Horton Taylor builds websites for tradies across New Zealand. A trade site takes three to four weeks and leads with photos of your real work, a tappable phone number and a short quote form, so people searching for your trade ring you instead of the next result. A free 15-minute call gets you a straight number.
Mitch has owned and run local service businesses himself, so you can skip the jargon. These are no-nonsense websites for tradies, builders, plumbers, sparkies and cleaners, built to get found locally and book jobs.
You’re too busy on the tools to fluff around with a website
Word of mouth has gone quiet and you need a steadier run of quote requests
The sparkies and plumbers down the road show up on Google and you don’t
You’ve been burned by an agency that had never talked to a tradie
Website design for tradies: what actually wins the job
A tradie website has one job: turn someone already searching for a plumber, sparkie, builder or cleaner into a phone call or a quote request. So four things get built first: photos of your real work, a tappable phone number, a short quote form, and your service area in plain words.
It is the same order of work behind our marketing for tradies approach. Proof first, then the easiest possible way to enquire, then traffic. Do it the other way round and you pay for clicks that land on a page nobody trusts.
Loads in under two seconds on a phone on mobile data, not just on your laptop
A page for every service you sell, so Google knows what to rank you for
Your suburbs and towns named on the page, not buried in the footer
Reviews, licences and guarantees where people see them before they enquire
Photo galleries and before-and-after shots that sell the work
Photos of your own jobs sell better than any words we can write. A tradie buyer is checking one thing: have you done work like mine before. Every build gets a proper gallery, grouped by service, with before-and-after pairs and captions naming the suburb and the work.
All compressed properly, so a page with 20 photos still loads fast on site. That is exactly what we did for JunkBoss, where the before-and-after shots and the review count went front and centre and the site now holds top three local rankings across the Bay of Plenty.
Mitch runs every account personally from Mount Maunganui.
Click-to-call and quote forms, because tradie leads happen on a phone
Most people find a tradie on a phone, standing in the room with the problem, so your number sits in the header of every page as a tappable link. Next to it goes a form asking for name, number, suburb, the job, and a photo upload.
Long forms lose trade leads: six fields beats sixteen every time. Every call and form submission is tracked, so you can see how many jobs the site produced. If you run ServiceM8, enquiries can land straight in there as a job instead of sitting in an inbox until Sunday night.
You work directly with Mitch.
Horton Taylor · Tauranga & Mount Maunganui
Should you use a website builder for tradies?
You can, and for a brand new one-man operation a cheap builder beats nothing at all. Where it falls over is search: builder templates hand you one page for everything, with no service pages and no town pages for Google to rank.
So every lead ends up paid for through ads. A properly built site is a one-off cost that earns organic enquiries for years, while the builder subscription never stops. What a website costs in NZ runs the numbers on both.
Local marketing done properly.
Horton Taylor · Tauranga & Mount Maunganui
Local SEO for plumbers, sparkies, builders and cleaners
Ranking for your trade plus your town is where a trade website earns its keep. Someone typing "plumber Tauranga" or "electrician near me" is ready to book, and your reviews do the heavy lifting once you are in front of them, which is the lever that moved JunkBoss to top three.
So the structure is built for it from day one: a page per service, a page per town you cover, your Google Business Profile matching the site, and LocalBusiness schema. For the wider picture, read how to get more leads for a trade business in NZ.
More booked jobs, less guesswork.
Horton Taylor · Tauranga & Mount Maunganui
What you get
A fast, no-nonsense website built to turn local searches into booked jobs
A photo gallery of your real jobs, with before-and-after pairs by service
Tappable click-to-call in the header and a short quote form with photo upload
Local SEO foundations so you rank for "plumber Tauranga" and "electrician near me" style searches
Call and form tracking, so you know which jobs actually came from the site
Built and looked after by Mitch, who has owned and run service businesses himself
What that means for you
A steadier run of quote requests instead of feast or famine
Less reliance on word of mouth and referrals
A site that does the selling while you stay on the tools
How it works
Our website design process
01
Discovery call
A free 15-minute call about what you sell, the towns you cover and what a good month looks like. No pitch deck, no jargon.
02
Photos, services and copy
We pull the job photos off your phone, map a page for every service and town, then write the copy. You approve it before anything gets built.
03
Build and launch
We build the site, wire up click-to-call, the quote form and tracking, test it on real phones, then launch and point the domain.
