Plumbing does not get bought the way most things get bought. It gets bought in a hurry, on a phone, by someone who is already having a bad morning — and then, quite separately, it gets bought slowly by someone pricing a cylinder or a bathroom. That is two customers on one website, and most plumbing sites are built for neither of them.
Here is the whole decision, start to finish. It happens one-handed, on a cracked screen, in about the time it takes to read this sentence twice. Every choice we make on a plumbing site comes out of this sequence.
Emergency plumber near me. Blocked drain, plus a suburb. Typed with one thumb, misspelt, and almost never with your business name in it — because they do not know your business name yet.
Three businesses with a pin, a star rating and a Call button. Getting into that box is a Google Business Profile job, not a website job. If you have no profile, this is where you are already out of the running.
They are not comparing craftsmanship. They are looking for three things: does this cover my suburb, are they open right now, and is there a number I can hit without pinching to zoom. Anything else on the screen at this point is in the way.
One tap, straight into the dialler. Not a contact page. Not a form. Not a number written as text that has to be copied out by hand while holding a torch.
It rings out, because you are under a house. They do not leave a message and they do not try again later. They press back and ring whoever was second. That call is not lost to a better plumber. It is lost to a plumber who answered.
One page listing nine services competes for nothing. Somebody searching for a hot water cylinder wants a page about hot water cylinders, and so does the search engine. This is the set we would build a plumbing business, and the tier each one starts at.
Your callout hours, your after-hours rate, and how fast you realistically get there — said in numbers, at the top, before anything else. Most plumbing sites bury this on a contact page. It is the single most valuable thing on the site at two in the morning.
The job people search for most and describe worst. What you use — jetter, camera, eel — and what each is for, so the person deciding between you and a $99 special understands what they are actually buying. If you do CCTV reports, this is the page that sells them.
Two searches on one page: the cylinder that has failed this morning, and the one being replaced on purpose next month. Electric, gas, continuous flow and heat pump, with the honest version of what each suits — because that comparison is a search in itself and it is the page that makes you look like the one who knows.
Written for someone standing in it. Where the toby usually is and how to turn it off, in two sentences, at the top — then your number. Telling a stranger how to stop the water before you have been paid a cent is the most persuasive thing a plumbing site can do.
If you are a certifying gasfitter, this is the page that says so, with what that means and what paperwork the customer ends up holding. Half the people searching do not know a plumber and a gasfitter are different tickets. The page that explains it is the page they ring.
The slow customer, not the wet one. What you take on, what you leave to the builder, roughly what a bathroom's plumbing runs to, and photos of your own finished work. This page gets read for ten minutes, not ten seconds, so it is allowed to be long.
The steady work that keeps a quiet winter from being a bad one. Written at a property manager rather than a homeowner: response times, how you invoice, how many properties you can carry. Nobody in your trade writes this page, which is exactly why it is worth having.
One page per suburb you genuinely serve, each with something true and specific in it — the age of the housing stock, the pipe you keep finding there, how long it takes you to get across at eight in the morning. Six of those beat thirty spun ones, and thirty spun ones can do real harm.
You do not need all eight. A four-page Essential site done properly beats an eight-page one padded out to look busy, and we would rather build you the four pages that match the work you actually want than eight that match a template. The tiers are set out in full on the homepage.
Most trade sites are designed on a laptop and then squeezed onto a phone, which is the wrong way round for a trade where nearly every urgent enquiry arrives on one. These are the six things we do differently, and why each of them exists.
A real tel: link in the header and a bar that stays put as they scroll, so the number is never more than one thumb-reach away. Written large enough to hit while holding a torch in the other hand.
Callout hours and the after-hours rate on the front page in plain numbers. Someone who knows it will cost more at midnight and rings anyway is a better job than someone who finds out at the door.
Your patch listed by name. Half the enquiries a plumber fields are from outside the area they will drive to, and each one costs a phone call to turn down politely.
No page builder, no stack of plugins, no eight-megabyte hero video. The page a customer opens on a bad connection is the same page you see on wi-fi, which is not true of most sites in this trade.
Stock photos of a stranger's van do not reassure anyone and they are recognisable at a glance. Ten photos from your camera roll, tidied and captioned, do more than any of it.
Name, number, what has happened. Not a fourteen-field quote request. And it says when you will answer, because the alternative is somebody sitting there wondering whether it sent.
A homeowner letting a stranger under the house has no way to judge the work and knows it. So they judge the things they can check. Every one of these is something you already have and most plumbing sites leave in the footer, or leave out.
