A phone number that can actually be rung

One tap, or none

Five seconds is all it takes to tell whether the number on your site is a link or a decoration. This lesson ends with you knowing which yours is, and with the words to send if it turns out to be the wrong one. It is the cheapest real improvement available to most trade sites: one turn, and nothing else on the page changes.

The mechanism is the whole of it. A number typed onto a page is just characters, the same as any other sentence. A tap-to-call number is those same characters wrapped so the phone knows what they are — press it, and the dialler opens with the number already in it.

That sounds like a small convenience and it is not. Without it, somebody standing over a burst pipe has to read eleven digits, hold them in their head, leave your site, find the keypad and type them without getting one wrong. Every step is a place to stop, and most people who stop have not decided against you. Something else happened.

Note. On a laptop a tap-to-call link does nothing visible for most people, which is exactly why this goes unnoticed for months. It is tested on a phone or it is not tested.

Where it goes

Not once, on a contact page. In a few specific places, all of them chosen because somebody has just finished deciding something.

Every place the number belongs

The header, on every page

The one part of the site that repeats. Readable digits at a size you would not squint at, with a tap target about 44 points square — roughly a thumb print, and the standard a first draft is built to.

The opening block

Beside whatever the other action is. Call, and get a quote. Two controls, not five, with the one you actually want first.

After the prices

Where somebody either decides they can afford you or decides to ask. Both end in a call, and scrolling back to the top to make it is friction you put there.

Beside the form

A form suits people who will not ring. It does not convert the people who will. Put both there and let them choose.

The footer

With the hours and the area. It is where people look when they have scrolled past the thing they wanted and cannot find it again.

Note. A number that lives inside a picture — in the logo graphic, or on a photograph of the van — is not on the site. It cannot be pressed or copied, it is invisible to a search engine, and it is not read out to somebody using a screen reader. If that is the only place it appears, the site has no phone number.

Why the header, and why every page

People do not arrive at your home page. Search sends them to whichever page matched what they typed, and what they typed was specific — a boiler make, a town, a job they have been quoted for elsewhere. They land halfway down your site, on a page you thought of as secondary, and that page is the whole site as far as they are concerned.

So a number that only exists on the contact page asks somebody who has already decided to make two more decisions: find the menu, find the right word in it, wait for a page. Small asks, at the exact moment you had them. The header is also one thing rather than nine, so getting it right there fixes every page you add later as well.

The failure to watch for is what happens when the header collapses. On a phone the links move behind a menu button, and they should. The way to reach you must not go with them. A trade site showing a phone nothing but a hamburger has hidden the one control that visitor needed.

Tip. Check this on an inside page rather than the home page. Open a service page on your phone and look at the top of the screen. That is where it goes wrong, because the home page is the one everybody remembers to check.

Hours, and what happens at ten at night

The number is half of it. The other half is whether the person pressing it gets an answer, and a website can do a good deal about that without you changing anything you do.

A phone that rings twelve times and stops tells a stranger a great deal, and none of it is good. They do not conclude you are busy on a roof. They conclude this is one of those numbers, and they go back to the search results with your name attached to a small bad feeling.

One line beside the number fixes most of that. Not a promise — a description of what happens. Somebody ringing at half nine at night who hears nothing was told in advance that they would, so as far as they are concerned nothing has gone wrong.

Note. A permanent banner reading 24 hour emergency response is a promise, and you break it the first time you are asleep. A sentence describing the hours you actually keep is information, and information is what gets believed.

The line that stops the calls you cannot take

When you are full, the most useful thing your site can do is say so. That runs against instinct, since the site is meant to bring work in. But a call you have to turn down costs three minutes and leaves somebody slightly annoyed with your business, and you get nothing for either.

The version that works is dated and specific. Booked to the end of September, still quoting for October. Storm Wednesday, booked for make-safe until Monday. Six words, at the top, changed by hand when it stops being true.

