Gas Safe on Your Website: What Homeowners Check First

On 14 September the HSE put out a warning to households about unregistered gas work, off the back of a genuine surge in prosecutions. Seventeen people have been convicted of working on gas illegally since the start of 2025. For comparison, there were three convictions in 2022/23 and four in 2023/24. The quote that stuck with me came from a family who had been caught out: "it looked like it was such a legitimate company, but it clearly wasn't."

Here is what that means for you. Every one of those stories teaches homeowners the same lesson - check the registration before you let anyone near your boiler. They are now actively looking for it.

And a fortnight earlier I had run eight UK emergency plumber websites through our checker. Not one of them displayed a Gas Safe registration number. Six didn't mention Gas Safe at all. So we have homeowners being told to check, landing on plumbers' sites that give them nothing to check. That gap is free money for whoever closes it first.

What a homeowner is actually doing while they look at your site

It helps to know the mechanics, because most plumbers have never done it from the customer's side.

A homeowner who wants to verify you has three routes. They can search your business on gassaferegister.co.uk. They can text GAS followed by your registration number to 85080 and get a reply confirming whether it is registered. Or, once you are at the door, they can ask for your Gas Safe ID card - checking the photo matches, the dates are current, and the back of the card covers the specific work they need.

Notice what every single one of those requires: your registration number. Without it they cannot check anything. A logo on its own proves nothing - anyone can paste a logo onto a website, which is precisely what the fraudulent operators do.

What the trust gap costs you

Hard to measure precisely, so here is a deliberately conservative model rather than a made-up statistic. Say you get 40 website visitors a week who are seriously considering ringing someone, and showing your credentials properly converts just two extra of them a month. Gas work being what it is, call the average job £450 - somewhere between a service call and the smaller end of a boiler job.

Extra jobs won a month	At £450 a job	Per year
1	£450	£5,400
2	£900	£10,800
3	£1,350	£16,200

Two extra jobs a month from displaying a number you already have is around eleven grand a year. The number costs you nothing. It is already yours. It is sitting on a card in your van.

Where the registration actually goes

1. In the header, as text

Alongside your phone number, in real text rather than baked into an image. "Gas Safe Registered - 123456". Text can be read by a screen reader, copied into the register check, and indexed by Google. An image can do none of those things.

2. On the homepage, near the top

Not buried on an About page nobody reaches. The decision about whether you are legitimate gets made in the first few seconds, on the first page they land on.

3. Next to your name, exactly as registered

This one catches people out. If the register says "J Smith Heating Ltd" and your website says "Smith's Plumbing & Heating", a homeowner checking you will get a mismatch and quietly assume the worst. Match the register exactly, even if the trading name you prefer is different - you can show both.

4. With a link to the register itself

Invite the check. Linking to gassaferegister.co.uk so they can verify you in one tap is the strongest possible signal, because nobody pretending to be registered would ever do it.

The badge nobody should rely on

Here is where I disagree with most people who build these sites. The Gas Safe logo on its own is close to worthless, and I would rather see a plain text registration number than the tidiest badge wall on the internet.

Go and look at a few plumbing websites and you will find a row of logos in the footer - Gas Safe, Which?, Checkatrade, TrustMark, a CIPHE crest, sometimes a manufacturer badge. It looks reassuring in a generic way and does almost nothing, because a homeowner who has just read an HSE warning about people who "looked legitimate" knows that logos are the easiest thing in the world to copy.

A number is different. A number can be checked in fifteen seconds, and the act of publishing one is a statement that you expect to be checked. If I could only put one thing on a gas engineer's homepage, it would be the number, in text, above the fold - and I would happily bin every other badge to make room for it.

If you want to see what your own site currently shows, run it through our free website checker - it looks for exactly this, along with whether your phone number is tappable.

What the best gas engineers do with it

The ones getting this right treat the registration as a selling point rather than a legal box to tick. The number sits in the header on every page. The business name matches the register character for character. There is a line somewhere near it that says something like "check us on the Gas Safe Register before you book - we would rather you did."

That last line does more work than any amount of design, because it inverts the whole dynamic. The homeowner arrives suspicious, having been told to be, and the first thing your site does is hand them the means to prove you are fine. That is exactly how we build websites for gas engineers - registration front and centre, not tucked in a footer.

We covered the wider version of this in the eight emergency plumber sites we audited and in what a plumber website actually needs in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Should I put my Gas Safe number on my website?

Yes, in text, near the top of the homepage. It is the single fastest way for a homeowner to confirm you are legitimate, and with prosecutions of illegal gas fitters rising, more of them are checking than used to.

How do customers check a Gas Safe registration?

They can search the business at gassaferegister.co.uk, text GAS and your registration number to 85080 for a confirmation reply, or ask to see your Gas Safe ID card at the door and check the front and back.

Is the Gas Safe logo enough on its own?

No. A logo is trivially easy to copy and illegal operators use them routinely. The registration number is what can actually be verified, so the number is what does the reassuring.

What if my trading name is different to my registered name?

Show both. If a homeowner checks the register and finds a different business name to the one on your website, they will assume something is wrong rather than ring to ask.

How dangerous is illegal gas work really?

Gas Safe Register research found that 66% of gas work carried out by illegal fitters over five years was unsafe, and an estimated 250,000 jobs a year are done by unqualified workers, roughly a fifth needing urgent disconnection. That is the backdrop your customers are reading about.

If you do gas work and your website does not show your registration number, that is the cheapest fix available to you this week - and it needs no designer. If the rest of the site is also working against you, we build fast, mobile-first websites for UK plumbers and gas engineers from £595 one-off or £49 a month managed, with the number and your credentials where people actually look, and an optional AI triage system that catches your after-hours enquiries. Tell us about your business at plumberproai.co.uk/website-enquiry and we will come back with a scope and a fixed price within one working day.