Your PGDB registration number goes where a nervous person finds it without hunting — near the top, near the phone number, and on every service page rather than once in the small print. We say which board, what the number is, and that it can be checked on the public register, because inviting somebody to check is stronger than asking them to take your word.
Most people do not know they are three separate tickets, and a page that explains it in one sentence is doing them a favour at the moment they are deciding. If you are certifying, we say so and say what it means: you sign off your own work, and the customer ends up holding the certificate.
Public liability cover, Master Plumbers or whatever you carry, and what your workmanship guarantee genuinely covers — in a sentence a homeowner understands rather than a logo with nothing behind it. If a guarantee has limits, we write the limits. The limits are what make the rest of it believable.
Reviews are the part we cannot build for you, and pretending otherwise would make everything above it worthless. What we do is make them easy to leave: the Google profile set up so the review link is one tap, and a place on the site for them to sit once they are real. Never a made-up one, not even as an example.
A plumber cannot answer the phone under a house, on a roof, or asleep. The enquiries that arrive then are the ones that quietly go somewhere else. This is the one part of the site that does something about it, and it is deliberately not clever.
It is a short conversation, not a chat window with a robot in it. It asks what has happened, whether it can wait until morning, which suburb, and how to reach them — then it says what happens next and gives them your mobile number in case it cannot wait after all. In the morning you have the job written down instead of a missed call.
There is no language model in it, on purpose. It cannot invent a price, promise a time you cannot make, or say something about gas you would never say. It follows a set of questions you approve before it goes anywhere near your customers, and it says in its first line that it is an assistant and not you.
You can try it right now. It is running on the Skyward homepage, in the corner, and it is the same flow a customer of yours would get.
You know what it is like getting a quote that turns out to be plus GST. We do not do that. These are the prices, they are the same prices anyone else on this site is quoted, and there is nothing added at the end.
Standalone, no website needed, done in a day. Claimed, verified, categories, service areas, hours, photos and the review link set up so it is one tap. It is yours, and you keep it whether or not you ever build a site with us.
Home, emergency callout, one or two services, and who you are. The right size if most of your work comes by word of mouth and you need somewhere credible to send people.
A page per job, which is the tier most plumbing businesses should take. This is the set on this page: emergency, drains, hot water, leaks, gas, bathrooms, maintenance, and you.
Everything in Standard, plus a page for each suburb worth having, a local search campaign, the after-hours assistant for twelve months and three months of the care plan.
Hosting, updates, backups, security and the small changes you ring up about. No lock-in contract, and you still own everything. Or take the logins and run it yourself, which is a real option rather than a threat.
The founding price is $500 off, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not go below it. Full pricing, add-ons and what is in each tier.
We are not going to tell you this will put you first on Google, or that it will bring you a certain number of jobs a month. Nobody can know that, and under the Fair Trading Act you are supposed to have grounds for a claim at the moment you make it. Anyone quoting you a number for either of those is guessing at your expense.
What we will say is what the site will be: fast, findable, honest about your hours and your registration, and built so the phone is one tap away at the moment somebody needs it. What that turns into is down to your trade, your area and how quickly you ring people back.
And the part most studios leave out — Skyward is new. We have no plumbing clients to point you at yet, no case studies, and no reviews. That is exactly why the homepage gets built before you pay anything, and why the first ten clients get $500 off for helping us fix it. You are being asked to judge us on the work in front of you, which is the page you are reading.
The general ones — payment, ownership, what we need from you — are answered at length on the homepage. These are the ones specific to this trade.
Not necessarily, and we will tell you if it is fine. Plenty of plumbing sites need the phone number fixed, the hours put on the front page and three service pages added, not a rebuild. If that is your situation we will say so, even though it is the smaller job.
If it does get rebuilt, nothing goes dark. The old site stays up until the new one is ready, your domain stays yours throughout, and old addresses get pointed at the new ones so anything already linking to you keeps working.
The Essential tier exists for exactly that, and the $395 Google profile exists for the month when even that is too much. A sole operator with a profile, a phone number that works and four honest pages is ahead of most of the trade.
What we would not do is sell you eight pages you have no work for. The tier is the size of the job, not a measure of how serious you are.
Your services with the ones you want more of marked, photos off your phone, your registration numbers and memberships, the suburbs you will genuinely drive to, and about half an hour on the phone so we hear how you talk about the work. That is it.
