An emergency service page

Put the number first

The phone number belongs at the top, in text, large, and tappable on a phone. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling is not reading a paragraph about your commitment to service.

Put it in text rather than in an image, so it can be tapped, copied and read by anything. A number inside a graphic cannot be read by a screen reader or an answer engine, and it is the single most common failure on these pages.

Repeat it at the foot as well. The reader who did scroll should not have to go back up, and the repetition costs nothing at all.

Give the page a plain address that somebody can read out over the phone. In an emergency people are often relaying a number to somebody else, and an address full of tracking parameters cannot be repeated aloud.

Say what you can actually do

State the realistic response time, the hours you genuinely cover, and the area you will travel to at night. Overstating any of the three produces a complaint rather than a lost job.

Rapid response means nothing. Somebody usually with you within two hours across the county is a real statement, and it is the one a person in difficulty is looking for.

Our page on honest claims covers why a promise you cannot keep is a bigger exposure than a modest one. Nothing here is legal advice.

Charges, stated before the call

Emergency work usually costs more, and people expect that. What they do not forgive is finding out after the visit that a night rate applied and nobody mentioned it.

Say what the callout costs, what the hourly rate is out of hours, and whether the first hour is included. Publishing it loses you almost nothing and prevents the worst disputes in the trade.

Our page on pricing claims covers presenting rates. A figure given on a page is far easier to explain than one given on a doorstep at midnight.

Say how payment works on the night as well. Whether you take a card on site, whether a deposit is needed, and whether an invoice follows are all questions that slow a callout down at the door.

What an emergency page must show

The list below is what a reader needs in the first screen. Anything below that point on a phone is effectively optional, and most emergency pages put the essentials there.

• The phone number, in text, at the top
• The hours you genuinely cover
• The area you will travel to
• A realistic response time
• The callout charge and out-of-hours rate
• What to do right now, before you arrive
• What you do not handle, so they call somebody else

Tell them what to do meanwhile

Turn off the stopcock, switch off at the consumer unit, do not use the appliance. Practical instructions for the minutes before you arrive are the most useful thing on the page.

It is also the strongest trust signal available. A business that helps before it has been paid reads as competent, and that section is frequently what gets the call.

Keep it short and unambiguous, with no jargon. Somebody stressed reads badly, and an instruction that needs interpreting will not be followed correctly.

Say what you do not cover

Gas, electrical, structural, anything requiring a different licence. Naming what you do not handle gets somebody to the right help faster and prevents a wasted callout.

Where there is a genuine safety authority to call instead, say so plainly. That is the single most responsible thing an emergency page can contain.

It also protects you. A business that took an emergency call outside its competence is in a worse position than one that referred it in ten seconds.

Make the page fast

Emergency pages get read on poor mobile connections in bad conditions. A page that takes six seconds to show a phone number has failed regardless of what it eventually shows.

Strip it back. No large hero image, no video, no script-dependent content. Our page on page speed covers what to remove and in what order.

Test it on a phone on a slow connection rather than on your desk. The gap between those two experiences is where most emergency pages quietly fail.

Check that the page still works with images blocked. Poor connections often load text and nothing else, and a page whose contact details only exist inside a graphic becomes blank at the worst possible moment.