor find a way to contact us in under five seconds? That meant cutting the page down to what a homeowner with a leak actually needs — service area, response time, a phone number, and a short quote form — and pushing everything else (company history, generic trust badges, unrelated services) further down or onto dedicated pages.
Implementation
- Rebuilt the site on lightweight, hand-written templates instead of a heavy page-builder theme
- Compressed and lazy-loaded all imagery so the homepage renders its key content immediately
- Restructured navigation around individual services (boiler repair, installation, servicing) so each ranks for its own search terms
- Added a short quote-request form with server-side validation, visible without scrolling on mobile
- Set up automated email acknowledgement so every enquiry gets an instant response, even out of hours
Technology
Automation
New enquiries now trigger an automatic acknowledgement email to the customer and a notification to the owner's phone, so nothing sits unseen overnight. This is covered in more detail on our business automation page.
Results
- Mobile pages load quickly enough that the quote form is usable before a visitor loses patience and calls a competitor instead
- Enquiries are acknowledged immediately rather than waiting until the next working day
- Each core service now has its own page and can be found independently in search, rather than competing against a single generic homepage
Client name withheld at their request. Figures such as load time and conversion percentages are not published here because we don't have independently verified before/after analytics for this project — we've described the concrete changes made and the outcomes the client reported instead.
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