The Case of the Gingin Plumber Who Needed a Shiny New Host: WTR Plumbing & Gas

Wayne has been a plumber and gas fitter for more than 20 years. He’s based near Gingin and works across Perth’s northern corridor. His website meta description says “North Perth plumber” on almost every page, so we have to change that.

Websites rarely come with notes when they change hands. This one came with a mystery or three, so I treated it like a case. With clues, and a lot of quiet checking.

The case

Wayne and Pauline run WTR Plumbing & Gas as a family business. Their question was simple. They’d been paying for SEO for three years and wanted to know what it had done for them.

The website couldn’t answer that. So I went looking.

Partway through, WTR decided to move the website away from their previous host and SEO people. We needed to:

• find out what the website was really doing, and
• move it to a new home (on my server) without losing an enquiry on the way.

The clues

I started with a review of the live site in October 2026.

• The plumber who was in two places at once. The home page and several service pages told Google the same thing: “Plumbing North Perth – Emergency Plumbers”. That included pages about gas, drains and water filters. Wayne works from near Gingin, about an hour up the road. Google was being sent to the wrong address.
• 97 location pages. 36 suburbs. The site had a page for each suburb, three times over: one for plumbing, one for blocked drains and one for water filters. Mostly the same words with the suburb name swapped. Google is not a fan, but this was the way SEO worked years ago. Sometimes sites don’t change as quick as SEO does.
• A counter stuck on zero. An animated counter showed Wayne’s years in the trade. It counts up when a person scrolls past it. Anything reading the page as text saw a zero. Twenty-plus years of experience, filed under none. Best to lose that I think.
• A headline that could belong to anyone. The home page opened with “Plumbing Experts at Your Service”. True of most plumbers in Perth. The things only WTR can say, like Wayne by name, his 20-plus years and a drain camera that reaches 60 metres, were further down or on other pages. That info needs to be seen – and is useful for Call to actions (CTAs).
• Three years of SEO, no scoreboard. From the outside, there was no way to tell what the SEO had achieved. That’s not proof of anything bad. It’s just no proof of anything. Some companies concentrate on getting in-bound links. I like to work on the site and watch real links (from real people, not bots) come in.
• Keys on several keyrings. The domain, the DNS, the website, the email and the enquiry form had been set up in different places over the years. Before moving anything, I made a record of who held which key. A full Cpanel site backup was made.

Most websites end up like this. Nobody sets out to build a website maze; but one invariably grows over time.

The method

1. Copy the scene before touching anything. A full backup of the website, files and database, taken before any change.
2. Rebuild it somewhere quiet. I restored the Cpanel copy onto my own staging server, where I could look under the floorboards without any customer noticing.
3. Write down every record. Before the switch, I listed every DNS record the domain relied on, so the website could move without the email noticing.
4. Leave the inbox alone. WTR’s email stayed exactly where it was. The website moved house; the mailbox didn’t. Those records were in Cpanel.
5. Point the domain at its new home. In late October 2026 the domain moved to Geoffrey’s hosting (hosting.com). The old hosting stays switched on until the DNS changes have settled across the web.
6. Send enquiries straight to Pauline. The quote form now delivers directly to WTR’s own office inbox (CF7 had been hacked to redirect leads elsewhere, so I removed the hack).

Case status: open

The move was step one. What can be shown now:

• the website on new hosting, with the old host kept as a fallback
• email untouched
• every enquiry now going straight to WTR’s own inbox, and
• 97 location pages identified for consolidation.

Next on the list:

• honest search titles that put Gingin and the northern corridor where “North Perth” used to be
• turning 97 location pages into a handful of genuinely useful ones, with redirects so nothing that ranks today gets lost
• Wayne, by name, at the top of the home page, and
• counting every call and form send, so the next years of SEO come with a scoreboard.

The site’s “look” and feel

And lastly, but also as important as SEO – I’d like to bring this site into the modern age with a fresh lick of paint and clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs).

I’ll add the first three months of calls, form sends and Search Console figures here in early 2027.

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Got a case of your own?

If your website lives somewhere you can’t get a straight answer about, it doesn’t have to be a horror story. I can turn it into a detective story.

You might have a case if:

• you’re not sure whose name your domain is in
• your website and email sit with a supplier who’s slow to reply, or has stopped replying
• you’ve paid for SEO for years and can’t see what it did
• your site has a page for every suburb, and they all say the same thing, or
• changing your phone number on the site means an email, a wait and an invoice.

I work every case the same way. Find out who holds the keys. Copy everything. Rebuild it somewhere safe. Move it with your email untouched. Then fix the things that actually cost you customers.

If your developer is moving on, start with my 30-day handover checklist. For a free first look, send me your website address and I’ll tell you where your domain, DNS and email sit, and whose name the domain is in. If you’d rather hand the whole move over, it’s included when you pay for a year of Hosting & Maintenance in advance.