The week it takes to build runs from when we have those, not from when you say yes. Most of the delay in this trade is waiting on photos. The full list is on the homepage.
Yes, and it is normal for a trade that drives to the customer — service areas are what a Google profile is built for. What we will not do is invent an address in a suburb you do not work from. That is against Google's rules, it is the most common reason a trade profile gets suspended, and getting one back is a bad month.
Suburb pages are the honest version of the same idea, and they only work when each one says something true about that area.
You do. The assistant takes the details and tells the person what happens next and how to reach you if it cannot wait — it does not quote, it does not book, and it does not pretend to be you. In the morning you have the job written down.
If you would rather not have it at all, the site works without it. It is an add-on, not a requirement.
You take the logins and go. You own the site, the domain and the content from day one, the care plan has no lock-in, and there is no fee for handing it over because there is nothing to hand over — it is already yours.
Ask any studio quoting you that question before you sign anything. The answer tells you most of what you need to know.
Everything above this is a claim about a website you have not seen. So here are the finished builds you can open on the phone you are reading this on. The plumbing one is first, because it is this page's argument with the pitch taken out of it. None of them has a customer behind it — we made the businesses up so that we could build the sites properly rather than wait for permission.
Every one of them was invented so that there was something to build. Open any of them and a black band runs across the top of the screen saying exactly that. All of them are set to noindex, so none can surface in a search for an actual tradesman. The phone numbers are fictional, the email addresses end in .example — a domain reserved so that it can never belong to anybody — and nothing typed into their forms goes anywhere.
The reviews on those pages are sample text and say so where they sit. Skyward has none of its own yet. Take them as a sample of the work and nothing further: if any of it reads to you like a client list, we have written it badly.
The ten seconds at the top of this page, built. The number is the first thing on the screen and dials on a tap, the callout hours are given in figures instead of adjectives, and the registration a nervous homeowner is hunting for sits where they will meet it rather than in the footer. Everything under that is arranged for a customer who has already rung and is deciding whether to cancel.Open the plumbing concept
02Nobody rings a sparky in a hurry about a switchboard. That page is built for a buyer working through three quotes over a week — what the business takes on, what it turns down, and certification put in one sentence a homeowner can follow.Open it
03A build is decided over months, quietly, by a homeowner crossing names off a list. That page leads with how the money moves through a contract, who is accountable and what happens when something goes wrong on site, well ahead of any photographs.Open it
04Nobody climbs up to check a finished roof, and no two roofing quotes describe the same job, so that page is built to be read from the ground — the seven things a quote has to contain before three of them can be compared at all, and what happens on the morning the old roof comes off and the timber underneath turns out to be rotten.Open it
05The furthest from your trade in the set, which is exactly why it is worth ninety seconds. Nobody chooses a painter standing in water; they choose one after a fortnight of thinking about three strangers in the house. So that page is a programme rather than a number — eleven dated days with the rooms the family loses written against each one, the crew by name, and the price with its exclusions above the signature. Almost nothing on it would suit you, and that is the reason to look at it.Open it
Yours would not look like any of them. They are different trades with different problems, which is the whole point — a set of sites that all looked the same would prove the opposite of what this page is claiming. What these show is the standard, and how much of the work happens before anything gets drawn. Yours gets built before you pay for it.
Same system, same prices, a different argument in each — because these trades are not bought the same way, and a set of pages that pretended otherwise would be worth less than one honest page.
A switchboard is not a panic. It is shortlisted on Sunday, priced against two others and slept on — and it goes to whoever replied while the customer still cared.
Nobody picks a builder. They cut a list of twelve down to three, and the cut that matters happens in April with nobody on the phone and no reason ever given.
Nobody has ever stood on the roof they paid for, so they check the roofer instead — and the real competition is another winter of doing nothing.
Fresh paint looks like fresh paint, whoever rolled it on. The difference between the quotes shows up in year three, by which time nobody connects it to the one that was cheaper.
Not a mock-up, not a template with your logo dropped in — a real, working homepage for your plumbing business, on a link you can open on your phone and send to whoever you want an opinion from. If you do not like it, you say no and that is the end of it. No invoice, no deposit, and it never gets published.
Josh reads these himself. There is no shared inbox and nobody it gets passed along to. If it is urgent, ring rather than wait.
That's with Josh now, and he'll come back to you on what you gave us — within a working day, usually the same morning.
Nothing is committed and no deposit is owed. If this goes as far as a homepage, you will see it before you pay for any of it. And if it's urgent, ring 022 584 0585 rather than wait.