What it buys is a caller who rings in three weeks instead of ringing a competitor now, and an afternoon where the phone only goes for work you can take. It also reads like a business with more work than time. Be honest about the cost, though: changing a sentence on the site is a build turn, and a turn is credits. Write a line that holds for a month rather than a commentary on this week.

Tip. Delete it when it is no longer true. A queue line still saying August in November does more harm than never having had one, because it is the reader's proof that nobody has looked at this site in a while.

WhatsApp, where it genuinely helps

It helps in three situations and is clutter in every other one. When the job is easier to show than describe, so the customer can send a photograph of the leak, the boiler badge, the crack in the render. At eleven at night, when somebody has a problem and does not want to ring a stranger. And for the person who cannot talk where they are — at work, on a ward, on a site.

It does not help when it becomes a second inbox. If it is not on the phone in your pocket and you do not look at it daily, it is worse than nothing, because from outside it looks answered. Somebody who messages and hears nothing for two days does not ring afterwards.

So it goes second, never instead. The number first, WhatsApp beside it for the people who prefer it.

Tip. Test that link on the site's own address, on a phone with WhatsApp on it. It will not open in the builder's preview or at the grafter.build share address, so a dead link and a working one look identical in both.

Note. If you connect WhatsApp through the tools on an agent, type the number with the country code and no leading zero — 447700900123, not 07700900123. The field takes the digits you give it and builds the link straight out of them, and nothing checks the country. A UK number typed the way you would say it produces a link that goes nowhere, and it looks completely fine on the page.

How to know it worked

Five checks, all on a phone, at the site's real address. None of them can be done from the machine you built the site on.

1. Open the site on a phone and press the number in the header with a thumb. The phone should offer to ring it, with the digits already filled in. If nothing happens, it is text rather than a link.
2. Read the digits on screen against the digits on your van, out loud, one at a time. A transposed pair is invisible to somebody who knows the number by heart and fatal to everybody else.
3. Open a service page rather than the home page and look at the top. The number should be there too, in the same place.
4. Scroll to the very bottom. Number, hours, area.
5. Ring it yourself from a different phone, at a time your site says somebody answers. This is the step everybody skips, and the one that finds the diverted number nobody set up properly.

Tip. Get somebody who has never rung you to do step one while you watch. Where their thumb lands first is where the number should have been.

Note. None of this can be checked in the builder's preview. The preview and the share address both show the site inside a sealed frame that a call link cannot open out of, so a broken number and a perfect one behave identically there.

What to ask for

Plain sentences describing what should be true. Not a widget by name, not a measurement, not a description of a bar you saw on somebody else's site.

• Put the phone number in the header as a tap-to-call link, at a size you can read without squinting, and keep it visible on a phone rather than behind the menu button.
• Repeat the number in the footer with our hours and the towns we cover.
• Add a Call button next to the quote button in the opening block, and put the call one first.
• Under the prices, add a line saying to ring for anything not listed, with the number as a link.
• Take the number out of the logo image and set it as text, because a number in a picture cannot be pressed.

Note. If you have set up an agent, there is a trait under what it prioritises called Phone calls. Switching it on tells every build from then on to treat the number as the main thing on the page, render it as a call link wherever it appears, and keep it in the header at every width. It saves repeating the request each time you ask for a new page.

Common questions

Mobile or landline?

The one you actually answer. A landline reads as more settled to some older customers and a mobile gets picked up in a van, which matters more. If you have both, put one on the site — two numbers on a page is a decision the customer has to make for no benefit.

Should I use a tracking number so I can count the calls?

It works, and the cost is consistency. Your site, your Google Business Profile, your van and your invoices should show the same number, because search engines use that agreement as one way of deciding two listings are the same business. Use the tracking number everywhere or nowhere.

Is a contact form still worth having?

Yes, second. It suits people who will not ring, and it gives you the details in writing rather than on the back of a delivery note. The form the builder writes asks for a phone number and will not send without one, for the reason this whole lesson exists: a message with no number is a job waiting on an email.

Can the button just say Call, without showing the digits?

On the first screen, yes. Print the digits somewhere as well, though — people save them, ring later from another phone, and read the area code to work out how local you are.