Insights · October 28, 2026
I scored 29 local trades and manufacturing websites on the five things a buyer needs a site to do. Here are the averages, the patterns behind them, and five questions that show you where your own site stands.
Earlier this month I read 29 websites belonging to trades and manufacturing businesses around Greater Victoria: plumbers, roofers, electricians, heating and cooling companies, painters, landscapers, renovators, machine shops, fabricators, an industrial supplier. I scored every one against a framework I use in my advisory work. It asks whether a website does the five things a buyer needs it to do, and it scores each one out of five.
The five are Interrupt (does the first thing on the page stop the right reader), Engage (does the page hold that reader by speaking to what they are actually deciding), Educate (does it build the case with proof), Offer (does it give the reader a clear next step worth taking), and Format (is it built and finished well enough to trust). The grade is the average. Below 3.0, in the framework's terms, the site has to be reworked.
One thing before the numbers, because it matters to me: the score grades the marketing, never the business. Some of the lowest-scoring companies in this survey carry hundreds of five-star reviews and decades of good work behind them. Their work is not the problem. Their websites undersell them, and the size of that gap is the story.
The average grade across all 29 sites was 1.9 out of 5. Twenty-six of the 29 scored below 3.0. The three that cleared the line scored 4.2, 3.6, and 3.0, and I will come back to what they do differently.
The dimension averages tell you where the market stands:
Read that as a pattern, not as five separate problems. The typical local site is reasonably well built (Format 2.6) and makes a middling case (Educate 2.7), but it opens weakly, holds almost nobody, and gives the reader nowhere to go. Dimension by dimension, here is what I found.
The first job of a homepage is to stop the right reader in the first few seconds, by saying the thing that reader is already thinking. Almost nobody in this market attempts it. The headlines I read were, in the main, one of four things: the company name ("Welcome to" is not a headline), a category label in capital letters ("RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL ELECTRICIANS", "Metal Fabrication and Machine Shop"), a credential ("OVER 25 YEARS OF ROOFING EXPERIENCE"), or wordplay on the company name ("Call the Best, Flush the Rest!").
A homeowner with water coming through the ceiling is not thinking about your years in business or your slogan. She is thinking about the leak, what it will cost, and whether anyone will come today. Twenty-two of the 29 sites scored 2 or less on this dimension. One company's homepage opened by pitching other contractors while homeowners are the core of its business, so the reader it most needs has to work out whether she is even in the right place. The headline is the cheapest line on the whole page to change, and it is the one most often wasted.
The framework is blunt about the sequence: when Interrupt scores 2 or less, Engage scores zero automatically, because a reader who was never stopped does not stay around to be engaged. That single rule is how 22 of 29 sites score zero on an entire dimension, and why the market average is 0.8.
Where headlines do land, the subheadings usually go back to talking about the company: our process, our team, our story. The sites that score on Engage do the opposite. Their subheadings read like the questions running through the buyer's head: How much does this cost? How long will it take? Are you insured? What happens next, and what does it look like start to finish? A page organised around the buyer's questions feels helpful before a word of selling happens. A page organised around the company feels like a brochure.
This was the strongest dimension, and it produced the strangest pattern in the whole survey. Most sites educate the way a catalogue does: services listed, equipment named, years in business claimed. Thin, but something. What is missing, over and over, is proof, and here is the odd part: company after company already owns the proof. It simply does not appear where buyers decide.
A roofer whose print advertising promised a 20-year workmanship warranty did not use the word "warranty" anywhere on its homepage. An electrician's lifetime workmanship warranty, the strongest guarantee I found in its trade, sat in the frequently-asked-questions page. A plumbing company carrying roughly 1,500 reviews showed none of them, not even the count. A custom builder that had won six industry awards did not mention one. A machine shop's aerospace certification sat in its footer, and the aerospace customers whose names would stop any buyer mid-scroll sat in a carousel below the fold. One roofing company with 25 years behind it made its entire case in about 60 words, with one photograph.
None of these owners needs to go and earn more proof. They need to move the proof they have from the footnotes, the print ads, and their Google profile onto the homepage, the one asset they fully control.
This is the weakest part of the typical site, and the most expensive. For most of these businesses, the whole conversion path is a phone number. Sometimes there is a generic contact form beside it. Nothing is framed as an offer: no named next step, no promise about how quickly anyone responds, and nothing at all for the visitor who is interested but not ready to book today, which on any given evening is most visitors.
The numbers: 21 of the 29 sites scored 2 or less on Offer. Exactly one scored above 3. The framework scores this dimension zero outright when a site has no way to capture a visitor at all, and two sites earned that zero. The common case is nearly as stark. A homeowner researches at ten in the evening, compares three tabs, likes what she sees on yours, and is not ready to call. She closes the tab. You never learn she existed, and you have no way to be in front of her next week when she is ready. She was the most valuable visitor your site had all month, and the site let her leave without a trace.
The last dimension is not about design budgets. It is about finish, and its failures are the easiest in this article to fix. I found whole sections pasted twice onto the same page: one plumber prints the same headline twice in a row, another repeats its entire "why choose us" section back to back. I found template leftovers that no one removed, including a contact form still headed "Product Variants" and a placeholder street address sitting in the fine print of an otherwise polished site. One company's COVID-era "no contact" banner was still live the day I checked. One fabricator's contact heading misspelled the word "Contact". One painting company's email address was a picture, so it could not be clicked or copied.
Each of these is small. Together, on the page a buyer is using to judge whether to trust you inside their home, they whisper something about how much attention the company pays. Buyers notice. They rarely say so. They just call the next name.
The heat pump company at the top of the table (4.2) puts the buyer's worry and the proof in the same breath: family-owned, island-grown, backed by more than a thousand five-star reviews, all in the headline. Its subheadings are buyer questions (what it costs, how the rebates work), its guarantees sit up front where they belong, including a one-year satisfaction promise, and it puts real price ranges on the page. The renovation firm at 3.6 opens by naming the reader's frustration in the reader's own words, then builds the case with numbers: 45 years, a fixed-fee guarantee, named reviews. The plumber at 3.0 shows its process, prices fixed on every invoice, sends arrival-time texts, and prints a dozen dated, named reviews.
And even they leak. The top site's only way in for the not-ready visitor was to book a job. The second site's only capture mechanism was a newsletter signup that offered the reader nothing for signing up. The third, for all its strengths, was reachable by phone and nothing else. Nobody in this market has finished the job, which is another way of saying the advantage is still sitting there for whoever does it first.
These websites work well enough as brochures for people who were already referred, who arrive half-sold by a neighbour's recommendation. For everyone else (the person new to town, the searcher comparing three tabs at ten at night, the buyer who needs a reason to pick one name over the four beside it) they say very little that helps a decision, and they keep no way to continue the conversation afterwards.
The fix is not a redesign budget. It is a headline that speaks to the buyer instead of the company, the proof you already own moved to the front page, one clear offer with an easy way to respond, and a proofread. In other words, the site has to do a marketing job, not a brochure job.
Run your own site against the same five questions. It takes ten minutes:
If your site answers those five the way most of the 29 did, it is costing you work you have already earned the right to win. And unlike most marketing problems, this one is entirely inside your control.
Phil Doublet works in business advisory with owners of trades, manufacturing, distribution and tech businesses, on raising profits, growing revenue and getting the owner spending less time at work.
Score your own site the same way: the Website Scorecard has the five dimensions, the 29-site averages, and the checklist, on two printable pages.