04
Measure and add
Once quote requests start coming in we can see which services produce them, then add pages and photos where the demand actually is.
Where we work
Areas we serve
We are based in Mount Maunganui and build for trades right across the Bay of Plenty, plus plenty of work done remotely for tradies elsewhere in New Zealand. Calls, email and text, so distance is not an issue.
JunkBoss had the reputation to win, with 350+ Google reviews and over 1,000 happy customers, but none of that showed up online. Prospects searching "rubbish removal Tauranga" or "demolition Mount Maunganui" were finding bigger brands with worse reviews first, and the business was leaking same-day and next-day jobs to competitors with stronger digital presence.
What we did
Built a modern, conversion-focused website that put the review count, guarantees and before-and-after photography front and centre.
Structured service pages around how customers actually search: house clearouts, commercial strip-outs, demolition, green waste, hoarder cleanups, with clear pricing.
Rebuilt and optimised the Google Business Profile with geo-targeted landing pages.
What happened
Top 3 local rankings for core commercial keywords across the Bay of Plenty
350+ Google reviews now actively driving leads through search
1,000+ happy customers reflected properly in the online presence
Same-day and next-day enquiries flowing in from organic search instead of competitors
"Horton Taylor has been helping us get our business cranking and Mitch's expertise have been a huge help. Can't recommend Mitch enough, he's epic! Super knowledgeable, efficient and friendly."
"Mitch has been a god send to my window cleaning business! We've been working together for just over two months and in that short time we've doubled the jobs coming through and implemented software and systems that make admin a breeze. Can't recommend Horton Taylor enough!"
Hogan Duke, Duke Property Services
"Couldn't be happier with the results we have been getting from Mitch and Horton Taylor. Our customer rebookings have gone through the roof and our calendar is booked out even in the slow months."
Kyle G, Reflections Window Cleaning
Questions we get about website design for tradies
How much does a website for tradies cost in NZ?
Three things move a trade website quote: how many services need their own page, how many towns you want covered, and whether you need online booking or payments on top. A standard build covers the pages, the copy, the photo gallery, click-to-call, the quote form, local search structure and call and form tracking, with hosting and small changes handled monthly afterwards. Book a free 15-minute call, tell Mitch what you do and where, and you get one straight number rather than a range. Our guide to what a website costs in NZ covers what the market charges generally.
How long does it take, and how much of my time does it need?
Three to four weeks for most trade sites, and roughly two hours of your time in total. One short call, a batch of job photos off your phone, and one round of feedback on the copy. Mitch does the rest, including the writing.
I don’t have good photos of my work. Can you still build it?
Yes, and phone photos are usually fine. We crop, compress and caption what you already have, then tell you which shots to start taking on the next few jobs. Before-and-after pairs are the ones worth chasing. If your phone is already full of job photos and none of them are online, that is the quickest win you have.
Will people be able to ring me straight from the site?
Yes. Your number sits in the header of every page as a tappable click-to-call link, next to a short quote form with photo upload. Both are tracked, so you can see how many calls and forms the site produced each month.
Do you build for my trade specifically?
Plumbers, electricians, builders, painters, roofers and landscapers, yes, and the same build works for window and house washing crews, carpet cleaners and junk removal operators. The structure stays the same and the service pages change. Where a trade needs job management sorted as well, Mitch is a ServiceM8 Certified Partner and can set up ServiceM8 alongside the site. If you are still choosing a system, ServiceM8 vs Tradify vs Fergus compares the three properly.
Can you sort the leads as well as the website?
Yes. Most tradies pair a new site with ads or follow-up so enquiries start straight away instead of waiting on rankings. On Google Ads we recommend budgeting $900 to $1,500 a month of spend paid straight to Google, roughly $30 to $50 a day, with management on top. Our marketing for tradies page sets out the order we recommend spending in, and how to get more leads for a trade business in NZ covers the channels one by one.
Can you redesign the site I already have?
Yes, and it is usually cheaper than starting again. We keep the pages already earning traffic, fix the speed and structure, add the gallery and click-to-call, then rewrite what is not converting. SWISH Property Services was a rebuild rather than a new build.
Who actually does the work?
Mitch does, from the first call to the changes two years later. No account managers, no offshore teams, no handing your job to a junior once the deposit clears. He has owned and run service businesses himself, so the conversation starts at what wins you work.
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Let's talk.
Tell us about your business and we'll get back to you within one business day, or call Mitch on 027 412 1176.
