Websites for tilers that win the work.

Most tiling customers have already spent hours in a tile showroom or online choosing tiles before they look for someone to lay them, and they are anxious about how an expensive choice will look once it is on the wall. Many are sent your way by the tile shop, which often keeps a list of local fitters, so your site is checked as a second opinion. Others arrive through bathroom and kitchen fitters who subcontract the tiling. Homeowners compare tilers on photos of very specific things: large-format porcelain laid flat without lipping, herringbone that finishes cleanly at a doorway, neat cuts around a toilet pan, mitred corners instead of plastic trim. They often think about price per square metre, because that is how they bought the tiles, and want a rough figure before inviting you round. Wet rooms and underfloor heating push them towards someone who can explain the preparation, not just the finish.

When demand peaks. Tiling follows the bathroom and kitchen calendar: busy from January into spring and again in the autumn run-up to Christmas. Being indoor work, it fills the winter weeks that outdoor trades lose.

A tiling website usually shows wide shots of finished bathrooms that could be anyone’s work - the bathroom fitter probably has the same room in their gallery. What sells a tiler is the close-up: tight grout lines, the cut around the soil pipe, a straight edge across a large-format floor. Sites also say nothing about preparation - tanking, levelling, backer boards - which is where tiling jobs actually fail and exactly what the customer who has read horror stories wants to hear about. And almost nobody gives even a rough price per square metre, in a trade where customers already think in those terms.