Demand for heat pumps is not the problem in 2026. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is funded to 2030, the grant is £7,500, and homeowners are searching for it. The problem is that most installer websites cannot answer the question those people arrive with.
1. Answer the grant question on your own site
Almost every homeowner researching a heat pump is really asking one thing: how much of this does the government pay? If your website does not answer it, they go and find a website that does — and that website is usually owned by someone who will sell your details back to you.
A checker on your own site answers it in about thirty seconds from the live scheme rules, and turns a visitor into a named enquiry in the process.
2. Tell people the EPC rule changed
This is the biggest free advantage available right now and it is closing. A valid Energy Performance Certificate stopped being a requirement for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme on 28 April 2026, under SI 2026/390. Every household that was previously turned away and told to sort their insulation out first is eligible now, and a great many of them have not looked again since they were told no.
If your site still implies an EPC is needed, it is turning away customers who now qualify.
3. Separate the off-gas question from the fuel question
The extra £1,500 — taking the grant to £9,000 — needs oil or LPG heating and no mains gas connection. Both, not either. Plenty of oil-heated homes still have a gas connection at the meter, and quoting £9,000 to one of them is an awkward conversation at the survey. That uplift ends in March 2027, which is a real deadline rather than a manufactured one, and worth putting in an advert.
4. Be findable for the question, not the product
People search “am I eligible for the boiler upgrade scheme” and “do I need an EPC for the heat pump grant” far more than they search for installers. Pages that answer those specific questions bring in people who have already decided they want a heat pump and are checking whether they can have one. That is a warmer visitor than anyone browsing a directory.
5. Answer at nine on a Sunday
Homeowners research in the evenings and at weekends, which is exactly when nobody picks up. You do not need a call centre for this; you need your website to keep talking. AnswerHQ answers from your own pages and offers a callback while the person is still reading, rather than leaving them to find your number in the morning — by which time they have filled in three other forms.
6. Run your own adverts at your own page
The keywords that lead portals bid on are not proprietary. You can bid on the same searches and send the click to your own page, with your own checker on it, paying Google directly instead of paying someone else's margin on top. That is the whole trick, and it is not a complicated one.
The honest caveat
None of this works on a website nobody visits. If your traffic is thin, fix that first or run the two together — a checker converts the visitors you have, and advertising is what decides how many of those there are.
Read next
The EPC requirement has gone covers the rule change in detail. What a lead portal actually does explains where bought enquiries come from. Or put a real postcode into the checker on the heat pump page.
Grant figures on this page were checked against gov.uk on 22 September 2026 and are indicative — the binding figure is the one from the official application. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.