The pages a trade website actually needs, and the ones that pad the invoice

Page count is the easiest thing to sell and the easiest thing to inflate. Break one service list into 6 headings and a $3,000 quote turns into a $6,000 one without a single extra fact being written down.

So here’s the working rule. A page earns its place when it answers a question a customer would otherwise ring up and ask. Anything else is a page you’re paying to build and then paying to host.

The pages that earn their place

Home

Its only job is to answer what you do, where, and who for, before anyone scrolls. Read the first 12 words of your homepage out loud to someone who has never heard of you. If they can’t tell you the trade and the area, the page has failed and no amount of design underneath it will fix that.

One page per genuinely distinct service line

Not one per task. The test is whether a customer would ring you about it differently. A switchboard upgrade and a safety switch are the same phone call. Commercial test-and-tag and residential solar are not.

The exception worth paying for is audience, not service. If you sell to homeowners and also to facility managers, those are 2 buyers with different budgets, different words and different urgency. That’s a real case for 2 separate service sections rather than one flat list, and it’s the one time more pages is the honest answer.

A service-area page that names real suburbs inside a stated radius

Never “we service everywhere”. That single line says nothing to a customer and nothing to a search engine, and it’s usually not true.

What goes on the page instead: where you’re based, the radius in kilometres or drive minutes, the suburbs you actually work in, and what happens for a job outside the line. “We’ll still come, there’s a call-out difference” is a perfectly good answer. So is no.

This is one page. Individual pages per suburb are a different job with a different standard, and a bad version of that is worse than not having it — see how location pages are supposed to be built before anyone quotes you 25 of them.

FAQ, matched to the hidden question-and-answer block

The questions customers actually ask before booking. Not “do you offer free quotes”. The 5 things you get asked standing in a driveway, answered the way you’d answer them.

The technical half matters more than it sounds: the FAQ structured data behind the page has to match the visible questions word for word. A hidden block carrying questions the page doesn’t show is a lie written in a format the customer can’t read. Ours match, and you can view source on any page we build and check.

About, carrying the things only you can supply

This is the page nobody can copy off you, provided you put something on it worth copying. Licence number as digits. Insurance, and who it’s with. Years on the tools. Who is actually turning up — you, or you and 2 apprentices. Where the ute is based.

Most About pages instead say the business was founded on quality and hard work. That paragraph is on thousands of trade websites, which is a fair indication of how much work it’s doing on any of them.

Terms and privacy

Dull, and on the list because they’re the pages that quietly get skipped. The moment you take an enquiry through a form you’re collecting someone’s name, phone number and address, and you should say what happens to it.

What you shouldn’t do is pay bespoke rates for them. These get templated once and reviewed per client. Ask whether they were written for you or adapted from a template, and price them accordingly.

Contact

One phone number, tappable on a phone, and the hours you’ll actually answer it. The number on that page has to be the number that rings today, which sounds obvious until you check the site of anyone who has changed carriers in the last 3 years.

And the form has to have been tested by a person, with a real enquiry, arriving in the inbox it’s meant to arrive in. That’s a launch-day item and it gets skipped constantly.

The ones that pad the invoice

None of these are scams. Each one is defensible in a meeting. They’re on this list because they cost money and change nothing.

The page	How it’s sold	What it does
Why choose us	Trust building	Repeats 3 claims already on Home, none of them checkable
Gallery of 40 photos	Showcase your work	6 photos of your own jobs beat 40 of someone else’s
A page per micro-task	Search coverage	“Powerpoint installation” and “downlight replacement” produce near-identical pages that fail the same duplicate test as templated suburb pages
Blog	Fresh content	An empty blog with 2 posts dated 2 years ago is worse than no blog, and the date is printed on the page
Areas we serve: 180 suburbs	Local SEO	A wall of names with no radius, no jobs and nothing a customer can use
Testimonials page	Social proof	Reviews work beside the service they’re about. The ones people trust are on your Google profile anyway
Meet the team	Professionalism	For a business of 1 or 2 this belongs on About, and splitting it out is padding

The micro-task row is the expensive one. Those pages get sold in packs, they’re written from a template with the noun swapped, and they’re exactly the pattern Google’s spam policies call scaled content abuse (Google Search spam policies, checked 16 September 2026). You’re not just wasting the money. You’re adding pages that drag on the ones that were working.

4 questions to put to any quote

1. Which pages carry a fact only I can supply? A licence number, a real job, a suburb list, a price. If a page can be finished without ringing you, ask what it’s for.
2. What does each extra page cost, separately? Not the bundle. The line. It’s a fair question and the answer tells you how the quote was built.
3. Will the pages be checked against each other? Duplication between your own pages is a real problem. Ask whether anyone tests for it. On our builds no two pages are allowed to read like each other, and every page must carry at least 3 facts that appear nowhere else on the site.
4. What happens to the pages that fail? The only acceptable answer is that they get rewritten and re-checked before the site goes live, not listed in a report afterwards.

What we actually build, and why it’s a shape rather than a number

The list above is the starting skeleton on every build: home, a page per real service line, the service-area page, FAQ, About, terms and privacy, contact. On the $4,997 build it’s the core site plus 6 location pages inside your radius, each one requiring a local specific and a real job you did there before it’s allowed to exist.

Each build has a set number of pages, printed on the pricing page. What we decide with you is which services and suburbs fill them, so every page does something. That’s a decision made per business in a 15-minute recorded call, and it’s the difference between a site with 9 pages that all do something and a site with 22 that mostly don’t.

Before you accept any quote, it’s worth knowing whether you’ll actually own what gets built. Page count is an argument about value. Ownership is an argument about whether you have anything at all.