What I’d Fix First on an Electrician’s Website, and What I’d Skip

I once billed an electrician for an entire week of speed work while his homepage was quietly warning his customers away from him.

He never mentioned it. I never looked. Two professionals, one homepage, and a browser warning parked directly above all my beautiful fast pixels.

So take the order below from someone who has got that order wrong himself, in writing, for money.

Say you have one Saturday and almost no budget. Where would you point them?

The two ends of this trade

3,034 electricians went into my sample across 24 cities, and 1,893 of them had a website I could open and audit.

When I ranked all 47 trades by how quickly the pages appear on a phone, electricians were sitting at the top, ahead of everyone else I ran the same test on.

Then I ranked them again by the padlock, and again by whether a site links out to a social profile. Both times almost every other trade finished above the electricians.

Same trade, same sample, opposite ends of everything I check.

Every rate below comes off a single page of mine, and the explorer near the bottom of it will roll up an entire trade if you choose the industry and leave the other box on all cities. That view carries the sample sizes underneath each rate, and it’s what I use on myself whenever a number arrives looking too flattering to be true.

The order I work in on my own electrician builds is the order you’re about to read. Cheapest damage first.

First: the address that never hands anyone over

Security arrives on my screen as two separate checks.

The first one says the locked version of the address answered when I knocked on it. The second says the naked version, the one a customer types without thinking about it, pushed my crawler over to the locked copy instead of quietly serving up a page of its own.

89.7% of electrician sites clear that first check, where 94% of everything I audited manages it.

The sites that never break share four ordinary habits, and none of them is expensive.

The second one is the one that costs people actual work.

81.2% of these sites move an insecure visitor across, against 88% of small business sites in general.

Nothing whatsoever looks broken when that second one fails.

You type your own address the way you always type it, out of your own browser history, and the page opens with the padlock sitting in front of it. Perfect. Meanwhile a homeowner taps a link off a directory listing nobody has touched since 2019 and arrives on the copy carrying the warning.

Plumbers land in almost the same spot, and the address nobody in that trade ever types is the broken one.

Why do I put it first? Because it isn’t your money.

The certificate and the hand-off both belong to whichever company keeps your site online, and on every host I’ve touched this year both of them are a setting rather than a project.

The padlock is the visible end of a longer list, and the rest of keeping a site safe is passwords, updates and the plugin nobody has opened since 2021.

Ring that company. Ask for the plain address to answer with a permanent move over to the locked one, then ask them to email you the moment it’s finished, because “we’ll look into it” has a habit of becoming next spring.

Second: the profiles you already run

50.0% of these sites link out to a social profile, where 66% do across my whole sample.

You already have the accounts. You already post to them occasionally. That’s exactly what makes this the cheapest item on the entire list.

A stranger who has never met you is asking two questions in the first ten seconds. Can this guy do the work, and is he still doing it?

Your homepage answers the first one, more or less. Nothing on it answers the second, because a homepage written in 2021 looks identical to a homepage written on Tuesday afternoon.

Four photographs of a panel you replaced last month answer it in a glance.

How would a customer travel from your website to your Instagram this morning, without already knowing your handle? If the honest answer is that they couldn’t, you’re hiding your best evidence behind a search nobody is going to run.

An hour in the footer fixes it permanently, and you’ll never think about it again.

Third: one job a month, written down

25.9% of electrician sites publish a blog, against 37% of everything I audited.

I know exactly how that one lands. You didn’t take up the trade so you could sit down and write.

So don’t write. Talk.

One job a month. What the customer originally called about, what you found the moment you got the panel open, what it cost to put right, and four photos taken on your phone while you were standing there anyway.

A page like that does something the adjectives on your homepage can never do. It proves you were up a ladder in March, in this town, doing the exact job the reader is nervous about paying for.

Could you talk for four minutes about the last panel you replaced? Then you can publish it. Dictate the whole thing into your phone on the drive home and let someone else tidy up the spelling.

What I’d skip: paying anyone to make it faster

Electricians average 64 out of 100 for phone speed, against 58 across every site I ran the test on, and no other trade came out above them.

I ran that ranking twice, because the result surprised me enough to doubt my own numbers.

Your trade arrived there without a single one of you asking for it, mostly because your sites are small and your photographs are ordinary photographs rather than a slideshow a designer talked you into.

Speed is also the number a stranger will open the conversation with, because it screenshots beautifully and makes whatever you currently own look like an emergency.

You don’t have to buy the one thing you already own.

I’ve written out the longer version of that refusal, because a stranger blaming your quiet phone on load times should have to say what he thinks is broken.

It hasn’t rescued the trade either. Overall these sites land on 69 out of 100, nearer the bottom than the top, because a fast page is still a page missing the lock, the links and anything worth reading.

Fast and quiet is a worse position than slow and busy. I have never once heard a customer mention that a website loaded quickly.

Go and find out which one is broken

Three jobs. A phone call, an hour in the footer, and four minutes of talking on the drive home.

None of them needs a designer and none of them needs a new website. If the quote sitting in your inbox opens with a rebuild, it’s answering a question your trade solved years ago.

Not sure which of the three is broken on yours? Send me the address and I’ll run my whole list at it, then tell you what I’d do and in what order.

If it were my business? I’d make the phone call this morning and leave the fast bit alone.