Websites for plumbers, in short: I build them for the South Bay and greater Los Angeles — one developer, $250 a month with no setup fee, hosting and changes included, and a fixed price after one call. What follows is specific to how plumbers actually lose work online, not a template with the trade swapped in.
Where plumbers lose work online
Emergency plumbing search is the most urgent traffic on the local web and the least tolerant of a slow site. Somebody with a burst line is not going to wait out a homepage video or hunt through a menu for your number.
The other half is planned work — repipes, water heaters, fixture replacement — where the customer is comparing three quotes and reading properly. Those are two different visitors and most plumbing sites are built for neither.
The searches that convert are symptoms, not services: water heater leaking, no hot water, sewer smell in the yard. A page called 'Our Services' matches none of them.
What the site has to do about it
The number is the interface
Tappable, in the first screenful, and stuck to the bottom of the screen on mobile so it's reachable from anywhere on the page. For emergency traffic this single decision outweighs everything else on the site.
A page per real problem
Water heater repair, slab leaks, drain clearing, repipes — each one its own page, written in the words a homeowner uses rather than the words the trade uses. This is where the findable traffic actually lives.
Emergency availability, stated plainly
If you take calls at 2am, say so in a place a panicking person will see. If you don't, say that too — the calls you turn down at 2am cost you sleep and goodwill.
Licence and insurance where they can be read
Your CSLB number visible and marked up properly. It's the first thing a careful customer checks and the first thing an AI assistant looks for when deciding whether to name you.
And increasingly, the AI answer
A growing share of "who should I call for a plumber near me" is now answered inside ChatGPT or a Google AI Overview, where there is no list of ten links to be third in — there is one answer naming two or three businesses. Getting named is a different and largely mechanical job: facts stated plainly, marked up so a machine can read them, and corroborated somewhere other than your own site.
Where you work
The other half of being found is being findable in a specific place. Pick your city and the page covers what's different about doing business there:
- Plumbers in Hawthorne
- Plumbers in Inglewood
- Plumbers in Manhattan Beach
- Plumbers in Hermosa Beach
- Plumbers in Redondo Beach
- Plumbers in El Segundo
- Plumbers in Torrance
- Plumbers in Palos Verdes
- Plumbers in Culver City
- Plumbers in Santa Monica
- Plumbers in Los Angeles
Other trades
- Websites for electricians
- Websites for hvac contractors
- Websites for roofers
- Websites for landscapers
- Websites for general contractors
- Websites for pool services
- Websites for pest control companies
Common questions
What does it cost?
A site is $250 a month with no setup fee, which covers hosting, upkeep and changes — no separate hosting bill and no charge to change a phone number. Adding automation is $700–1,000+ to set up, then $250 a month. The whole path — site, automation and the Google side — is $2,000+ then $500 a month. You get the exact number for your job after one call, before you commit to anything.
Do I need a page for every service?
For the ones people search by name, yes. That's usually five to eight pages, not forty. Pages nobody searches for are just maintenance you'll never do.
What about emergency calls at night?
If you take them, the site should make that obvious and make the number tappable. Emergency traffic converts several times better than planned work, and it's almost entirely decided in the first few seconds.
Do plumbers actually get jobs from their website, or is it all Yelp and word of mouth?
Both, and they feed each other. Emergency work mostly arrives through Google and maps rather than a remembered brand — someone with a burst line searches a symptom and calls the first number they can tap. The website's job in that moment is to be fast and put the phone number in reach. For planned work like repipes and water heaters, the site does the convincing, because that customer is comparing three quotes and reading properly.
What should a plumber's website have on it?
A tappable phone number in the first screenful and stuck to the bottom of the screen on mobile. Pages named after symptoms people actually type — water heater leaking, no hot water, sewer smell — not a single page called Our Services. Your service area in plain text. Licence number and real project photos. In that order of importance.
How much should a small trade business pay for a website?
For a local trade business in the South Bay, a properly built site is $250 a month with no setup fee, which includes hosting, upkeep and changes. Full setup with automation and the Google side runs $2,000+ then $500 a month. Anyone quoting $99 a month with no setup is selling you a template on rented space; anyone quoting $15,000 is selling you an agency's overhead.
Is it worth paying someone, or should I use Wix or Squarespace?
If you will actually build it, a Wix site you finish beats a custom site you never commission. The honest split is time: the builders are cheap in money and expensive in hours, and the hours are the thing a working tradesperson does not have. Where builders genuinely fall short is technical SEO structure and page speed on mobile — fixable, but not by default and not without knowing what to fix.